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The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics

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I have a preoccupation with the 1970's, as I should've lived in America and become more Americanized during that formative period of my youth. Well, guess what? I did a little, but not enough of the 1970's culture was filtered into my household. As a result, I felt alienated from America, and still haven't come to terms with it. So when I discovered Bruce Shulman's book, The Seventies-The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, and Politics, I saw an analytical treasure trove. Basically, the beginnings of contemporary America began not in the 60's, but the 70's, and Schulman effectively makes his case here.

With the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, the optimism that had lighted the country burned out into the disillusionment of the 1970's. The melting pot was transformed into a salad bowl in the 70's, as various ethnic groups went on the cultural nationalism bandwagon, be they African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, whatever-Americans. I remember those commercials on a certain group, with someone concluding, "I'm proud to be a Chinese/Italian/Japanese-American."

The various fads and movements are also touched on here, such as Werner Erhard's EST, radical feminism, New Age, the New Right Christians, the environmentalist movement, Gray Panthers, to list a few. Strangely enough, the SLA, People's Temple and the Moonies aren't mentioned. But the people thought there must be another answer. After losing Vietnam, we had entered, in the words of Jimmy Carter, "a crisis of confidence," even before he came to office.

The feeling that authority figures were not trustworthy hit a high point with Watergate, and an early chapter focuses on Richard Nixon and his policies. This theme carried on later in Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech.

And while I'm at it--Jimmy Carter's given a sympathetic treatment by Schulman. His humble facade, attempts to de-imperialize the presidency, and Congress's tearing apart his energy policy are covered. Basically, he had good intentions, but came face-to-face with a Congress still steaming after Watergate.

And what book would not be complete without entertainment? There was the narcissistic indulgence of glam artists KISS and David Bowie (both in my top artists lists, BTW), the continuing importance of Bob Dylan with Blood On The Tracks, and punk rock as typified by the Sex Pistols, Clash, and Ramones. The Clash's anarchic message demonstrated the anger against the establishment, and even called for people to "Kick down the wall/cause governments to fall" in the song "Clampdown."

Even Saturday Night Fever, with its escapist theme living side by side with the economic souring of that time, is covered. There's a certain flavour in 70's movies, be it the hairstyles, clothes, cars, the vermilion dye that substituted for blood, and film quality that reaches out to me. The feeling of anger, disaffectedness, and distrust in authority from that bygone decade harkens to me.

The Hegelian synthesis of Alan Alda's sensitive male and John Wayne's red-blooded macho male was an interesting read. This is discussed in the Battle of the Sexes, which includes Billie Jean King teaching Bobby Riggs a well-deserved lesson.

The book concludes with the beginning of the Reagan Years, of how conservatism took over, and how counter-culture icons like Jane Fonda and Jerry Rubin sold out to crass capitalist values of the "My Decade." An additional postscript was how Grenada, Libya, and later Panama gradually brought America out of the Vietnam Syndrome. Schulman has done a wonderful job bringing the dynamics of the 1970's together in one volume.

Bruce J. Schulman's takes a look at how the Seventies shaped the political structure of today. The book actually stretches from 1968 to 1985 and Mr. Schulman deftly shows how the country's political power shifted from the Northeast to the South and how the country moved from the prevailing liberalism of the left to the conservative right. Along the way he discusses the presidencies of Nixon, Carter & Reagan and the social and cultural movements such as Women's Lib, The New South, Minority Equality and others as well as issues like property taxes, environmentalism, skyrocketing inflation and the energy crisis. Interspersed among all the political talk is a look at the music, film, television and how they mirrored the times. Mr. Schulman does a superb job of showing how the 70's seemed to a time of malaise, but actually shaped our country more than we think.

I'm a huge fan of the alt-rocker Jonathan Richman, so I should have been delighted that Bruce Schulman devoted nearly 4 pages in a book of only 250 pages to covering Jonathan's songs and performance style. But I found myself wondering why a book that starts with Richard Nixon and ends with Ronald Reagan can waste so much space on a minor punk and rock influence. It's as if the author, a professor in Boston, was trying to show that he was cool because (though he doesn't say it), he went to Jonathan's shows when he was an undergrad in Cambridge.

