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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 14 · pp. 434–475
This chapter follows the United States through the late 1960s and 1970s, when war, racial conflict, political scandal, economic trouble and fights over family and sexuality left the country divided and anxious. It covers Vietnam, new movements for racial and ethnic power, the Nixon presidency and Watergate, the decline of industrial work, the rise of the environmental movement, and the Carter years. This part covers the opening events: Altamont, the strain of Vietnam, and the new racial and cultural movements.
On December 6, 1969, about 300,000 people went to a free concert at the Altamont Motor Speedway in Northern California. The Rolling Stones headlined. The poor organization showed. The Hells Angels biker gang had been hired as security and paid in beer. As the day went on, the crowd grew angrier and the Angels beat people who tried to reach the stage. During the Stones' set, eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter approached the stage, was pushed back, and returned holding a pistol. An Angel stabbed and killed him, and the band kept playing. (pp. 434–435)
Altamont is best understood next to Woodstock, which took place only four months earlier. Woodstock had come to stand for peace, love and youthful hope, and Altamont was billed as "Woodstock West." Instead it became linked with anger, violence and death. Together the two events show the hopeful and the troubled sides of 1960s youth culture. Altamont also matched the nervous mood of the 1970s, when some Americans felt the country had not gone far enough toward equality and others felt it had gone too far. (pp. 434–435)
Escalation and protest. President Johnson sent hundreds of thousands of troops to keep South Vietnam from falling to communism. Stalemate, vague goals and the draft all helped build a large antiwar movement in the United States and Europe. Protesters burned draft cards, refused to pay income taxes, took over government buildings and delayed trains carrying war supplies. By 1967, demonstrations drew hundreds of thousands of people, and hundreds were arrested after surrounding the Pentagon. (p. 435)
The first "living room war." Vietnam earned this nickname because TV and print reporters had wide access to the battlefield, and the government did not formally censor them. Americans saw images of casualties and atrocities at home. In 1965, a CBS report showed Marines burning the village of Cam Ne, whose residents were accused of helping Vietcong guerrillas. Johnson was furious and phoned the head of CBS to complain. (pp. 435, 437)
The credibility gap. Although there was no censorship, officials used briefings and interviews to paint a rosy picture. They pointed to enemy body counts, villages "secured" and South Vietnamese troops trained as proof of progress. Reporters doubted these claims and joked that the Saigon afternoon briefings were the "Five o'Clock Follies." The credibility gap was the wide distance between what officials said and what was clearly happening in Vietnam. As the gap grew, public trust in government fell. (p. 437)
Tet and My Lai. The January 1968 Tet Offensive did the most to expose the gap. Communist forces hit more than one hundred American and South Vietnamese sites, including the US embassy in Saigon. The US and South Vietnam beat back the attacks and caused heavy enemy losses. But the offensive showed that the enemy could still strike anywhere, even after years of fighting, which contradicted claims that victory was near. Later, in 1969, reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that US troops had massacred and raped hundreds of civilians in the village of My Lai. In 1972, Nick Ut's photograph of a naked child fleeing a napalm attack shocked the public again. Each story pushed more Americans to oppose the war. (p. 437)
Johnson steps aside. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced on television that he would not run again. The war's unpopularity drove his decision. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy had challenged him in the primaries, and in the end Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee. (pp. 437, 446)
Richard Nixon ran in 1968 promising "law and order" and a vague plan to end the war. His plan had two sides. To calm antiwar feeling, he promised to phase out the draft, train South Vietnamese forces to do more of the fighting, and slowly withdraw US troops. This was called Vietnamization. To keep the support of Americans who still backed the war, he promised an honorable ending, later called "peace with honor." (pp. 437–438)
Those Americans were the silent majority, Nixon's name for ordinary people who supported the war and disliked the protest movement. His campaign aimed at suburban voters by linking liberals with protest, riots and violence. (pp. 438, 446)
