Hardly had three weeks of 1970 passed before a U.S. Navy ship set the tone for what was to come by tearing loose from its anchorage in a high wind and ripping a 375-foot hole in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel structure. To the superstitious it appeared that the new decade was off to an inauspicious start.
Nature appeared to be in a contrary mood elsewhere, too. After two hundred consecutive rainless days, Southern California was ravaged by the worst brush fires in its history, apparently caused by spontaneous combustion, denuding over 500,000 acres—an area nearly as large as Rhode Island. Eleven died in another fire of unexplained origin, in an eighty-five-year-old Minneapolis apartment building. All over the world natural disasters were besetting man; a Venice whirlwind left four dead, a cyclonic tidal wave in East Pakistan left 200,000 dead, and earthquakes in Peru, Turkey, and Iran left tens of thousands dead. Possibly God was angry with people like Woody Allen, who denied Him, or with the irreverent, like the flip college students who wore pins reading: “God Isn’t Dead—He Just Doesn’t Want to Get Involved.”
Certainly religion wasn’t the steady rock it had been. Christians who didn’t regard God as a bigot were shaken by the new president of the Mormon Church, who said, “There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages, while another man is born white with great advantages. The Negro evidently is receiving the reward he merits.” Episcopalians were agitated over the shelving, after three and a half centuries, of the King James Version of the Holy Bible for a New English Bible. Worst of all, from God’s point of view, was the growing power of anti-Christianity—the worship of strange totems and even of Satan himself.
According to one reliable source, America was supporting 10,000 full-time and 175,000 part-time astrologers. Computers spewed forth ten-dollar horoscopes, a New York hairdresser employed a staff astrologer, a department store sold fifty-dollar annual subscriptions to a Dial-an-Astrologer service, and 300 newspapers with a combined circulation of 30 million carried a regular astrological column. Book clubs offered tarot cards as premiums. At the University of South Carolina 250 students were enrolled in a course on sorcery. Magazine advertisements inquired, “Tired of being on the outside of witchcraft looking in? Get in on the action yourself. Join our Diploma Course in Witchcraft and learn the age-old secrets, including raising power, meditation, prediction, fertility, and initiation rites.” Mrs. Sybil Leek, a Houston sorceress who cast spells with a pet jackdaw named Hotfoot Jackson perched on her shoulder, calculated that there were “about eight million initiated witches in the world. I mean real witches, not Hollywood sex orgy, free-for-all types. I personally know of about four hundred regular covens in the United States. It is possible there are thousands of irregular ones.”
If heaven was receiving insufficient respect, so were the authorities on earth. After one man had been killed and 105 wounded or injured during a People’s Park riot in Berkeley, federal indictments were handed down accusing not the rioters, but ten deputies and two former deputies, who were charged with violating the civil rights of the demonstrators. (“This is the sickest operation any level of government was ever involved in,” the sheriff raged.) Black Panthers seemed to be literally getting away with murder; juries or appeals courts threw out homicide charges against them in San Francisco, New Haven, and New York, and in Chicago a special federal grand jury criticized police conduct during the raid in which Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been killed. Even the American Indians, who had been at the bottom of the status pyramid since the country was founded, were feeling feisty. The Senate didn’t give the country back to them, but a bill did return New Mexico’s Blue Lake and 48,000 surrounding acres to the Pueblo tribe.
It was a hard time for U.S. generals, and not just in Vietnam. The Russians arrested two of them on charges of violating Soviet air space. The commanding general of the European Exchange System was stripped of his rank for irregularities by subordinates, and Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who had retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant general, the highest rank ever held by a black, resigned as director of public safety in Cleveland because, he said, the city’s black mayor was providing “support and comfort to the enemies of law enforcement.” Anyone wearing a uniform was liable to be subjected to abuse by the tormentors of authority, though it did seem that President Nixon gave the White House police a special handicap. Impressed by the fancy uniforms of Romanian police, the President commissioned Jimmie Muscatello, a Washington tailor, to design new regalia for guards at the Executive Mansion. The result was a $16,000 joke—double-breasted white tunics with gold braid, brass buttons bearing the presidential seal, and black plastic Ruritanian hats. One guard muttered that if he had to wear such livery he wanted a bass drum to go with it. A designer said, “This is not the time for Gilbert and Sullivan at the White House.” “You can’t please everybody,” said Muscatello, who hadn’t pleased anybody, not even the President; the tunics stayed in service, but the hats were quietly shelved.
