American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Growth in the Southwest outstripped the South. Trailers and mobile homes dotted the region, a cheap way to accommodate a growing population. By 1980, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had seven and a half million people, with nearly three million in the city itself. The San Diego region was approaching two million people, more than tripling its population in thirty years. Greater Phoenix grew from under a third of a million in 1950 to a million and a half in 1980. Albuquerque was approaching an area population of half a million. Utterly dependent on air-conditioning and imported water for their growth, these sprawling desert cities, with their comparatively inexpensive single-family homes in suburban subdivisions, new shopping malls, and seeming ability to slough off their histories, served as prototypes for polycentric, dispersed, low-density living, with industry, research facilities, retailing, and recreation as likely to be on the outskirts of the metropolitan region as in its center. Small outposts at the start of the twentieth century, by the 1970s these southwestern cities were drawing millions of whites from elsewhere in the country and millions of Hispanic immigrants in pursuit of that core American activity, starting out anew.

  As the South, once portrayed outside the region as backward, quaint, or undeveloped, grew more populous and wealthier, its cultural influence increased too. Something of a southernization of national culture began to take place. In part it came from the dispersal of southern migrants to other parts of the country. Southerners carried with them evangelical Christianity and regional musical forms that spread and morphed in northern settings. Country music, largely a white phenomenon, traveled with southern migrants to the Midwest and California, especially the Central Valley. By the mid-1970s, a fifth of all AM radio stations specialized in country music, with most major cities in the North as well as the South having at least one outlet. Black southern music, particularly blues, found a following among young northern whites (even as it lost much of its appeal to young northern blacks). Stock car racing, a white southern sport that grew out of running bootleg liquor, slowly became a national obsession.

  As it nationalized, southern culture retained a rural—or faux rural—tinge, but the urban South proved influential too. Nothing better embodied this than the buildings of Atlanta architect John Portman. His breakthrough came with his development of the huge Atlanta Merchandise Mart in the early 1960s, the start of the Peachtree Center and the revival of downtown Atlanta. To capitalize on the growing demand for downtown guest rooms, in 1967 Portman built a twenty-two-story hotel with an atrium that extended up the full height of the building and a revolving restaurant on the roof. To get to their rooms, guests took glass-sided elevators that faced inward toward the atrium. In an era of boring, boxlike hotels and office buildings, Portman’s hotel proved a sensation. He followed it up nine years later with the seventy-three-story Peachtree Plaza Hotel, a slim cylinder also equipped with atrium, revolving restaurant, and scenic elevators. By then, Portman was building variations of his atrium hotels and cylindrical buildings in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. The national centers of power and cultural sophistication warmly greeted Portman’s glitzy if ultimately banal bag of architectural tricks as key to their revitalization. By the early 1980s, Portman’s firm was building hotels and merchandise marts across Europe and Asia, including in China. The atrium hotel, a product of the Sun Belt resurgence, became a global emblem of modernity.

  Dystopia

  While population shifts were an important force shaping American society during the 1970s, the economy proved even more important. Very rapidly, the economic downturn of the 1970s, with its deep recessions, weak recoveries, high inflation, and stagnating income, undermined the confidence and optimism that permeated postwar America, bringing unaccustomed uncertainty and pessimism to politics and culture. The obvious decline of U.S. power, seen in its defeat in Vietnam and inability to check oil prices; the success of its economic competitors; the deep political and cultural divisions at home; and the exposure of political corruption in the Watergate scandal and more minor Washington scandals that followed all added to a widely shared sense that something had gone wrong and no one knew what to do about it.

  Many of the most impressive and popular artistic works of the era had a decidedly dark tenor. Perhaps no one better documented the shifting national mood than the San Francisco–based rock group Sly and the Family Stone, which burst on the scene in the late 1960s with a series of joyous, optimistic populist anthems. Racially integrated, the group had female instrumentalists backing male singers, reversing the typical pattern. Its 1969 song “Everyday People,” which topped the charts, was an R&B updating of the Popular Front classic “The House I Live In.” Calling for tolerance—“different strokes for different folks”—its infectious good spirits seemed to provide reassurance that ultimately people of all races, the “long hair” and the “short hair,” “the butcher, the banker, the drummer,” the “fat one” and the “skinny one,” would see the folly of their hatreds and join together as “everyday people.” The group had another number one hit three years later, “Family Affair,” this time a slower, druggy, agonizing song that portrayed a family of divided fates and immense sadness, with “one child . . . that just loves to learn, / And another child . . . you’d just love to burn.” No hope could be found in the web of emotions that left the singer unable to stay and unable to leave, not wanting to cry but “cryin’ anyway ’cause you’re all broke down.”

