Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (88 page)

50
. See
chapter 7
.

51
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 159.

52
. Robert Hughes,
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
(New York, 1993), 66.

53
. Lawrence Stedman and Carl Kaestle, “The Test Score Decline Is Over: Now What?”
Phi Delta Kappa,
Nov. 1985, 204–10; David Tyack and Larry Cuban,
Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 34–36.

54
. From 1 teacher per 22.3 public school students in 1970 to 1 per 18.7 in 1980 to 1 per 17.2 in 1990 to 1 per 16 in 2000.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 150.

55
. As the Court recognized, the requirement of provision for bilingual education might result in classes segregated by race or ethnicity. This often happened: The right of bilingual education could—and did—clash with the goal of racially integrated public education.

56
. Gareth Davies, “The Great Society After Johnson: The Case of Bilingual Education,”
Journal of American History
88 (March 2002), 1405–29; Skrentny,
Minority Rights Revolution
, 337–39. In all, there were 3.6 million students with limited ability in English at that time.

57
. For special education legislation, see Gareth Davies, “Education for All Handicapped Children,”
chapter 6
of his forthcoming book concerning federal educational policy between 1965 and 1984. For statistics concerning special education in 2000, see
Stat. Abst., 2002,
133, 157. For local fights, see
New York Times,
April 24, 2005.

58
. In 1986 Congress enacted a law that called on school districts to provide for handicapped children attending pre-schools.

59
.
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez
, 411 U.S. 1 (1973).

60
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 164. Many students at four-year colleges and universities dropped out or took more than four years to graduate. In 2002, 18 percent of blacks and 36 percent of Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine were graduates of four-year colleges or universities.
New York Times
, May 16, 2004.

61
. Theodore Caplow et al.,
The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000
(Washington, 2001), 12; and Benjamin Kleinberg,
Urban America in Transformation: Perspectives on Urban Policy and Development
(Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995), 122–23.

62
. Paul Fishman,
Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia
(New York, 1987), 180–82; Kenneth Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
(New York, 1985), 272–80.

63
. For a bittersweet history of one such town, Camden, Ohio, see Richard Davies,
Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America
(Columbus, Ohio, 1998).

64
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 13, 674, 675. Of the 221 million motor vehicle registrations in 2000, 134 millions were passenger cars. Most of the rest (87 million) were trucks.

65
. Adam Rome,
The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism
(New York, 2001).

66
. Fishman,
Bourgeois Utopias
, 203.

67
. William J. Wilson,
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
(New York, 1996).

68
. Cited in a widely noted journalistic account, Ken Auletta,
The Underclass
(New York, 1982), 30. See also James Patterson,
America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 209–16.

69
.
New York Times
, July 14, 1977.

70
. Jonathan Mahler, “The Darkest Night,”
New York Times Magazine
, Oct. 5, 2003, 76–82; James Goodman,
Blackout
(New York, 2003). An outage in New York in 1965 had caused no such scenes. Nor did a wider blackout that darkened not only New York City but also other parts of the East and Midwest (including Detroit) in 2003.

71
.
New York Times Almanac, 2000
, 303;
Stat. Abst., 1977
, 168. Many statistics on crime derive from the FBI, which relies on reports from police departments. Critics warn that these numbers may be flawed, inasmuch as police departments may downplay the extent of crime or (seeking more manpower) may wish to exaggerate it. Increases in crime between the mid-1960s and late 1980s, however, were clearly high.

72
.
Miranda v. Arizona
, 384 U.S. 436 (1966); and
Furman v. Georgia
, 418 U.S. 238 (1972).

73
. Most famously advanced as a theory by James Wilson and George Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,”
Atlantic Monthly
249 (March 1982), 29–38. Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City became a visible advocate of this idea in the 1990s.

74
. From 1977 through the end of 2004. A disproportionate number of those executed were blacks. Texas led the way in executions. New York, New Jersey, and the six New England states executed no people between 1964 and the end of 2004.
Christian Science Monitor
, Nov. 22, 2004. See also
chapter 8
.