New York gravediggers struck in January. The air traffic controllers went out in April. Grounded passengers were bitter, but they may have been lucky; heavier-than-air transport wasn’t at its most reliable in 1970. Air piracy continued, and an Arizonan named A. G. Barkley added a new wrinkle when he entered a TWA cabin with a gun, a razor, and a can of gasoline and announced that he wanted 100 million dollars. He was seized after a gun battle during which the pilot was wounded in the stomach. Boeing’s 21-million-dollar jumbo jet, the 747, was off to a slow start, running as much as six hours behind schedule. Even a lunar flight, Apollo 13, broke down some 200,000 miles from home. The three astronauts aboard had to turn back.
Ironically, one of the most successful journeys of 1970 was a 3,200-mile ocean voyage by a papyrus boat, the Ra II, built and sailed by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl to prove that the ancient Egyptians could have crossed the Atlantic. At least the Ra II reached its destination, Barbados, and while it didn’t make money, neither did many commercial carriers, including, most conspicuously, the biggest railroad in the United States. In bankruptcy court with 2.6 billion dollars in debts, the Penn Central was one of many American institutions which were having trouble balancing their books. Another was the motion picture industry; five major Hollywood studios were in the red, with total debts of over 100 million dollars. The great boom of the 1960s seemed to have ended with the decade, and the best evidence was in Wall Street, where the Dow Jones industrial average, which had been within striking distance of 1,000 in December 1968, sank to 631 on May 27.
The gallery at the New York Stock Exchange had been crowded with eager spectators in the years of the Johnson bull market. After the long slide of May 1970 it became a lonelier place. Indeed, the entire city of New York—which its mordant inhabitants now called Fun City—was less popular with tourists. There was the street crime, and there were other perils. On June 1 the city increased its towing fee for illegally parked cars from twenty-five to fifty dollars. That day a Springfield, Massachusetts, mother came to New York and took her children to a film. When she emerged her auto was gone and she owed the city fifty dollars plus a fine. The movie was The Out-of-Towners, dealing with the hazards of visiting Manhattan.
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While 1970 was a year of doldrums on most California motion picture lots, a director named Russ Meyer finished his twenty-first successful movie that year. He had known from the outset that it would be big box office. None of its predecessors had lost money or grossed less than six figures, and one of them, Vixen, filmed for $72,000, had earned over six million. Meyer said: “I don’t play games with an audience. In my films you know where you’re at in fifteen seconds—the first fifteen seconds.” Where you were at was in the middle of what the trade described as “erotica” and others called pornography. Peddling sex had become a big business in the United States, netting over 500 million dollars a year, and the market seemed insatiable.
The merchandise came in various packages. Main Street theaters showed X-rated films; 1970 hits
included Sexual Freedom in Denmark, The Minx (“Makes Curious Yellow look pale”—New York Daily News), and Allen Funt’s What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? (“What can you say?” asked its ads. “We say wow”), which was grossing one San Francisco movie house $7,000 a week for round-the-clock showings. Manhattan was supporting two hundred “adult bookstores,” and those in the twenty-four-hour-a-day block between Seventh and Eighth avenues displayed their goods like supermarkets, with overhead signs advertising the various departments—heterosexual, homosexual (male), bestiality, flagellation, lesbian, incest, fellatio and cunnilingus. Arcade machines offered skin flicks in color at a quarter a showing. Picture packets contained “Eight revealing poses! $2.” Onstage in New York were Grin and Bare It with nine nudes in the cast, The Boys in the Band, which AP dramatic critic William Glover called “the most unabashed and forthright account of homosexuality yet seen in this era of growing artistic permissiveness,” and Futz, which dealt with the problems of a yokel who enjoyed coupling with a sow. But the market was much bigger than Broadway. The Arcadian bachelor could resolve his frustrations by sending for obscene LP records; a lonely bachelor girl could purchase a vibrator in a hometown store or a plastic dildo through the mails, and as Professor Morse Peckham of the University of South Carolina observed, in the corner drugstore the public could now “buy for very little money pornographic works which a short time ago were unobtainable for any amount of money.”