  Movies likewise captured the downbeat sensibility of the 1970s. After initially avoiding films about the Vietnam War, in the late 1970s the major film companies released a series of powerful and commercially successful movies that looked back at the conflict with a critical eye. Many portrayed the war as not only misguided but as a symptom of deep national flaws. The most impressive of the group, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Academy Award–winning Apocalypse Now, rendered a sprawling vision of an American army that had lost all moral bearings, a drugged, disintegrating arm of a failing empire. Other films, like Who’ll Stop the Rain (1976) and Taxi Driver, portrayed the violence, drugs, and madness of Vietnam coming back home through war veterans living outside the law and outside sanity. In the early 1980s, several movies extended the hellish vision of urban life in Taxi Driver into the future, in dystopian dramas like Blade Runner (1982), set in a poor, violent, polluted future Los Angeles, and Escape from New York, which imagined the future of Manhattan as a penal colony (using decimated parts of St. Louis and East St. Louis for location shots). Roman Polanski’s film noir look at Los Angeles history, Chinatown (1974), pictured the wealth and power of society as resting on hidden corruption, greed, and horrifying moral transgression. The notion that real power was not wielded by the citizenry through the open channels of democratic governance but rather by powerful cliques through hidden, evil conspiracies animated other films of the era too, like Network (1976), a scathing look at the television industry, The China Syndrome (1979), about the nuclear power industry, and Three Days of the Condor (1975), about the CIA.

  The flip side of the grim view of the immediate past, the present, and the future in so many films of the 1970s and early 1980s was the invention of a fanciful 1950s, which music groups, musicals, movies, and television shows counterpoised to the troubling aspects of American life in the 1960s and 1970s. The earliest and most self-conscious effort to create an Edenic, prepolitical postwar past took place at Columbia University in 1969, when members of an undergraduate singing group, the Kingsmen, began performing elaborately choreographed songs from the 1950s, trying to appeal to both sides of the political and cultural divide that rent the campus the previous year. Instantly popular with both SDS and fraternity members, they named themselves Sha Na Na and within months were singing at the Woodstock rock festival. Their success inspired the Broadway musical Grease and its filmed version, in which Sha Na Na appeared. George Lucas’s 1973 movie American Graffiti, set in small-town California in 1962, provided another, less cartoonish fabrication
of an idealized American society before its loss of innocence. The popular television shows Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, set in Milwaukee in the 1950s and early 1960s, played on the same theme of innocent youth coming of age in a society not yet split by war, racial conflict, or political strife. The producer of those shows, Garry Marshall, said he wanted to be the “Norman Rockwell of television.” Though these confections had no explicit political message, they implicitly put forth a deeply conservative notion that America before the rights revolution had been a healthier and happier society.

  A retreat from present-day social reality took other forms as well. The 1970s saw a growing interest in the cultivation of the self, therapeutic regimens, and personalistic religion. Many observers, at the time and later, contrasted the period unfavorably with what they portrayed as a more collective and idealistic era that proceeded it. Most famously, in the mid-1970s writer Tom Wolfe, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, declared that “the 1970’s . . . will come to be known as the Me Decade.” The view of the 1970s as a politically demobilized, narcissistic era rests on an exaggerated picture of mass political activity during the 1960s and a discounting of political activism that occurred thereafter. Left-wing political activity declined but did not suddenly die, while right-wing activism, if anything, was on the rise. Yet perhaps more than in earlier decades, collective efforts coexisted and competed with the search for sustenance and salvation through individual effort.

  Rather than a repudiation of the democratic revolution, the inward turn of the 1970s represented a mutation of it. The critique of liberal, bureaucratic rationality mounted by the New Left helped pave the way for many forms of antimodernist and “postmodern” thinking in the 1970s and beyond. In a backhanded way, the rights revolution helped legitimate the search for individual fulfillment by spreading the idea of equal entitlement to all rights, including that elusive but fundamental right, the pursuit of happiness. The cultural trajectory could be tracked in the transformed use of the term “empowerment.” First employed to denote the accumulation of political power by subordinate groups, in the 1970s it took on a therapeutic meaning, designating personal transformation that could be achieved by overcoming psychological barriers to self-assertion. By the late 1980s, it reappeared as a business buzzword for getting top managers to cede authority to lower-level employees as way to increase corporate flexibility.

  Tom Wolfe connected the narcissism of the 1970s with the enormous boost in national wealth that occurred during the thirty years after World War II. The once exclusive ability of the rich to engage in ongoing scrutiny and reinvention of the self spread through the society during the golden age of capitalism. Millions of Americans could now afford the money and time for spiritual retreats, encounter sessions, and therapy of all kinds. Economic growth had allowed the common man and woman to do “something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me!”

  Paradoxically, it was not just the long-term growth in wealth that underlay what Wolfe called—in a typical exaggeration—“the greatest age of individualism in American history,” but also the economic ills that had brought the golden age of capitalism to an end. With the end of decades of growth came a growing fear that the country had become, as economist Lester Thurow put it in the title of his influential 1980 book, a “zero-sum society,” in which each person’s gain came at the expense of another’s loss. Millions of workers continued to embrace solidarity through unionism as they struggled to survive the hard times, but members of the middle class increasingly looked to themselves for economic and spiritual betterment.

