In the Northeast and Midwest, another reaction to disenchantment with national culture and the seeming loss of national vitality developed in the so-called New Ethnicity. Starting in the late 1960s and accelerating in the 1970s, many descendants of European immigrants, particularly Italians, Jews, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans, began more strongly and openly identifying with their ethnic background, after decades when assimilation had been the largely unquestioned expectation. Many older white ethnics had never stopped thinking of themselves as members of a particular nationality, as Italians or Lithuanians or Jews. In New York City, some labor unions that explicitly identified themselves by ethnicity did not drop those labels until the 1970s, in spite of the illegality of discriminating on the basis of national origin. But for many children and grandchildren of immigrants, ethnic identification was something new. In Maryland, the moribund Sons of Italy revived with an influx of young members, setting up thirty new chapters over the course of the 1970s. Baltimore began hosting huge annual Italian and Polish festivals, with smaller celebrations for Greeks, Estonians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Irish, and Hispanics. In other cities, too, ethnic festivals, with a heavy emphasis on ethnic food, became common. So did ethnic cookbooks, though typically they made considerable use of processed foods rather than the basic ingredients in traditional recipes.
The civil rights and Black Power movements helped spark the ethnic revival. For whites feeling increased competition for housing, jobs, government programs, and college admissions in what became a declining economy, ethnic organization served as a strategy to defend territory and command social resources. It also could be a way to try to reclaim moral ground from African Americans, whose suffering during centuries of violent oppression and pervasive discrimination had received near-universal social acknowledgment as a result of the civil rights movement. Immigrant groups, by pointing out their particular histories and the suffering they had experienced, could disassociate themselves—at least in their own minds—from responsibility for the subjugation of black Americans and make a claim for social sympathy through narratives of hard work and discipline overcoming disadvantage. But African American mobilization not only made white ethnics anxious; it inspired them too. Many whites looked admiringly, even jealously, at the expressions of African American cultural pride and solidarity that came in the wake of the civil rights movement. The enormously popular 1977 television miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s story of tracing his family lineage to Africa, sparked people of all races to become more interested in celebrating their family and ethnic heritage.
The ethnic revival fed off a sense that liberal politicians had ignored the needs of European immigrant communities, particularly those in declining or threatened urban neighborhoods. Republicans saw in the revived ethnicity a way to pry away groups strongly associated with the post–New Deal Democratic Party. But overall, the New Ethnicity flourished mostly as a cultural rather than a political phenomenon. For millions of children and grandchildren of immigrants, a turn toward their ethnic background provided nourishment at a time when the national culture seemed hollow. Many viewers found the loyalty, devotion to family, and warm sensuality of the Italian mobsters in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 movie The Godfather an attractive contrast to the perceived sterility and treacherousness of the white Protestant establishment. Deeply nostalgic, usually for a very selective, romanticized notion of the past, the ethnic revival represented yet another manifestation of the inability of the national present to provide much inspiration or reassurance to a population worn down by the economic downturn, a lost war, and corrupt national politics.
Highway 40 Revisited
The country that the Vales explored in the late 1970s appeared in many ways quite similar to the one George Stewart had traveled soon after World War II. It remained a vast, richly endowed land, only lightly settled by the standards of advanced industrial nations. But in some ways the United States and the circumstances it faced had changed profoundly. In the decades after World War II, the country seemed ascendant, full of national and individual possibility. After the Vietnam War, it seemed on the decline, in its international position and the opportunities it offered its citizenry. It also seemed more divided than in the past. After World War II, there had been sharp social conflicts, evident in the labor and civil rights struggles. But by the end of the Vietnam War, cleavages had so spread that the United States seemed not divided but fragmented. Regional differences had diminished, but place still mattered. So did race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, and even aesthetic sensibility, as identity politics crisscrossed class and ideological divisions. A stalled economy infused social conflicts with bitterness and resentment, unalloyed by confidence in the future.
Deeply dissatisfied with the status quo, Americans groped for a way to revive the economy and restore a sense of progress and well-being, with increasingly disparate notions of what those meant. Since the New Deal, the national government had loomed large in setting the direction of the country. But efforts to use the government as an instrument of national renewal would, at least for a while, largely fail. Instead, the key arena of social innovation and decision making moved to the private sector, where a corporate reinvention of the nation began to unfold, largely outside of the control of democratic structures.
CHAPTER 13
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The Politics of Stagnation
By the time Richard Nixon resigned office, the post–World War II democratization of American life had gone far. For the first time in its history, the United States had embraced universal adult suffrage, with only a few exceptions, like felons and noncitizens. And as a result of Baker v. Carr and subsequent court decisions, votes counted more or less equally, except in the composition of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Courtrooms became more democratic when in 1975 the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to deny women equal access to jury service.