Behind the talk of withdrawal, Nixon widened the war. Under what was called the "madman strategy," he bombed communist supply lines in Laos and Cambodia, hoping North Vietnam would believe he would do anything to end the fighting. Congress and the public were not told or asked. The bombing did not bring peace, and when news of it came out, protests flared again. In 1970, police and National Guard troops killed six students at protests at Jackson State in Mississippi and, more famously, Kent State in Ohio. (p. 438)
The end came in stages. After about three more years and another twenty thousand American deaths, the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, ending the US military commitment. The peace was fragile. When fighting resumed, North Vietnamese troops quickly overran southern forces, and by 1975 Vietnam was united under a communist government. (p. 438)
Many Americans still thought the war was just, and they feared the protests and fast social change were threatening order. A growing number of them turned toward conservatism. (p. 438)
Black Power. By the late 1960s the civil rights movement had split. Black Power challenged the integrationist hopes of older activists, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X deepened disillusionment. By 1970 the Black Panthers had dozens of chapters and thousands of members. (pp. 439–440) In Chicago, Fred Hampton led the Illinois Black Panther Party and built the multiracial Rainbow Coalition, which pushed for antipoverty programs, better housing and better policing. He was killed in a police raid on December 4, 1969. (p. 440)
Chicano movement. Mexican Americans challenged unequal treatment in the Southwest and took pride in the word "Chicano." Students formed MAYO in San Antonio and UMAS in Los Angeles in 1967. They protested unequal school funding and bans on speaking Spanish, and they asked for more Mexican American history in classes. Thousands walked out of Southern California schools. In Crystal City, Texas, students walked out over cheerleader limits, and activists then founded the third party La Raza Unida, which won local gains in South Texas. (p. 440)
Young Lords. In Chicago, a Puerto Rican street gang copied the Black Panther model and grew into a community empowerment group that ran programs and protests. (p. 440)
Red Power. Native activists occupied Alcatraz Island (1969–1971) and Wounded Knee, South Dakota (1973). Hundreds of Indigenous organizations formed by the mid-1970s. They included American Indians United, the International Indian Treaty Council, which demanded that the US honor its treaties, and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, which worked for fair oil and gas royalties after years of fraud by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (pp. 440–441)
Protests such as Navajo elders picketing strip-mining bulldozers, together with lobbying by groups like the National Congress of American Indians, led Congress to act. It passed the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act and, in 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act. These laws widened Native political and cultural control. (p. 441)
Divisions of race, class and gender broke the single American mass culture into many subcultures. Marketers aimed at smaller groups, including African Americans, who had been overlooked. Communities formed around music styles such as disco, punk, country and hip-hop. (p. 441)
Some popular works spoke to white working-class people uneasy about the 1960s. Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" praised a world untouched by hippie culture, and it caught on even though Haggard later called it satire. The sitcom All in the Family made Archie Bunker a mocking portrait of a reactionary white man, yet many viewers embraced him. Both show a conservative cultural revival in the 1970s. (pp. 441–442)
By the end of the 1960s, American culture was splitting along racial lines, and each side produced its own popular forms. In 1979 the Sugarhill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight' became the first rap single to reach the Top 40. It showed that Black musical innovation could reach a mass audience (p. 443). Hollywood offered a white counterpart in films like Dirty Harry (1971). Its hero punished clear villains with violence and followed a very simple moral code. That code appealed to viewers who feared that 'law and order' was breaking down (p. 443).
Those fears fed on visible violence, and some of it came from whites who opposed civil rights programs. In Boston in the mid-1970s, busing was meant to break down residential segregation and truly integrate schools. Protests against it brought racial violence to the city. A famous news photo, The Soiling of Old Glory, shows Ted Landsmark, a Black attorney, being attacked by anti-busing protesters. One of them uses an American flag as a weapon (p. 443).
Many white Americans, though, linked the civil rights movement with urban riots more than with anti-busing violence. The worst riots were in Watts (Los Angeles, 1965), Newark (1967), and Detroit (1967). Each began with a fight between white police officers and Black residents and then grew into days of chaos. Dozens of people died, and property damage ran to tens of millions of dollars. White-owned businesses were looted and destroyed. White capital then left the cities, which left urban poverty even more isolated (p. 443).