I grew up in 70s -- finished high school in 1980 -- and I know the terrain well enough to be able to state this book gives a reasonable sense of what it was like to live during that era. The author does a good job of showing how the failure of 1960s radicals and hippies to transform the world led to the cynical, ironic, and disillusioned 70s, and then to the highly selfish 80s. He gives a good sense of how the decade felt frivolous, especially after Vietnam was wound down and Nixon left office, and then the economy slammed into a wall when the oil embargoes started. He hits the cultural high spots (or low spots, depending on your perspective): disco and punk music challenging the giant arena rock shows; television expanding beyond white suburban families; the rise of women in sports, business, and politics; etc. So far, so good.

But this book falls far short in many ways. First, it spends too much time on politics at the highest level -- Nixon, Carter, Reagan -- without going into enough depth. To understand the economic challenges that Jimmy Carter faced would require a book itself. To understand Richard Nixon's rise and flameout would require a whole library. I can't imagine that anyone who didn't already know a fair amount of economic history would understand Schulman's descriptions of Carter's deregulation and then price control initiatives; and yet, a person who did know it wouldn't learn anything new from the light coverage, either. It would be better if the author just dropped it almost entirely, rather than zipping through it in a few pages.

Also, as noted above, the author seems to struggle with what's important and what isn't. Songs like "American Pie" or movies like "Chinatown" were popular in their time, and Baby Boomers feel nostalgic about them to this day, but they are not especially important. The attempt to juxtapose those kinds of things (and there are scores of examples in the book) with political events feels like they're coming from an academic who is searching for "big" statements to make.

The most interesting aspects of the book are a few genuinely sweeping cultural generalizations. Schulman lifts these ideas from others, which isn't a criticism, because he does a good job of synthesizing the facts. These include: 1) The loss of a national sense of purpose after the violence of 1968 and Richard Nixon's lies, which directly led to the anti-tax revolts of the 70s and the Reagan years; 2) The beginnings of a Third Awakening of religious fervor in America that we still see today; 3) Efforts by all sorts of subgroups (women, the elderly, Hispanics, Indians, environmentalists) to get their piece of the pie, by following the examples of the civil rights movement. These important developments really did happen, even as the mass culture focused on trivia and titillation instead.

One reviewer noted that this book was the "first word" on the 70s. I'm waiting eagerly for a "second word" that's deeper and more fluidly written.

First of all, Schulman's concept of the 1970's as a unique historical period actually covers the period 1968-84 and makes some big omissions within that time frame. The dust cover compares the book to Halberstam's classic, The Fifties, Halberstam's book is twice as long and overall more insightful and entertaining. Politically, Schulman virtually ignores the Ford years, and much of our foreign policy, including events that had a deep impact on the American psyche such as the fall of Saigon, Cambodian genocide,the hostage crisis, terrorism, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, etc.
The book is very interesting in its analysis of Nixon's long range covert strategy to undermine liberalism and his animosity towards the Republican Eastern establishment and its old money backers. In another very interesting chapter, Schulman gives us his take on the tax revolt which actually began in the early seventies as a leftist movement. He has some great facts on Reagan who, for example, raised sales and income taxes more than 50% during his years as governor of California.
Schulman's analysis of feminism is relatively superficial and uninsightful and his take on culture is spotty at best, we are told a lot about a few of his favorite musicians while other important musicians and movements are ignored, a bit about movies and TV, and virtually nothing about art, dance, and literature. Overall, about a third of the book is great and the rest is just OK.

This was required reading for a graduate course in American history. Bruce Schulman analyzes the social, cultural, and political trends of the decade of the Seventies, broadening it to begin at 1968 and end at 1984. Schulman crafts a relatively brief (334 pages inclusive of footnotes), but detailed, history of a period that he proves to be more eventful than previously credited. American society in the Seventies was, in fact, experiencing profound changes. Three main themes emerged in the reading:

From Rustbelt to Sunbelt
Schulman astutely explains the great economic and political shift that took place from the Rustbelt, Northeastern and Midwestern states to the Sunbelt, Southern and Southwestern states. Schulman noted that jobs migrating from Rustbelt states to the Sunbelt states were a driving force in this transformation. During the late sixties and seventies, "Alabama, the slowest growing Sunbelt state, had expanded its job roles at twice the rate of New England and four times as fast as New York and Pennsylvania" (106). With these new jobs came people to fill them, which also meant there was a shift in political power as voters left the Rustbelt for the Sunbelt. "Between 1970 and 1990, the South's population exploded by 40 percent, twice the national rate" (109). The Sunbelt states' warm climates were attractive to business leaders and retirees. The Sunbelt also provided lower labor costs to business owners, due to the extremely low levels of union membership which was a result of the right-to-work laws enacted by most Sunbelt states in the 1950's. State governments made a concerted effort to lure jobs and industries to their region by providing public funds for generous relocation subsidies, long-term tax incentives, free land, and worker training programs. As Sunbelt communities transformed from agricultural backwaters to urban and suburban communities, laborers in the Rustbelt states were eager to leave their
dilapidated urban communities.