To Americans over the age of thirty the change was mind-boggling. In their childhoods the word “ass” had been forbidden in mixed company, and the swing generation could remember the uproar over the Hays Office decision to let Clark Gable say “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” in Gone With the Wind. Now Jack Valenti approved “horseshit” and “Piss on you” in movies rated for the whole family. Part of the latitude studios now took could be traced to the Supreme Court’s 1957 decision, in the case of Roth v. U.S., that to be obscene material must be prurient, offensive to community standards, and “utterly without redeeming social value.” Another part of the new license was a byproduct of the new contraceptives, liberalized abortion legislation, and the consequent emancipation of women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. And much of it, as William Glover had noted, was rooted in the era, in the sexual revolution and the mini-micro-bikini-topless-bottomless mood of the times. Curiosity about sex appeared to be insatiable; Nicholas von Hoffman wrote about a female reporter who, while collecting material for an article about prostitution, went to bed with a strange man for money and reported that the climax was “a moment of stunning pleasure.” A mother in Braintree, Massachusetts, came home one afternoon to find her teen-age daughter and a girlfriend in bed naked, experimenting with Sapphic techniques. The word “indiscretion” in its sexual sense all but dropped out of the language, because hardly anybody was discreet any more. A Pennsylvania legislator opposing abortion legislation was unmasked as a hypocrite when a young woman came forward to tell the press that he had been her lover and had paid for her abortion. There had been a time when she would have kept that to herself.
All this was hard on children, who were exposed to it, were more precocious in their dating customs than their parents, and attained puberty at an earlier age. The remedy most often proposed was sex education in the schools. Gallup found that 71 percent of the people approved it, with 55 percent in favor of courses explaining birth control. Among the groups endorsing the teaching of sex were the AMA, the National Education Association, the Sex Education Association, and the Sex Information and Education Council in the United States (SIECUS). Dr. Mary Calderone, executive director of SIECUS, said sex should be taught “not as something you do but as something you are.”
SIECUS issued no material; it merely offered professional advice to school systems. That point was obscured by the articulate minority, which was outraged by the very suggestion that reproduction might be discussed in the classroom. “Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?” asked Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade, firing the opening gun in the ultraright’s attack on sex education. The Reverend Billy called SIECUS the “pornographic arm of liberal education,” and state boards of education in Oklahoma, California, and Utah rejected sound film strips because they had been approved by SIECUS.
Other organizations in the antisex coalition were the Movement to Restore Decency (MOTOREDE), a Birch front; Parents United for a Responsible Education (PURE), the Mothers Organization for Moral Stability (MOMS), Sanity on Sex (SOS), Parents Opposed to Sex Education (POSE), and Parents Against Unconstitutional Sex Education (PAUSE). “I doubt that one parent in a thousand had heard about sex education a year ago,” said a Birch coordinator. “Now they’ve heard about it, and they don’t like what they hear.” One group accused the schools of planning to “reveal all the details of intercourse and masturbation to small children”; a school in Parsippany, New Jersey, was called an “academic whorehouse”; a PAUSE leader accused the schools of “undermining what should be taught in the home.” An eighth-grade mathematics teacher was jailed for disseminating lewd materials, and a California school superintendent was fired. Ultrarightists also won in Racine, Wisconsin, after charging that sex education was a Communist plot to undermine the morals of the pupils. One of the wilder battles was in San Francisco over an innocuous book titled A Doctor Talks to Five-to-Eight-Year-Olds. The ultras there printed a leaflet reproducing an illustration from the book of one toad on another’s back. The book explained that it was a mother carrying her baby. The leaflet lost sex education a lot of supporters by changing the caption to “Mating Toads.”