Democratization entailed not only individual rights but also institutional reforms that diffused power away from central authorities and insider cliques. Congress helped set the tone by moving to limit the postwar centralization of federal power in the executive branch. The 1973 War Powers Act at least symbolically reasserted the power of Congress in making war. The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment required the CIA to report covert activities to congressional oversight committees. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act restricted the ability of the president to refuse to spend congressional appropriations (a favorite Nixon tactic) and established the Congressional Budget Office to provide independent expertise in economic forecasting and budget analysis. The 1976 National Emergencies Act created new procedures and congressional controls for declarations of emergency (which gave the president extraordinary powers).
Within Congress, rank-and-file members moved to restrict the power of their leaders and create greater opportunities to participate in decision making. The seventy-five new Democratic congressmen elected in 1974 in the wake of Watergate—many of them political neophytes lacking the usual deference to party leaders—forced the ouster of several longtime committee chairs and the reform of House rules. By the late 1970s, a handful of powerful congressional leaders no longer could make major decisions out of public view.
Across the society, government bodies and public institutions were allowing greater access to information once kept confidential and creating more opportunities for public input in decision making. Building a structure, changing a government regulation, or administrating a program often required extensive public consultations and hearings, unlike in the past when leaders could act on their own. With the mass mobilizations of the 1960s still part of social memory, people expected to be heard and did not feel hesitant about taking to hearing rooms or to the streets to press their positions. And when that did not suffice, they often used the courts to block or force government action.
Yet belying the formal democratization of society were many signs
of public disenchantment with politics and public processes. Antiauthoritarianism, inherited from the 1960s, came to pervade society, with an air of sour disgust rather than liberatory glee. A growing part of the population disengaged from politics altogether. Many private interests, finding there to be too much democracy for their taste, began finding ways to exert power outside of formal procedures of government. As antistatist sentiment grew, democracy expanded and became hollowed out at the same time.
The Crisis of Authority
The most obvious measure of public disenchantment with politics came in the declining participation in national elections. In every presidential election during the 1950s and 1960s, at least 60 percent of the electorate voted. In 1972, just 55 percent did; in 1976, 54 percent; in 1980 and 1984, 53 percent; and in 1988, 50 percent. Even fewer people voted in off-year congressional elections. Participation hit a low point in 1978, when less than 38 percent of the eligible voters cast a ballot, the lowest level in over three decades. Some of the drop came from the lowering of the voting age, since young adults were less likely to vote than their elders. But much more it reflected a blanket rejection of politicians and a growing belief that elections had little to do with daily reality.
Incumbents suffered from the public disgust. In 1976, Gerald Ford barely managed to win the Republican nomination in the face of a challenge from former California governor Ronald Reagan, only to be defeated in the general election by an obscure governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Carter, in turn, lost to Reagan in 1980, the first back-to-back defeats for incumbent presidents since 1892. In 1980, independent presidential candidate John Anderson won more than 6 percent of the vote—more than Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace together got in 1948—to a large extent simply because he did not represent one of the major parties.
Some of the public disgust with politics and politicians stemmed from political scandals and revelations of past government misdeeds. Late one night in October 1974, the Washington, D.C., police stopped a car carrying one of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives, Wilbur Mills, in the company of a stripper named Fanne Foxe, who bolted into the nearby Tidal Basin. When months later Mills appeared on the stage of a Boston burlesque house at Foxe’s beckoning, his days as a power broker came to an end. Two years later Wayne Hayes, head of the House Administration Committee, fell from power when a member of his staff told the Washington Post that she had been put on payroll to serve as his mistress: “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone.” A murkier, more serious scandal began unfolding in 1976 with allegations that political operatives acting on behalf of the South Korean government had distributed cash to a large number of congressmen.
From 1970 through the late 1980s, the number of local, state, and federal officials indicted and convicted for criminal activity rose sharply. In all likelihood there were not more crooks than in the past but rather closer scrutiny of politicians by the press, prosecutors, and rivals. With the Democrats and Republicans locked in close national elections from 1976 on, charges of personal wrongdoing became a widely used partisan tool, as the conspiracy of mutually self-serving silence that once reigned among Washington politicians collapsed. The press abetted the process, as Watergate placed a new premium on uncovering official wrongdoing. A 1978 law furthered politics by exposé by establishing a procedure for appointing special prosecutors in cases of alleged wrongdoing by federal officials.