Schulman superbly noted the correlation between the economic gains of the Sunbelt states and their new-found political gains. For decades, American conservatism was perceived to be under the influence of elitist country club Northeasterners. Schulman describes the Sunbelt's shift to the Republican Party and how its population changed. "As the geographic locus of conservative politics had moved south and west, its nature changed; it became more populist, more middle class, more antiestablishment" (114). Though William F. Buckley, Jr. and his magazine National Review had become the primary forum for conservatives since the 1950's, it took new leaders on the right, such as Richard Vigurie to establish a new organizational structure to communicate to members of disparate groups. Vigurie brought groups like the National Rifle Association, pro-life organizations and the Christian evangelical organizations under an umbrella network so, "these groups could map out a broad-based conservative agenda and organize the pressure groups into an effective movement, teaching the techniques of lobbying, fundraising, and grass-roots organizing" (196). Vigurie had 15 million names in a computer database and used direct mail to communicate to conservatives for fund raising. In turn, these mailings caused thousands of conservatives to contact their representatives to voice their concerns.

By the late 1970's the New Right became a force to be reckoned with in American politics. With a rehabilitated south rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of the civil rights era in the seventies, the newly refashioned Republican Party burst forth from the Sunbelt states and culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980.

Shift in Activism
Schulman expertly illustrates the shift in activism during this period. He bases his argument largely on the influence of two growing trends: pride in diversity and 'contempt for authority'. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968 transformed the general feeling of societal optimism into disillusionment with New Deal liberalism and frustration at the establishment. The qualities of civility and restraint revered by the Cold War generation of the i950s, which were still visible in the New Left activists' appearance and demeanor, were replaced by personal liberation expressed by the Counterculture and the defiance of the Radicals.

With the arrival of Vietnamese and Cuban refugees, rising immigration from the Third World, minority set-asides, and reverse-discrimination case that encouraged student diversity (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke) later in the decade, Americans' perceptions of race, ethnicity and identity became altered. The American 'melting pot' of integration and assimilation was transformed into "... discrete people and cultures sharing the same places - a tapestry, a salad bowl, or rainbow" (71). Ethnic groups embraced cultural nationalism through self-identification as "African-American", "Italian-American", or "Japanese-American." This move toward diversity, combined with contempt for authority, gave rise to diverse social movements like radical feminism, gay liberation, New Age, environmentalism and the "back to the land" movement, Christian fundamentalism, Red Power, and the Gray Panthers. While these movements may seem disparate, they illustrate a growing desire to search for individual growth and reshape society for the better.

Crisis of Confidence
Shulman paints a grim portrait of the "crisis of confidence" that caused America to turn to the private sector, big business, entrepreneurship, evangelical revival, new age revival and even disco. Shulman posits the idea that Americans had no where else to turn, so they turned to themselves. Their government, saturated with the liberal bureaucracy from the sixties, was a tangle of wasteful dollars, it was "soft" on communism because of its detente policy, and it was rocked by scandals and ineptitude. Americans wondered whether they would even be able to heat their homes. In this climate, the conservative Ronald Reagan won the presidency.

Shulman illustrates how Reagan and "Reaganism" changed America on the surface. However, Shulman argues that if examined more closely, Regan's presidency was not so much a change, but rather the culmination of the 1970s and its inward turn. Regan's disdain for big, bureaucratic, government, public assistance, detente and high taxes resonated with many Americans, especially after the liberal policies of LBJ, Nixon and Carter. Shulman contends that after the scandalous Nixon and inept Carter, Americans simply lost faith in their government and public administrators. Americans began to "plug in," and chase their own dreams of individual salvation, whether it was by reading the Aquarian Conspiracy or being half a redneck. Regan, a product of their new emergent "sunbelt," embodied this new, individualistic America, which Shulman believes was a byproduct of the seventies.

