Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (10 page)

It is possible, as some observers have argued, that stress in the family since the 1950s—not new in any event—has been exaggerated. After all, most late twentieth-century parents had fewer children.
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Families in which both parents have jobs outside the home normally earn much more income in real dollars than families with one earner. Though these parents often lead hectic lives, they are far less likely to be poor. And because jobs were becoming increasingly white-collar in nature, parents were not so apt to be physically exhausted when they got home. Nostalgia for the Good Old Days dimmed memories of harsh realities of earlier years and obscured gains in the new era.

Still, there was no doubting the magnitude of the seismic shift in America’s work and gender relationships, a shift that had become especially powerful by the 1970s. However working wives coped, they were weary from their “double day,” which exacerbated domestic strife. “You’re on duty at work,” one wife complained. “You come home, and you’re on duty. Then you go back to work, and you’re on duty.” Some women observed mordantly, “What I really need is a wife.” Arguments between husbands and wives erupted again and again over domestic rights and responsibilities. They were the most frequently cited source of divorce during these years.
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A
LL THESE CONTROVERSIES
over sex and family life would have been cause enough for concern even in sunny economic times. But the late 1970s and early 1980s were not so sunny. Though ongoing advances in science and technology brightened a few future possibilities, discouraging developments, while often exaggerated in the media, darkened the mood of Americans and cast an especially deep shadow on those difficult years, which were in many ways the gloomiest of the late twentieth century.

First, the good economic news. A minority of Americans had reason to be relatively happy about rewards from the economy at the time. Among them, as always in the celebrity-conscious world of the late twentieth century, were popular performers and professional athletes. In 1975, Stevie Wonder signed a recording contract for $13 million. James “Catfish” Hunter, a top Major League Baseball pitcher, broke with the Oakland A’s following the 1974 season, when he had earned $100,000. After winning an arbitration battle that freed him from the A’s, he auctioned himself off to the New York Yankees, who signed him to a five-year contract for $3.25 million plus extras. It was by far the largest amount ever paid to a player before that time. Pressure from the Major League Baseball Players Union—the most successful labor union of the 1970s—then helped to end the “reserve clause” that had bound players to their owners. “Free agency” in Major League Baseball took hold. Average Major League Baseball salaries jumped from $52,300 in 1976 to $146,500 in 1980.
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Among other Americans whose economic prospects improved at the time, many lived in the South and West, which witnessed unprecedented economic and population growth in the 1970s. These years were pivotal in the late twentieth-century transformation of the Sunbelt, which, though remaining the poorest region of the nation, gained increasing cultural, economic, and political influence over time. Some of its cultural manifestations—country music, auto racing—later spread nationwide.
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The rapid expansion of air-conditioning to the region did a great deal to drive this growth. Though one southern homeowner grumbled that AC was a “damn-fool invention of the Yankees,” most people were eager to install it. By 1980, 73 percent of southern homes had air-conditioning, as opposed to only 18 percent in 1960. “General Electric,” one wit observed, “has proved a more devastating invader than General Sherman.”
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The federal government, too, had already been promoting economic growth in the South and West, both by financing a vast expansion of the interstate highway system and by awarding a host of defense and space contracts to these regions. It also underwrote farm programs that advanced agribusiness interests. Observing the growing army of lobbyists for such programs, William Faulkner had commented:“We no longer farm in Mississippi cotton fields. We farm now in Washington corridors and Congressional committee rooms.”
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As economic stagnation hit the Northeast and the Midwest—the Rust Belt of the 1970s—many employers relocated to the South, a land of lower labor costs. Cities like Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, and San Diego boomed as never before. Overall per capita income in the South rose from 60 percent of the national average in 1960 to 80 percent in 1980.
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Frances FitzGerald, who visited varied American communities in the 1970s, was one of many contemporaries fascinated by the rise of the “New” South. This was an area, she wrote, of “sleek, landscaped manufacturing plants and men in polyester suits riding local commuter airlines.”
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The explosive growth of a new realm of business—personal computers—helped other areas, such as Seattle and “Silicon Valley,” California, to flourish in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1975, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to join his friend Paul Allen in founding Microsoft (originally Micro-soft), a software company that was booming by the 1980s. Their motto was “A personal computer on every desk and in every home.” In early 1977, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who in 1976 had founded Apple Computer, brought out the Apple II, which soon dominated a great new market for home computers.
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The Apple II cost $1,298. As the price fell and computer memory increased, sales climbed rapidly. By the end of 1980, Apple Computer was valued at $1.8 billion, more than the Ford Motor Company or the Chase Manhattan Bank.
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In 1982,
Time
named the computer its Man of the Year, and by 1983, as ownership of personal computers grew explosively, Microsoft’s motto seemed prophetic.

It was not widely noted at the time, but computer technology owed a great deal of its early development to the Cold War, which stimulated basic and applied research in the field, especially after the enormous promise of silicon chips had become recognized in the late 1950s. The Pentagon was a key supporter of research, especially at universities, which advanced other technological changes. One of these was the Global Positioning System (GPS), a network of twenty-four satellites that could pinpoint locations on earth. The Defense Department started an experimental GPS system in 1978. The government also advanced exploration in space, dispatching the first Shuttle test flight in 1977. More significant scientifically was the launching of probes into space, notably the spectacular Viking I and Viking II in 1976 and Voyager I and Voyager II in 1977. The Vikings soft-landed on Mars, sending back color photos of the planet’s surface along with scientific data.
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The Voyagers journeyed far into space to provide additional data on the planets. Still out there in the early 2000s, these left the solar system and are expected to send back information until their electricity runs out in 2020.

