Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (11 page)

Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage, at $2.10 an hour in 1975, was hiked in stages to $3.35 an hour by 1981, but the increases failed to keep pace with rapidly rising prices. The real wages of full-time male production workers stagnated, not only in the late 1970s but also for the next twenty-five-odd years.
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Household debt shot up. These were key reasons, of course, why so many wives looked for employment. When income inequality in America increased, as it did with greater force in the 1980s and 1990s, the households that managed the best were those with more than one adult wage earner.

Workers complained bitterly that corporations were holding down wages, demanding faster output, and “outsourcing” jobs to the “cheap labor South” and to overseas locations. Some workers embraced protectionism, attaching bumper stickers to their cars that read: “
BUY AMERICAN; THE JOB YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN
.” A few even took sledgehammers to Toyotas.
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A wave of governmental deregulation in the late 1970s—of airlines, trucking, and communications—expanded the decision-making power of corporate leaders and further alarmed workers. Many employees worried above all about job security. This was probably no more endangered than in the past—blue-collar jobs had never been very secure, and they declined in number over time as a percentage of all jobs—but scare stories in the media publicized the issue, which was real for many people (including a considerable number holding white-collar positions). The stories added to a general perception that the American economy was heading for catastrophe, and described a real and disturbing trend: rising inequality of income.

The anger of American workers became especially hot in 1974, when strikes and lockouts affected 1.8 million employees, resulting in the loss of 31.8 million working days, a number that had been surpassed only twice in American history (1970 and 1971).
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Later in the 1970s, losses in working days caused by strikes and lockouts ebbed a little but still averaged more than 20 million a year. This was considerably higher than the number of idle days in the 1960s and than were to be lost in most years of the 1980s, when union power dramatically decreased.
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The most bitter controversy of the 1970s, a strike of coal miners that erupted in December 1977 and lasted more than three months, featured violence in Utah and Ohio.

Labor unions backed many of these stoppages, but except among teachers and other public service workers, their power, slipping since the mid-1950s, weakened considerably in the 1970s. In 1953, an all-time high of 35 percent of American non-farm workers had belonged to unions. This percentage fell to 29 by 1973 and to 20 by 1983 (and to 13.5 by 2001).
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These dramatic declines stemmed in part from the complacent leadership of George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979, and his aides. Meany asked, “Why should we worry about organizing people who do not want to be organized?”
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More generally, the decline of unions reflected larger structural developments, such as generally tough corporate attitudes toward unions; the movement of jobs to the South and West, where organized labor had historically been weak; and increases in the numbers of women, part-time, and service employees, who were harder to organize. The traditional core of union power in America, manufacturing workers, shrank as a percentage of the national labor force.

For millions of Americans in the late 1970s, especially production workers, whose pay stagnated in real dollars, inflation was the archvillain of the age.
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The cost of living rose between 1973 and 1983 at an average annual rate of 8.2 percent, more than double the rate between 1963 and 1973. This was the highest such increase for any ten-year period in the history of the United States.
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The cost of a first class postage stamp, 8 cents in 1974, jumped to 20 cents by 1981 (and to 37 cents in 2002). A McDonald’s hamburger cost 15 cents in 1967 and 50 cents by the early 1980s.

Various forces propelled this inflationary spiral in the mid-1970s, including large government deficits that had mounted to pay for the Vietnam War, and consumer demands that exceeded supplies. Huge hikes in oil prices, which leapt from $3 to $34 a barrel between the end of 1973 and the summer of 1979, spiked the already strong inflationary surge.
⁷³
On June 13, 1979, 58 percent of American service stations, out of gasoline, turned off their pumps. Long lines of cars snaked around corners and awaited gasoline from stations that had not closed. Fights broke out among motorists. The oil crisis of 1979, like the embargo of 1973–74, heightened popular perceptions that America was vulnerable—nearly helpless—before economic onslaughts such as these.

The impact of rising taxes, which had already provoked sharp protests in the 1960s, further inflamed tempers and led to widespread grass-roots protests by the late 1970s. Workers who received pay raises—as from cost-of-living clauses in union contracts—often entered into higher income tax brackets. This was “bracket creep,” which left these taxpayers even further behind in the struggle to cope with the rapidly upward surge of prices. Totals paid in Social Security payroll taxes also increased significantly between 1964 and 1980. Capital gains taxes, which went up in the late 1970s, alienated many stockholders, helping to drive some of them out of the market altogether.
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Then there were property taxes, some of which hit middle-class homeowners especially hard and incited a range of protests in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1978, a staunchly anti–New Deal Republican and activist, Howard Jarvis, helped to lead a powerful popular revolt in California against such taxes, which (because of new assessments and rising land values) had become considerably higher than those in most other states. This protest, leading to a popular referendum on so-called Proposition 13, aroused enormous enthusiasm in California and captured the attention of people throughout the nation. In June, Prop 13 carried, two to one, thereby reducing these taxes by 57 percent and seriously threatening public education and other government services. It especially benefited large corporations and wealthy homeowners. Prop 13 also amended the state constitution, by requiring a two-thirds vote in the legislature to increase state taxes and two-thirds of voters to approve any new local levies.
⁷⁵

The
New York Times
, which closely observed the fight for Proposition 13, lamented that the outcome signified a “primal scream by the People against Big Government.”
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This was hardly an exaggeration, for the mission of Jarvis and his many allies had tapped into—and further excited—widespread popular rage throughout the United States against high public spending as well as taxes. Prop 13 quickly inspired successful crusades against property taxes in thirty-seven states and against income taxes in twenty-eight states.
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By 1980, millions of aroused taxpayers (though calling for better schools, roads, and other public services) were demanding a rollback of big government. They brought formidable strength to a surge of conservative activism that was beginning to challenge American liberalism and to reshape national politics.