Conclusion
The 1960s are deemed as the decade of change. Shulman does not challenge this notion as much as he extends it to cover the 1970s as well. The 1960s began the change, but it was the 1970s which inherited all of these cataclysmic ruptures and had to live with them. Shulman's work examines this "inheritance." It is a study of lasting effects-and reactions-to the 1960s liberal changes and external events. This book is crucial for understanding the United States in the 2151 century. The 2151 century did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, persistent ideas and reactions to those ideas have shaped society into what it is today. Shulman examines the shift from public to private sector began in the 1970s and the reasons for that shift. Today, many Americans have "turned inward." The scars from Nixon and Carter have not healed and many Americans simply do not trust, or more bluntly, do not care about their government, so long as it leaves them alone. Socio-economically, and politically, the seventies have left an indelible mark on America to this day.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.

This book contains an excellent, detailed description of the domestic social and political trends of the 1970s -- actually, notwithstanding the title, of the years 1969-1984. In a sense the book explores the early manifestations of the forces that resulted in G. W. Bush's victory last year, more than a decade after the book's time frame. It is, however, a commentary on, rather than a narrative of, events. The reader who knows little about the period covered should first read a more conventional history in order not to miss (for example) the full melodrama of Watergate as it unfolded its secrets and surprises over the weeks and months.

As one who came of age in that eminently forgettable decade, Bruce Schulman's history of the 1970s brought back long-repressed memories of that wretched epoch (which Schulman defines as extending from 1969 through 1984).

Synthesizing a 15-year period into a compact, 250-odd-page tract is no easy task. And Schulman does a reasonably effective job of capturing the social, cultural and political forces that shaped America in that era. However, Schulman overlooks several events, which, in my mind, are integral to understanding America in the 1970s.

The biggest of these is the Iranian hostage crisis. The U.S. diplomats' humiliating, 444-day captivity underscored in the public mind U.S. impotence on the world stage, while the ill-fated rescue mission highlighted the deleterious effects of the "hollow" military in the aftermath of Viet Nam. These events lead directly to American voters' repudiation of President Carter. Schulman fails to even mention the hostage crisis in his analysis of the 1980 election, ascribing Reagan's trouncing of Carter to economic issues alone. (In my mind, economic factors and the hostage situation contributed equally to the Reagan landslide and the rout of old liberal stalwarts like McGovern, Bayh and Church in the Senate.)

Similarly, the ignominious fall of Saigon in 1975 and America's abandonment of loyal allies -- dramatized by South Viet Namese desperately clinging to fleeing U.S. choppers -- lowered U.S. prestige, lead to increasing self-doubt at at home, and emboldened our enemies abroad. (For a cogent analysis of the effects on American psyche and world position, see David Frum's excellent chronicle -- "How We Got Here.") Schulman eschews any detailed discussion of this tragic event.

Finally, Schulman spends inordinant time on 1970s musical trends -- from the vapid, ephemeral disco craze to punk and New Wave to country to the emerging rap genre. He dissects the impact of a broad range of artists: Bob Dylan and Country Joe McDonald; Donna Summer and the Bee Gees; the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Clash, and even Peter Frampton -- to cite just a few. Yet Schulman neglects to mention the premier songwriter of the 1969-1984 epoch: Bruce Springsteen, who better than anyone, articulated the hardscrabble 1970s existence of blue collar America. Just how many times did Joey Ramone grace the cover of Time and Newsweek, anyway?

The Seventies - The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman is accurately described by the Boston Globe as "A fine antidote to less sophisticated efforts to make sense of so seemingly empty a decade . . . a powerful story about our nation's recent past." Schulman very effectives uses the technique that, away from academia is becoming, happily, more and more in use - namely, "what was it like to live in this particular period" rather than strictly reciting a change in the political landscape with Southern Democrats switching over to the Republican Party for social reasons. Schulman certainly doesn't miss that but quite literally overlays lyrics from Neil Young's Southern Man and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama on his theme to effectively drive home, in this case, the changes in the South. He does this time and again with race relations, expectations and landmark legal cases, gender issues, Vietnam, politics, hippies- literally across the cultural and political landscape. One has to be a very competent writer to discuss the issues of the Equal Rights Amendment within pages of the meaning of the Clash's epic (and politically important and powerful message) of Working for the Clampdown.

