Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (18 page)

Blacks grumbled, however, that Carter seemed to be cool to court-ordered busing to advance racial integration in the schools and that he gave only lukewarm support to a fair housing bill, which failed to pass in 1978.
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African American congressional leaders, banding together as the Black Caucus, chafed especially at his fiscal conservatism, which helped to spike liberal expectations for significant expansion of social welfare programs.
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The United States Conference of Mayors, another of the many interest groups promoting social spending for inner-city needs, was unhappy that public service employment did not rise faster than it did. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, emerging as a presidential aspirant, exclaimed that Carter’s economic policy was like a “domestic neutron bomb”: “It doesn’t destroy bridges—only people who are less organized and therefore less able to defend themselves from such an attack.”
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A few labor leaders, notably of the National Education Association, had reason to applaud the Carter administration, which established a Cabinet-level Department of Education. Then and later, public employee unions such as the NEA, growing in size amid the overall decline of organized labor, offered significant support for liberal candidates and public policies. Many other labor leaders, however, were unhappy with Carter, who was generally skeptical of unions. They complained that Carter refused to back an expensive national health insurance bill and a large hike in the federal minimum wage. They were especially angry that he did little to promote the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. This measure, a longtime goal of AFL-CIO chief George Meany, had stated in its original form that the federal government, protecting workers from recessions, should be the employer of last resort. By the time the bill finally passed in October 1978, it had become so watered down as to be of only symbolic significance. Put off by Meany’s criticisms, Carter refused to meet with him in 1978.
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Advocates of women’s rights, too, had mixed opinions about Carter. They were pleased that he appointed many women to government positions. On the other hands, some activists thought he might have done more to promote the ERA, which no states ratified after 1977. Still others urged him to do more to enforce Title IX (1972), which was aimed at gender discrimination in American education.
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Their disappointments reflected the high expectations from government that America’s liberal interest groups, working as earlier with supportive staffers and subcommittee chairmen on the Hill, had developed by the late 1970s.

Liberals, who had long led the fight for greater governmental management of the economy, nonetheless acquiesced in a surge of deregulatory legislation that passed in the late 1970s. Carter signed a number of important measures into law. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 abolished the Civil Aeronautics Board and permitted airlines greater leeway in scheduling and related matters. Other laws cut back federal oversight of trucking and communications. The deregulatory wave of the era exposed a widespread feeling that the still sluggish American economy needed to be “unshackled” from strict public restraints so that the “liberating forces of market competition” could come into play.

The results of this wave seemed unclear at the time. Deregulation of the airlines stimulated sharp (and in many ways brutal) competition and brought about lower fares on many routes. In subsequent decades it benefited a great many cost-conscious travelers. Supporters of deregulation, led by market-oriented business leaders, emphasized that it loosened the “dead hand” of governmental oversight, aroused entrepreneurial energies, rewarded lean and competitive corporations, and stimulated economic growth.
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Later, they asserted that deregulation spurred a resurgence of the economy and positioned American corporations to thrive in the globalizing world of the 1980s and 1990s.

Some liberals, however, remained skeptical about deregulation, which they said gave far too much freedom to big corporations. They also continued to chafe in the late 1970s at other presidential decisions, particularly where appropriations for social welfare were concerned. They especially deplored a widely noted statement—one that prefigured Republican rhetoric in the Reagan years—in Carter’s second state of the union address: “Government cannot solve our problems. . . . It cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy.” The progressive historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had served under JFK as an adviser and had written laudatory accounts of the New Deal, was one of many critics who would have none of this. If FDR had believed these things, Schlesinger (a supporter of Ted Kennedy) snapped, “we would still be in the Great Depression.”
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Liberals had slightly more favorable things to say about the Carter administration’s environmental policies. The environmental movement, indeed, had come into its own during the early 1970s, when Congress had approved landmark legislation leading to creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Congress had also passed a Clean Air Act (1970), an Endangered Species Act (1973), and a Toxic Substances Control Act (1976). Thanks in considerable part to the indefatigable efforts of Ralph Nader, a Consumer Product Safety Commission had been established. By the time Carter entered the White House, environmentalism had become a strong and vibrant, if not always purposefully united, political movement that embraced a host of causes. Activists lobbied not only to preserve wilderness and endangered species but also to fight against suburban over-development, nuclear power, occupational diseases, acid rain, depletion of the ozone, wasteful use of energy, and dams and other huge reclamation projects. Advocates of population control, worried about the environmental consequences of immigration, which grew rapidly in the 1970s, established the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1978.