For a brief time, it looked like Gerald Ford might succeed in restoring integrity and confidence in government. He came into the presidency with a surge of public goodwill, a sense of relief that the strange, dark days of Richard Nixon were over. Ford’s unpretentious manner and the suburban normality of his family seemed reassuring, whatever people thought of his political views, which on many issues were more conservative than Nixon’s. Ford’s wife, Betty, signaled how much national social views had changed when she compared trying marijuana with having a first beer or cigarette and said that she would accept her teenage daughter having an affair. But Ford destroyed any chance he had of improving public perception of the political class—and any likelihood of getting elected to the presidency in his own right—when just a month into office he gave Nixon a full pardon for any offenses he might have committed as president. Ford’s approval rating plunged, as many people believed that he had made a sordid deal with the former president, or at least perpetuated a different set of rules for political insiders than for everyone else.
Disclosures during and after the Ford administration of past governmental wrongdoing furthered public disenchantment with politicians and the state. The foreign and domestic calamities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially Vietnam and Watergate, left in their wake resentment and bitterness among government insiders that opened the floodgates for leaks, revelations, and recrimination. Tales of CIA assassination attempts, coups, illegal spying, and use of psychedelic drugs captured headlines and sparked government investigations, which led to further revelations. Former FBI associate director Mark Felt—the Washington Post’s “Deep Throat” source during Watergate—was convicted of illegal break-ins during a search for fugitive radicals. The tawdry picture of covert, illegal, often bumbling, and sometime murderous activities by the government undercut its moral authority. In 1964, a public opinion poll found that 76 percent of the public trusted the government; by 1974, the figure had fallen to just 36 percent. Ironically, liberals, who supported an expansive notion of government, ended up contributing to its delegitimization by aggressively investigating Watergate and other government misdeeds.
The distrust of government leaders and politicians was part of a broader crisis of authority during the 1970s. All kinds of traditional figures of authority were seen as dishonest and self-interested. A 1976 poll reported that only 42 percent of the public trusted the medical profession, down from 73 percent in 1966, and only 12 percent trusted the legal profession. The antiauthoritarianism once associated with the New Left had become the common property of broad sectors of society.
Ford
Even more than the loss of confidence in the probity of national leaders and government institutions, their failure to solve major problems confronting the country fed antistatism and disaffection with electoral politics. Presidents Ford and Carter, though quite different in their ideologies and political styles, both proved remarkably unsuccessful in dealing with serious domestic troubles and foreign affairs. To some extent their failures reflected ineptitude. But the very nature of the circumstances they faced made it almost impossible to succeed.
Economics dominated politics for most of the 1970s. As soon as Nixon left office, national attention shifted from Watergate to the rapidly deteriorating economy, as unemployment and inflation shot up, the GDP shrank, take-home pay fell, and the federal deficit ballooned. The coincidence of a downward business cycle with structural changes in international capitalism threw businessmen and policymakers into confusion. In the past, unemployment and inflation had tended to be reciprocal, with one falling when the other rose. Now they began moving up together, as slow growth (or no growth) combined with inflation in what came to be called “stagflation.”
The Keynesian solutions that had become normative government policy in the United States and Western Europe no longer fit the circumstances. If the government tried to lower unemployment by stimulating the economy, it faced the danger of exacerbating already high inflation. If it tried to lower inflation through monetary policy, it faced the possibility of slowing or reversing economic growth and throwing more people out of work.
Ford made inflation his priority. He put much of the blame for surging prices on excessive government spending and the federal deficit. A political and economic conservative, he had never liked the expansion of state function that came with the Great Society, as a congressman opposing Medicare, federal aid to education, and housing subsidies. As president, he tried to trim federal expenditures. He wanted th
e public to cut spending too. Ford ended an October 1974 address to Congress that laid out his economic program by urging his listeners to spend 5 percent less on food and drive 5 percent less. He then pinned on his lapel a button with the letters “WIN” on it, an acronym for “Whip Inflation Now.”
The WIN program superficially mimicked the New Deal. During Roosevelt’s first stab at an economic recovery program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) had used a Blue Eagle symbol to rally public support. Its reincarnation—the WIN name and button design—came at the White House’s request from the Benton & Bowles advertising agency, whose cofounder, Chester Bowles, had mobilized millions of volunteers to help fight inflation during World War II as head of the Office of Price Administration (OPA). But both the NRA and OPA used the public to help enforce mandatory government regulations that greatly increased the role of the state in managing the economy. Ford wanted to go the other way, to decrease federal regulation of the economy and use public mobilization as a substitute for state intervention, moving away from, not back toward, the New Deal order. Ford’s faith that family belt-tightening could “whip” an inflationary spiral rooted in commodity shortages and deep economic structures seemed to belie much understanding of political economy. WIN buttons immediately became the butt of jokes.
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