In 1967 President Johnson set up the Kerner Commission to find the causes. It blamed Black frustration with hopeless poverty. One witness argued that television kept showing the poorest Americans a rich life they could never reach. The report was an unexpected bestseller (pp. 443–444).
Not everyone accepted that view, and three explanations competed:
The riots did reflect real disillusionment. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act were essential legal steps. But they did not bring economic justice, and segregation survived in Northern cities. Residential and economic segregation was so stark that the old split between southern de jure (legal) and northern de facto (in practice) segregation stopped meaning much. Martin Luther King Jr. reportedly said that winning the right to eat at a hamburger stand is not enough if people lack the money to buy a burger (p. 444).
Two assassinations shook the country that year. King was killed on April 4 in Memphis, where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers. Riots broke out in more than one hundred cities. Robert F. Kennedy was killed on June 6 while campaigning in California. Liberal idealists had seen him as their last hope, and anger and despair spread (pp. 444–445).
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August made things worse. Protests began peacefully, but police threats and taunting from young demonstrators soon raised the tension. Many protesters had only taken part in campus protests and were unprepared for Mayor Daley's heavily armed police and National Guard troops. Some protesters kept provoking violence, hoping images of brutality would win public sympathy. The fighting ended in a televised standoff outside the Hilton Hotel, where protesters chanted that 'the whole world is watching.' The scene convinced many people that chaos ruled American life. It also strengthened demands for 'law and order' (pp. 437, 445).
Richard Nixon ran as the calm choice for suburban voters. He promised peace and prosperity and tied liberals to protest and rioting. A September 1968 poll found that 80 percent of Americans believed public order had broken down (p. 446). The result was close in the popular vote:
| Candidate | Popular vote | Electoral votes |
|---|---|---|
| Nixon | 43.3% | 302 |
| Humphrey | 42.7% | 191 |
| Wallace | 13.5% | 45 |
George Wallace carried five Deep South states. He won them by appealing for law and order and rejecting civil rights. Democrats kept both houses of Congress. That made Nixon the first president in 120 years to start his term facing an opposition-controlled House and Senate (p. 447).
Nixon turned his attention to foreign policy. The Nixon Doctrine (1969) said the US would keep giving allies financial support. But it would not send American troops into Third World conflicts, and allies had to take charge of their own defense. Adviser Henry Kissinger argued that the world now had several centers of power, so the US could not impose its own design on it (p. 447).
Détente was the strategy that replaced active anticommunist containment. It aimed to ease tensions with Cold War rivals and to freeze arms levels. Nixon used the split between China and the Soviet Union to seek closer ties with both, which also strengthened the US position against each (p. 447). In 1972 he became the first president to visit communist China. He was also the first since Franklin Roosevelt to visit the Soviet Union. The US later normalized relations with China and signed two arms agreements with the Soviets, the ABM treaty and SALT I. By 1973, after almost thirty years of Cold War tension, peaceful coexistence seemed possible (p. 447).
In October 1973 Arab members of OPEC embargoed oil exports to the US. They did it to punish American intervention in the Middle East. This started the first US energy crisis. Oil prices quadrupled by the end of the year, and drivers waited hours in line for gas. OPEC lifted the embargo in 1974, but the crisis lasted into the late 1970s (p. 448). Like Vietnam, it showed that small countries could still hurt the US.
Government scandals deepened the distrust. In 1971 the Nixon administration tried and failed to stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. This leaked Defense Department history showed that presidents from Truman to Johnson had repeatedly deceived the public about Vietnam. In 1973 Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which sharply cut the president's power to wage war without congressional consent (p. 448).
On June 17, 1972, police arrested five men who were installing bugging equipment in the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. One was a former CIA employee working for Nixon's reelection committee (p. 448). No direct evidence shows that Nixon ordered the break-in. But tapes showed he had asked for illegal wiretaps and for a break-in at another office (p. 449).