A small number of environmental militants, embracing tactics described in Edward Abbey’s
The Monkey Wrench Gang
(1975), chained themselves to trees and blocked bulldozers. A few of these activists spiked trees with long nails, which wrecked chain saws. In so doing, they invited widespread criticism. The environmental movement also received mixed reactions from blue-collar workers, blacks, and Native Americans, some of whom charged that it was elitist and that it threatened industrial jobs. A popular labor union bumper sticker read:
IF YOU’RE HUNGRY AND OUT OF WORK, EAT AN ENVIRONMENTALIST
. But environmental causes appealed especially to growing numbers of young, middle-class liberals. Suspicious of government ties to industry, they brought an almost religious intensity to their crusades.
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It was estimated that the number of Americans enrolled in environmental organizations swelled from 125,000 in 1960 to 1 million in 1970 to 2 million in 1980 and to 6.3 million in 1990.
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Growth such as this, along with technological developments, promoted environmental gains in the late 1970s. Catalytic converters, first introduced along with unleaded gasoline in the mid-1970s, helped to cut pollution from cars by some 75 percent over the next few decades. Clean air and water laws did not work wonders—alarm about acid rain intensified in the late 1970s—but they were important. Drinking water became purer, and putrid rivers and lakes regenerated. Workplace safety and health received better protection. Though California continued to suck water out of the West, many Americans became more conscious of the need to save rivers, wetlands, wilderness areas, and endangered species. Industrial polluters had to cope with tougher public restrictions. Gregg Easterbrook, who carefully evaluated these developments, did not exaggerate when he concluded later that “environmental protection is arguably the most impressive achievement of progressive government since the establishment of the Social Security system.”
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Two troubling, highly publicized events in the Carter years further hastened environmental consciousness. The first took place in 1978 at Love Canal, near Niagara Falls in upstate New York. For some time, local residents living near the canal had complained that foul-smelling industrial waste had polluted the canal and the atmosphere, oozed into the ground, and caused serious health problems, including high rates of miscarriage and birth defects among children. Public officials, they charged, had deliberately deceived them about the seriousness of the situation. Taken to heart at last in July 1978, the complaints caused the state health commission to brand the canal as a “great and imminent peril to the health of the general public.” The state then spent $30 million to buy nearby homes and to relocate hundreds of families. Intensive media coverage of the troubles at Love Canal caused a national outcry, especially when it became clear that some of the people who lived near the canal had suffered chromosomal damage.
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Less than a year later, in March 1979, a frightening event created even greater alarm. At Three Mile Island, near Middletown, Pennsylvania, the radioactive core of a nuclear reactor overheated and partially melted down. The top half of the reactor broke up and caused leakage of radioactive steam. Terrified, more than 100,000 nearby residents fled their homes. It turned out that the steam had been confined to the interior of the reactor. No one was killed or injured. Fears that the near disaster had caused cancer were later shown to be unwarranted, and 2,100 lawsuits were dismissed. But the events at Three Mile Island shattered popular faith in nuclear power. Though many existing nuclear plants continued to operate (including one reactor at Three Mile Island), no new ones were built in the United States, thereby helping to make the nation more dependent on oil, especially overseas oil, as a major source of energy in the future.
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Carter, an outdoorsman himself, sympathized strongly with most environmental goals. During his term of office he signed clean air and water bills, as well as contested legislation regulating strip-mining. He also strengthened the Environmental Protection Agency. But it was not easy to satisfy contending forces within his party, some of which pressed for environmental causes, while some others, including local interest groups, stoutly resisted.

Political fighting over the Tellico Dam, which was then being constructed on the Little Tennessee River south of Knoxville, exposed these divisions. Advocates of the dam, including the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were already building it when environmentalists discovered that the project would eliminate snail darters, a species of small fish that existed nowhere else. Relying on the Endangered Species Act, they resorted to legal action, which ultimately reached the Supreme Court in 1978. The Court upheld a lower court injunction against the dam. Infuriated congressional proponents of the project, which promised to promote employment and economic benefits in the area, retaliated by attaching to an appropriations bill a rider that mandated completion of the dam. Carter sympathized with the environmentalists, but he recognized that Congress was up in arms over the issue. Reluctantly, he signed the bill.
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In 1980, environmentalists finally scored two victories. One, the Alaska Lands Law, more than doubled the acreage of American land set aside as national parks and wildlife refuges. The other created a Superfund, which was expected to spend more than $1 billion a year to clean up toxic waste sites. Some of this money was to come from taxes on polluters, notably oil and chemical companies. The progress of Superfund was uphill over the years, in part because there were ever more numerous hazardous sites that had to be cleaned up. Restoring Love Canal (number one on the Superfund’s list) took twenty-one years and cost nearly $400 million.
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Still, the law was a significant environmental accomplishment of the Carter years.
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As the fight over the Tellico Dam made clear, energy policy issues complicated efforts for environmental protection. These issues gave Carter, who established a Cabinet-level Energy Department in 1977, no end of trouble, but he was determined to fashion a comprehensive energy policy, for he understood that energy use was intimately connected with economic and foreign policies. He hoped especially to promote conservation and to lessen American dependence on overseas oil, use of which was increasing. He therefore called for development of alternative (and clean) sources of energy, including solar power, and for a range of tax credits and regulations that would improve energy efficiency in buildings, cars, and home appliances.
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During these anxious years, a number of useful steps did lead to energy conservation in the United States, notably the enforcement of federal regulations (first established in the Ford years) that required auto manufacturers to produce cars that were more fuel-efficient. Until the mid- and late 1980s—by which point the cost of overseas oil had fallen considerably and Americans once again began buying large numbers of gas-guzzling cars—this reform, along with the lower speed limits imposed in 1974, had salutary effects. Major improvements in home appliances, especially refrigerators, and the spread of better home insulation, further curbed wastefulness. America’s per capita energy consumption decreased by 10 percent from 1979 to 1983—during which time growth in the economy enabled the real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to rise slightly.
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Changes such as these had positive long-term consequences: America’s total energy consumption, at approximately 18 percent of GDP in the mid-1970s, dropped over time, to roughly 9 percent in the early 2000s.
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