Schulman, quite correctly in my mind, views the 70s as beginning in 1968 and ending in 1984 and cites great and cogent reasons for this. His writings on free love hippies versus the radical New Left is spot on and he rarely misses a point. All of this and he, quite seamlessly writes, on a different note, "Frampton Comes Alive, like most other Seventies corporate rock, offered music with no soul, no message, no recognizable quality to distinguish it from what came before. Yet it became the biggest-selling album of all time-the first multiplatinum record."

This book is for both historians of recent times and for readers of cultures of a specific era. Professor Schulman is to be commended for the wide reach of his work and his ability to write it in such a highly entertaining fashion. Readers who enjoy this and are looking for "more" might try Restless Giant - The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson (part of the Oxford History of the United States that, interesting, Schulman is due to add to with his upcoming book, Reawakened Nation, The United States from 1896-1929). One wonders if he writes this well on the 70s and is now adding a volume of U.S. history on the turn of the last century, when he gets time to listen to the Clash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Sly and the Family Stone et al!!

"The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics" is a notable accomplishment. In his book, Schulman takes his readers on a rollercoaster ride through the seventies, a decade that even today is misunderstood and its importance misinterpreted by many, even by those people who lived through those uncertain times. Schulman writes of the seventies as a time of extraordinary and controversial changes and he does so with authority and fluidity that makes for enjoyable reading.

In a mere 257 pages, Schulman brings together the events that defined the seventies, while at the same time taking this decade out of the shadow of the sixties and giving it the attention it rightfully deserves. Tom Wolfe referred to the seventies as the "Me Decade" or a decade of self-fulfillment and a time for fun and leisure while others refer to that era as the "Disco Decade". Whatever the case may be, Schulman's book clearly illustrates that politically, socially, and culturally, the seventies was an important decade in American history. Schulman makes the case that the seventies was a direct result of the sixties, and the eighties was a consequence of the seventies.

Schulman describes the seventies as times of exhilaration, excesses, change, and social upheaval; he depicts the seventies as a time when presidents like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter fell from grace, and the American people turned to "Reaganomics" as a false savior of the economy. According to Schulman, these events led to lost confidence and trust in government, politicians, and authority. Schulman writes about the Chicano, American Indian, feminists, gay, and environmental social and cultural movements that demanded social and political change. He continues to write of the violence of the Black Panthers and the political activism of the Gray Panthers and how the end of the Viet Nam War left America in a state of uncertainty about its place in a global economy and in its military dominance.

The seventies, Schulman writes, was a time of rebellion; rebellion against the status quo in just about every part of American society, especially in politics, music, cinema, and television. He covers musicians from Bob Dylan to Peter Frampton, music styles from the new country music to punk rock, to the love-hate relationship with disco music. He talks about the rise of "independent movies" like "Taxi" and "Saturday Night Fever", the coming of age in television networks that introduced TV programs like "All in the Family", "The Jeffersons", "Sanford and Son", "Chico and the Man". . . . He writes about Reagan's "Star Wars" program, the "battle of the sexes", "the year of the Yuppie", the Air Traffic Controllers strike, liberalism versus conservatism and much, much more.

Whether readers accept or reject Schulman's interpretation of the seventies, they'll be absorbed by it. Even those who lived through the seventies will gain new insights into those times of change and uncertainty. It is like traveling through a time machine. I wholeheartedly recommend "The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics".

The problem with books recording the history of pop culture America is that there are too many of them, all with similar themes and layout. This makes a reader choice a bit complicated.
This Schulman work is by and large a god work. It captures the spirit of the seventies and puts whatever was big deal event at the time in words. Schulman also skillfully put such events in their sociological, anthropological and economic context. Needless to say, the 1970s era actually started in 1968 and ended in 1980. During that time, America lived turbulent time from the consequences of the Vietnam War, to Watergate and the ensuing trust in government, to the failure of Ford and success of Carter whose popularity plummeted to record low as president.
Schulman, however, did not restrict his book to political events as he included almost all facets of life deemed important at the time from the rise of the Sweet Home Alabama to Jesus music, the rise of communities as opposed to civil rights, the hippies, Jimmy Hendrix and Saturday Night Live.
The book is so attractive and entertaining that you would want to finish it in an overnight read even though toward the end, Schulman might have over extended his decade to cover the consequences of the 1970s over the 1980s.