The cover-up unraveled in several steps:
Even Republicans in Congress would not put party loyalty ahead of the rule of law. In July 1974 the House Judiciary Committee approved impeachment. Nixon resigned before the full House could vote, the first and only president to do so. Vice President Gerald Ford took over and, a month later, gave Nixon a full pardon. Nixon never faced charges (p. 449).
After World War II, most Americans got richer. Historians call this stretch the Great Compression because the gap between rich and poor shrank. Taxes on high incomes were steeply progressive, unions were strong, and unemployment kept falling. Between 1947 and 1973, the living standards of working-class families nearly doubled. Segregation and discrimination still kept racial and gender inequality alive, so the gains were not shared equally (p. 450).
This prosperity hid weak spots, and Detroit shows them best. During the war its car factories made military equipment, earning it the nickname "arsenal of democracy." Afterward, automakers began to shut city plants and move to the suburbs. They automated work to cut labor costs. They also moved toward places with low taxes, right-to-work laws (which weaken unions), and low wages (pp. 450–451).
Detroit depended on one industry, so the damage spread. When the Big Three automakers cut jobs, the machine tool shops and other suppliers lost business and cut jobs too. From 1947 to 1977, manufacturing jobs in the city fell from 338,400 to 153,000, and the number of manufacturing firms dropped from over 3,000 to under 2,000 (p. 451).
Why Black Detroiters suffered most. Job losses hit everyone, but Black workers were trapped. Housing discrimination, intimidation, and denial of credit made it very hard to follow jobs to the suburbs. In 1960, 19.7 percent of Black autoworkers in Detroit were unemployed, compared with 5.8 percent of white autoworkers. By the time the 1967 riots broke out, 25 to 30 percent of Black residents aged 18 to 24 had no work (p. 451).
Several forces pushed unions downward at the same time.
By the mid-1970s, the postwar boom faded. Foreign competition and slow productivity growth held down wages. The pay gap between workers and managers grew again, and the tax code became less progressive. Unions represented about one-third of workers in the 1950s but only one in ten by 2015 (pp. 452–453).
Geography mattered too. In the 1970s and 1980s, firms left pro-labor states. Some moved overseas to use cheap foreign labor. Others moved to anti-union states from Virginia through Texas to Southern California. Northern and Midwestern factories closed, and by the 1980s that region was called the Rust Belt. It was contrasted with the Sunbelt, a term journalist Kevin Phillips coined in 1969 for the southern and western states that boomed after the war (p. 453).
Several things fed Sunbelt growth:
The boom did not help everyone. Many newly prosperous residents were transplants, not native southerners. Poor white and Black southerners, pushed off farms as cotton work shrank, were mostly left out. State leaders steered money toward high-tech industry and universities instead of public schools. The South and West thus had many high-skill jobs but too little education to train local poor and middle-class workers for them (p. 454).
Still, more jobs meant more people. By 1972, the Sunbelt had more electoral votes than the Northeast and Midwest combined, and the gap has kept growing. The region's rise rested on federal spending, yet New Right politicians who preached "small government" found their most loyal voters there. They blended conservative Protestantism with free-market ideas. Suburban housewives formed home reading groups that grew into political activity. Some people joined anticommunist groups like the John Birch Society, while more moderate suburbanites favored Richard Nixon's conservatism (p. 454).
The environmental movement grew in the 1960s, helped by the counterculture and by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring. Apollo 8 astronaut Will Anders's 1968 "earthrise" photo showed how fragile the planet looked. In 1969, an oil spill fouled the Santa Barbara coast, and the Cuyahoga River, clogged with industrial waste, caught fire. On April 22, 1970, over twenty million people joined the first Earth Day (pp. 454–455).
Authors added to the debate. Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle (1971) blamed industrial technology and urged redesigning it. Works like The Population Bomb (1968) and The Limits to Growth (1972) criticized consumerism and population growth (p. 455).