In time, an especially influential governmental research effort in these years was the development, also overseen by the Pentagon, of an interlocking network of giant computers working to advance America’s military preparedness. This effort, fairly well advanced by the mid-1970s, was largely unknown to the public, but with the further aid of research that was under way in Europe, it was a fundamental scientific and technological basis for the network of computers—the Internet—that began to affect many aspects of life in the 1990s.
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Other scientific, engineering, and technological developments captured the imagination of many Americans in the late 1970s and 1980s. One was the federally aided completion in 1977—over the opposition of environmentalists—of an 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which enabled oil to flow from Arctic regions of Alaska to the northern Pacific.
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Consumers welcomed a host of developments, among them the growth of cable TV. ESPN, appearing in 1979, ultimately soon brought sports to millions of fans, and C-SPAN, starting in the same year, began to offer coverage of the House of Representatives. Also pleasing consumers at the time were a host of new cordless household appliances using rechargeable battery packs—hand-held vacuums, hedge-trimmers, and screwdrivers—that had been developed to serve space exploration. Other advances of the era led to the first human magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRIs), color photocopiers, and the beginnings—with the arrival of synthetic insulin and growth hormone in 1979—of what was soon to become a growth industry: biotechnology. In 1975, videocassette recorders hit the market, as did Miller Lite, the first light beer. In 1978, Tamoxifen, a new weapon in the war against breast cancer, was marketed, and the first “test tube” (in vitro) baby was born. In 1979, the Sony Walkman went on sale in stores.

These scientific and technological developments, including the surge in computerization, did not contribute a great deal to economic growth in the late 1970s. Nevertheless, the economy did move slowly ahead following the doldrums of 1973–74, especially between 1977 and early 1979. Average per capita disposable personal income rose from $5,470 in 1975 to $8,869 in 1980.
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In real dollars this was a growth rate of approximately 2 percent per year. Though other economies, notably those of West Germany and Japan, continued to expand at faster rates, and though some key domestic industries, such as automobile production and steel, remained depressed, many other American industries coped all right during these difficult times. Production in manufacturing held its share (around 25 percent) of the world market in the 1970s.

The United States, having pressed in the 1940s to lower trade barriers and to promote global economic interdependence that would promote national prosperity, continued in the 1970s to dominate such key institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which exerted wide influence abroad. America remained number one in the world in the manufacture and sale of aircraft, industrial and agricultural chemicals, engines, turbines, and office computing machines, and number two in the fields of plastics, drugs, and various forms of electrical machinery.
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The American standard of living—characterized among other things by bigger houses, cheaper food, enlarging consumer choice, and improving quality of many goods and services—was still the highest in the world. Facts like these confirm two key points about economic life in the late 1970s: Most Americans were not suffering as calamitously from “deindustrialization” as some pessimists claimed, and the nation was not in long-range economic “decline.” Titles of contemporary jeremiads, such as Andrew Hacker’s
Decline of the American Era
, exaggerated the economic dangers facing the United States in the 1970s.
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What these pessimistic accounts should have emphasized was that many Americans, benefiting from living in a still dynamic, risk-taking, and resource-rich country, were doing a little better but often felt a little worse.

B
UT FOREBODINGS SUCH AS
H
ACKER’S
did rest on a good deal of bad economic news in the late 1970s. A number of worrisome developments in those years indicated that the American economy, while strong in many ways, was not so vibrant as it had been in the Good Old Days. These developments, in turn, threatened yet another right that many Americans had always cherished: the right to advance their material well-being in life.

The stagflation that had descended in the early 1970s persisted into the early 1980s. A key source of this misery was long-range and structural: the movement of the American economy (like other industrialized economies) from a base in manufacturing toward a “post-industrial” society that depended more heavily on services, where technological advances were normally small, where gains in productivity were modest, and where (in many cases) wages or salaries were relatively low. In retrospect, it appears that this transition was especially sharp and painful in the 1970s. It was estimated that service jobs, already 60 percent of the total in 1970, increased to 70 percent by 1980.
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Increases in American productivity, which had averaged more than 3 percent per year between 1947 and 1965, fell to 2.4 percent per year between 1965 and 1970, and to 1.2 percent between 1973 and 1979.
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Other troubling trends, notably greater economic competition from abroad, compounded these problems. West Germany and Japan, energetically emphasizing research and development, offered sharp challenges. Japanese cars captured 23 percent of the American market by 1979, at which time Susan Ford, daughter of the former president, announced in a TV ad, “Take it from a Ford, drive Subaru.”
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Chrysler, battered by Japanese car imports, lost billions and was rescued in 1980 only when President Jimmy Carter signed into law a highly controversial $1.5 billion federal bailout.
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Finding jobs for the many millions of women and baby boomers who were looking for employment posed special difficulties. Mechanization in struggling sectors of the economy, notably coal mining and cotton textiles, cut back on employment in these areas. As earlier, small farmers and farm workers found it hard to make a living.
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Residents in pockets of rural poverty, such as the Mississippi Delta area and Appalachia, suffered badly. Native Americans on reservations continued to face a wide range of economic ills, notably poverty. Many jobs, as in radio and television manufacturing, moved abroad. Thanks to these and other problems, unemployment rates, which had averaged 4.7 percent per year between the late 1960s and 1973, rose to an average of 7.4 percent between 1973 and 1986. Though the government’s official poverty rate remained fairly stable (generally between 12 and 13 percent of the population in the 1970s), the overall population of the United States, thanks to increasing immigration, rose gradually, and the number of poor people increased between 1970 and 1980 from 25 to 29 million.
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