At the peak of the controversy sex education was an issue in twenty-seven states. Toward the end of 1970 sanity triumphed and the courses were introduced, to the bewilderment of the children, who wondered what all the fuss had been about. Then, just as superintendents and school boards thought they could divert their professional attention to other matters, their presentation of sex came under attack from an entirely different movement: Women’s Lib. Liberated women took it as an article of faith that all except physical differences between males and females were taught, not inherent. They believed that girls were trained to want motherhood and cultivate domestic science, and they regarded the public schools as a major training ground. Demanding that textbooks be revised and teachers reoriented, they joined battle with their adversaries in a struggle which was certain to endure as a major issue of the 1970s.
Millions of Americans had first become aware of the new feminism when Robin Morgan, until then best known as a TV actress in I Remember Mama, marched into the 1968 Miss America Pageant pulling a train of blazing brassieres. She was there, she told startled reporters, in her role as founder of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH). Feminists paraded through metropolitan shopping districts on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. All that year liberated women were demonstrating that they, like the members of other protest movements, understood the uses of publicity. “Take it off!” one of them yelled at a construction worker, and when she was asked if she meant his hard hat she said, “No, his jockstrap.” One June Conlan won a ten-year court fight to become a day laborer digging ditches. Marlene Dixon wrote that “in all classes and groups, the institution functions to a greater or lesser degree to oppress women; the unity of women of different classes hinges upon our understanding of that common oppression.” Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a great-granddaughter of John D., denounced romantic love between men and women as “counterrevolutionary.”
“I’ve had Women’s Lib up to here,” said Dr. Edgar F. Berman, a physician active in Democratic politics. Democratic Congresswoman Patsy Mink of Hawaii promptly accused Berman of being a sexist with the “basest sort of prejudice against women.” As the year wore on, the rhetoric grew more heated. Margaret Mead said, “Women’s liberation has to be terribly conscious of the danger of provoking men to kill women. You have quite literally driven them mad.” On
e male spectator at the women’s march in New York screamed at them, “All you pigs can’t get a man!” while another stood silently by wearing a brassiere. “These chicks,” said Hugh Hefner in a memo to his staff, “are our natural enemy. It’s time to do battle with them. They are inalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society Playboy promotes.”
Some of the women sounded as frivolous as Hefner. They devoted a great deal of energy to debates over whether they should be known as Mrs., Miss, or Ms.; to attempts to have chairmen called chairpersons, and to attacks on National Airlines for running ads of pretty stewardesses saying, “I’m Doris. Fly me.” But the deeper questions they raised were anything but trivial. Over 23 million American women now held full-time jobs; another eight million had part-time jobs. Four of every ten married women were employed, 12 million of them with children at home under eighteen. Superficially this indicated a challenge to male supremacy in the job market, but the nature of the employment and the pay for it still reflected a society in which men, not women, were expected to support families. Men still dominated the most lucrative professions and brought home the bigger slices of bacon. Just 7.6 percent of America’s 300,000 doctors, and only 1 percent of the surgeons, were women, while 90 percent of the phone operators and stenographers were female. The average woman was making $3 for every $5 made by a man with the same job. Life calculated that a woman needed a B.A. degree to earn as much as a man who left school after the eighth grade. The typical salesman made $8,549; the typical saleswoman $3,461.
By 1970 Women’s Lib arguments for equality in employment and education were supported by many men. Demands for free abortions and free day-care centers for children were more controversial, and the masculine population seemed evenly divided on the proposed Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution—the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), ensuring women complete equality before the law. Yet within two years the Senate would approve ERA and send it to the state legislatures. Under it, women would no longer be required to change their names when they married; they would be given an equal voice in where the family would live; if the husband’s job obliged him to move elsewhere, and his wife stayed behind, she would not be liable to a charge of desertion. On the other hand, should a marriage break up, the wife might have to pay alimony. Laws shielding women from danger and physical strain on the job and protecting them from certain sexual outrages would be void. (Rape was an exception.) In addition, women might be drafted and even sent into battle. A pro-ERA contributor to the Yale Law Journal argued:
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