  The change could be seen dramatically on college campuses. After student protest reached its high point in the early 1970s, it fell off rapidly with the end of the war in Vietnam and the economic downturn. In its place came what Yale University president Kingman Brewster dubbed “grim professionalism.” Middle-class students, instead of assuming secure futures as so many of their predecessors had, now feared downward mobility. To ensure the comfortable lives that they grew up taking for granted, many avoided political and civic activities to concentrate on classes in order to pave the way for career success. Business became an increasingly popular subject of study, to the point that by 1981 more students majored in the field than in history, the social sciences, the arts, philosophy, religion, language, and literature combined. In their anxiety about the future, some white students expressed open resentment toward their nonwhite classmates, who they believed were getting unfair advantages in admissions and financial aid, narrowing their own opportunities in educational and labor markets that had fixed numbers of desirable slots.

  Campus life did not return to pre-1960s norms. Student activism continued, though at a diminished level, focused more on campus issues than on larger social concerns. College administrators made little effort to reimpose rules regulating student life. Sex, drug use, and, increasingly, heavy drinking pervaded many campuses. A growing number of older students joined the college ranks; more and more students worked at least part-time, making night classes more common; and coeducation became near universal, including at the military academies, which began admitting women in 1976. By the end of the 1970s, the typical college campus was a very different place than it had been at the start of the decade.

  The new obsession with the self and self-improvement also could be seen on the nation’s roads, in its parks, and in its living rooms, as much of the country was swept up in a fitness craze that gathered momentum in the latter part of the 1970s. Since the end of World War II, public health experts had been bemoaning the poor state of physical fitness among Americans, especially young people, who fell far behind their European peers. Their cries led to occasional federal government exhortations for the population to get itself into shape, most famously by John Kennedy, who urged men and women to participate in what he called “this phase of national vigor.” But the exercisers of the 1970s and 1980s cared little for national vigor, instead focusing on their personal well-being, good looks, and good feelings. Jogging and distance running, once oddball activities, became a national rage. So did aerobics, popularized by actress Jane Fonda through her workout tapes.

  The fitness enthusiasm of the recession years was strongest among the middle and upper classes. Overall, national physical fitness actually began to drop around 1980, while rates of overweight and obesity began climbing. In the late nineteenth century, the typical image of the plutocrat had been a plump man smoking a cigar, a fellow able to afford plenty of good food, tobacco, and rest. By the latter part of the twentieth century, the well-off man was likely to be a nonsmoker devoted to staying slim and healthy. Now it was workers and the poor who were more likely to be overweight smokers.

  Seeking reassurance and fulfillment through attention to the self took spiritual as well as secular forms. The 1970s was a golden age for nontraditional religious and quasi-religious movements that claimed to bring enlightenment, peace, and self-actualization, including Scientology, EST, the Hare Krishnas, and Transcendental Meditation. Antirational thinking seemed to be on the rise, perhaps a rational response to a moment when technocratic rationality had seemingly brought social failure on both the national and international fronts. Finding that the larger society could not fulfill sometimes inflated expectations of happiness or peace of mind, many Americans experimented in seeking it on their own, as part of what Wolfe called the “Third Great Awakening.”

  Established religions, most importantly evangelical Protestantism, proved far more important in the intensified spirituality of the period than the flamboyant though largely ephemeral “New Age” purveyors of hope and fulfillment. Overall church and synagogue attendance remained fairly stable during the 1960s and 1970s, below its late 1950s peak but still high, with about four out of ten Americans reporting in 1975 that they had attended a place of worship during the previous seven days. The biggest change in numbers occurred among Catholics, whose church
attendance rate significantly declined between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s (though it stayed above the rate for Protestants and Jews). Protestant church attendance held steady, but where Protestants worshipped significantly changed. The mainstream, liberal denominations—the Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians—all suffered sharp membership drops. At the same time, many conservative, fundamentalist, and evangelical denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, grew rapidly, especially in the cities and suburbs of the South and Southwest.

  The explosion of evangelical and fundamentalist religion came in reaction to the social liberalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the economic uncertainty thereafter, but it did not spring up wholly anew. Many evangelical and fundamentalist denominations had been growing since early in the century. Over time, an infrastructure of seminaries and Bible schools, radio and television stations, publishers, bookstores, and record companies had developed that helped spread their reach. So did ministers who used television to build national followings, like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert, Rex Humbard, Jim Bakker, and Robert Schuller. Though the growing Protestant groups had intensely personal theologies, built around the direct relationship between the individual and God, their churches provided a sense of community, particularly important in burgeoning suburbs full of newcomers. By the end of the 1970s, evangelical megachurches had started to become common, attracting huge memberships with a combination of conservative theology, an informal atmosphere (including rock music hymnody), and rich congregational life. When during the 1976 presidential campaign Jimmy Carter spoke openly about having found Christ, it jarred a country used to more private devotion from their political leaders, with a sizable number of people unfamiliar with the idea of being “born again.” By the end of the decade, such declarations had come to seem normal, a cultural revolution, particularly outside the South, where such public professions of piety had been more common.