75
. Cited in Mary Ann Watson,
Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience Since 1945
(Fort Worth, 1998), 94.

76
. James Wilson, “Hostility in America,”
New Republic
, Aug. 25, 1997, 38–41.

77
. Steven Gillon,
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America
(New York, 2004), 98.

78
. Wilson, “Hostility in America.”

1
. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,”
American Scholar
(Winter 1993), 17–30.

2
. Theodore Caplow et al.,
The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000
(Washington, 2001), 142–43, 146–47;
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 197.

3
. Peter Braunstein, “‘Adults Only’: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York During the 1970s,” in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds.,
America in the Seventies
(Lawrence, Kans., 2004), 129–56.

4
. David Allyn,
Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution, An Unfettered History
(Boston, 2000), 295–97.

5
. Ibid., 266-68.

6
. Mary Ann Watson,
Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience Since 1945
(Fort Worth, 1998), 112–13.

7
. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(Chicago, 1997), 370–71.

8
. Ibid., 334–35; Caplow et al.,
The First Measured Century
, 71. Statistics on sexual behavior rely on interviews and polls and are understandably inexact. There is no mistaking the general trend, however.

9
. Tom Wolfe,
In Our Time
(New York, 1976), 4.

10
. Ibid.; David Frum,
How We Got Here: The ’70s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse)
(New York, 2000), 173.

11
.
Eisenstadt v. Baird
, 405 U.S. 438 (1972); Allyn,
Make Love Not War
, 265–66.

12
.
International Herald Tribune
, Sept. 4, 2004; Anthony Lane, “Oral Values,”
New Yorker,
Feb. 28, 2005, 96–97. The budget of the film was said to be around $25,000.

13
.
International Herald Tribune
, Sept. 4, 2004.

14
. Allyn,
Make Love Not War
, 271–80; Wolfe,
In Our Time,
4.

15
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 59.

16
. Ibid., 51.

17
. House Committee on Ways and Means, “Overview of Entitlement Programs,”
1992 Green Book
, 102d Congress, 2d Session (Washington, 1992), 654, 660; James Patterson,
America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 156, 166.

18
. In the 1970s, between 43 and 46 percent of parents receiving AFDC were blacks, and between 38 and 40 percent were non-Hispanic whites. Most of the rest were categorized as Hispanic. In the 1980s, the percentage of AFDC parents that was categorized as Hispanic crept up, from 13 in 1969 to 17 in 1990. The number of black parents in the program continued in those years to be slightly larger than the number of white parents.
Green Book
, 670.

19
. Patterson,
America’s Struggle Against Poverty
, 157–60.

20
.
World Almanac, 2001
, 873; Andrew Hacker,
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York, 1995), 73–74.

21
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 441. These rates, for children under the age of eighteen, rose from 15 percent in 1970 to 18 percent in 1980. The rates for black children were fairly stable during these years, at around 42 percent, or three to four times the rates for white children alone.

22
. Ibid., 59.

23
. Ibid. See also William Strauss and Neil Howe,
Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069
(New York, 1991), 324–26; Francis Fukuyama,
The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order
(New York, 1999), 40–42; Frum,
How We Got Here
, 80;
New York Times Almanac, 2003
, 277; and Wolfe,
In Our Time,
5.

24
. During the 1970s, America’s population increased by only 11.4 percent (from 203.3 million to 226.5 million)—the smallest rate of growth since the Great Depression years of the 1930s.

25
. Because Americans lived longer, married couples faced a longer road than in the past. This demographic reality also helped increase divorce rates.

26
. See
chapter 4
for the rise of social conservatism in American political life in the late 1970s.

27
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 70;
New York Times
, Jan. 16, 20, 2003. The abortion ratio (which measures the number per 1,000 live births) peaked in 1983 at 436 per 1,000 births, after which it slowly but steadily declined to 340 per 1,000 by 1997. This was roughly the ratio that had existed in 1975, shortly after
Roe v. Wade
. Abortions per 1,000 women aged fifteen to forty-four declined from a peak of 29.3 in 1980 and 1981 to 21.3 in 2000.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 70.