N
OTWITHSTANDING THESE MANY WORRISOME DEVELOPMENTS
, it was possible to look back on the 1970s with some satisfaction. Most social programs that had developed or been liberalized in the 1960s and early 1970s—the historic civil rights laws for blacks; Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for many of the poor; Supplementary Security Income that allotted federal aid to the indigent aged, blind, and disabled; various environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act of 1970—enjoyed fairly broad consensus by the 1980s and were bettering the lives of millions of people. Some older programs, like Social Security and SSI, were indexed in the early 1970s so as to keep pace with inflation, thereby markedly reducing the incidence of poverty among the elderly. Significant Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s that had guaranteed greater legal protection to the welfare poor, the mentally ill, and criminal defendants remained the law of the land.
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The advance of rights-consciousness in the 1970s added to these protections. Yielding to governmental pressure, southern public schools were desegregating at last; affirmative action procedures remained in place for blacks and other minorities; activists for women’s rights, though embattled, were stronger than ever before; and other groups—the handicapped, school children with limited English—were securing entitlements that would have been unimaginable in the early 1960s. In 1973, Congress approved the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited federal agencies and programs receiving federal funds from discriminating against individuals with disabilities.
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Delighted advocates hailed it as the “Civil Rights for the Handicapped Act.” Congress also enacted the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which toughened existing laws protecting workers from such biases, and (in 1975) the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which greatly advanced the civil rights of disabled schoolchildren. A few activists welcomed a ruling in 1976 that they hoped would promote yet another right: to die. In that year New Jersey’s Supreme Court said that the family of twenty-two-year-old Karen Ann Quinlan, who had been in a vegetative state since 1975, might have her detached from a respirator.
⁸⁰

Scattered signs in the 1970s also suggested that Americans, for all their divisions, were becoming more cooperative and less judgmental than earlier. Thanks in part to the rise over time in educational levels, people were becoming more tolerant. Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, for instance, were becoming less visible than they used to be. Ethnic and religious divisions, which had remained sharp in the 1950s, were slowly softening, especially among the young. Though some Americans lashed out at the greed, as they saw it, of big businessmen and the very rich, class resentments, such as existed in some European societies, continued to be muted. On the contrary, popular faith in the possibility of socio-economic advancement, perhaps enhanced by slowly rising access to higher education, seemed to remain strong, at least among white people.
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Landmarks of popular culture in the late 1970s offered signs that many Americans still cherished optimistic visions of the future. Just as the phenomenal success of
Roots
may have indicated a willingness on the part of millions of people to respect the courage of blacks, so did another blockbuster of 1977, the movie
Star Wars
, suggest the continuing salience of a historically durable American dream: the power of faith and struggle to achieve victory against high odds. The most commercially successful movie of all time,
Star Wars
was a religious and futuristic tale that conveyed a simple moral: Good (heroic Jedi knights) wins over evil, in this case an empire. Inspirational in difficult times,
Star Wars
appealed in part because its special effects were marvelous, and in part because its optimistic message was so characteristically American.

Rocky
, a very different hit movie of the previous year, conveyed a similar message. Sylvester Stallone, a rags-to-riches story in his own life, played Rocky Balboa, a bloodied boxer who at the end lost the big fight, but who showed great courage and rugged individualism and therefore prevailed (implausibly but in a heart-warming way) against almost everything else. Rocky won self-respect and the girl. Events that patriotically celebrated the nation’s bicentennial in that year also featured upbeat themes. These commemorations, highlighting the spirit of hardworking colonial housewives, entrepreneurial rural artisans, and self-reliant yeoman farmers, celebrated the stalwart virtues that had supposedly made the nation great. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative, performed as a highly visible orchestrator of these hymns of praise to self-reliance and can-do values.

A
MERICANS WHO SAVORED UPLIFTING MOVIES
and celebrations such as these were in various ways contesting four interrelated social developments that prompted widely resonating laments in the late 1970s. The first lament—initially voiced by Tom Wolfe in 1976—was that the 1970s were the “Me Decade.”
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Three years later, Christopher Lasch, a historian, pursued similar themes in a popular book,
The Culture of Narcissism
.
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Wolfe mainly damned what he considered to be the hedonism of American culture. He also satirized the surge in popularity of religious fads, obsessions, and enthusiasms, ranging from jogging and health foods to encounter groups and transactional psychology. All of these, Wolfe wrote, exposed a foolishly self-absorbed quest to find the “divine spark which is me.” His full title was “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

Lasch, deadly serious, focused less on ridiculing hedonism than on documenting the anxiety that he thought was affecting family life and driving up divorce rates. He complained that Americans were becoming wrapped up in a “therapeutic culture” manipulated by self-appointed experts adept at psychobabble. Like Wolfe, though, he thought that obsessive self-concern aimed at promoting self-realization and personal fulfillment—that is, narcissism—was unraveling the fabric of American life. He asserted that a “lust for immediate gratification pervades American society from top to bottom. There is a universal concern with the self.”
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