New laws followed, many under Nixon:
Love Canal. In this Niagara Falls neighborhood, toxins from about 21,000 tons of buried sludge seeped into homes. Residents suffered chronic childhood illnesses, birth defects, and miscarriages. Lois Gibbs led them to demand a cleanup and a buyout of their worthless houses. The pressure forced President Carter to evacuate families in 1978. The case is seen as the push behind the 1980 CERCLA law, called Superfund, which created a federal fund to clean up hazardous waste sites. Even so, poor Americans often lived in polluted "sacrifice zones," such as the Ironbound district of Newark (pp. 455–456).
Global warming. By the late 1970s, scientists were more sure that burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases that warm the planet. Carter urged Americans to waste less energy, created the Department of Energy, pushed higher fuel efficiency in cars, and backed renewable energy. He even had solar cells placed on the White House roof (p. 456).
In the 1970s, family life changed. More women worked outside the home, some for fulfillment and some because wages were stagnant. Couples lived together without marrying, married later, or divorced more. Sexuality, no longer tied only to marriage and children, became a political cause (p. 456).
Law remained strict. Interracial marriage was banned in many states until 1967. Same-sex intercourse and cross-dressing were crimes in most states, and gay, lesbian, and transgender people faced violence, policing, and discrimination in housing and jobs (pp. 456–457).
Two 1973 Supreme Court cases set the sides for the "sex wars."
Many women cared most about fair employment. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned job discrimination based on sex. Black feminist Pauli Murray helped, arguing that leaving out sex would cover only half of Black Americans. The law worked slowly, through lawsuits and pressure. NOW challenged sexist practices, such as airline ads that sexualized flight attendants. The EEOC issued stronger protections between 1968 and 1971 (p. 458).
Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman in Congress in 1968. She backed the Equal Rights Amendment and won minimum wage coverage for domestic workers in 1974. In 1972 she became the first Black candidate to seek a major party's presidential nomination, hoping to unite young, Black, female, and poor voters. She lost but served another decade in Congress (pp. 458–459).
No-fault divorce. Before 1969, most states required one spouse to prove the other guilty of something like adultery, so couples sometimes invented claims or traveled to Nevada. California passed the first no-fault law in 1969, and almost every state followed by the late 1970s, allowing divorce for "irreconcilable differences." Between 1959 and 1979 the divorce rate more than doubled, and by the early 1980s nearly half of marriages ended in divorce. Stigma faded, though religious conservatives objected (pp. 459–460).
Gay Americans faced the labels of mental illness and immorality. Earlier "homophile" groups, like the Mattachine Society, were cautious and wanted to fit in. Younger activists, inspired by Black Power, the New Left, and the counterculture, wanted liberation rooted in pride (p. 460).
The turning point was the Stonewall Inn uprising in New York in June 1969. When police raided the bar, patrons fought back in a multiday street battle. Sylvia Rivera recalled them forming a chorus line and throwing coins at officers, who took payoffs from bar owners. Calls for respectability gave way to chants of "Gay Power!" (p. 460).
Progress followed, but unevenly. Activists urged people to come out, noting that secrecy fed stigma and suicide. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association stopped calling homosexuality a mental illness. In 1982 Wisconsin became the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and more than eighty cities and nine states followed within a decade. Gay Americans still met hostility (p. 460).
The movements for sexual freedom in the 1970s were not united. Transgender people were often kept out of Gay Pride rallies and lesbian feminist conferences. They organized on their own against high rates of rape, abuse, and murder. A 1971 newsletter rejected the idea that being transgender was a mental illness and called for "trans liberation." (p. 462)
As sexual freedom and gender equality grew, organized opposition grew too. Evangelical Christians and other cultural conservatives worked to reverse gay rights wins. In 1977, voters in Dade County, Florida, overturned a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation. The campaign used the slogan "Save Our Children." (p. 462) Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister and broadcaster from Lynchburg, Virginia, became a leader of the religious right. In 1980 he said Americans must stand against the ERA, feminism, and the "homosexual revolution." (p. 462)
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) said that equal rights under the law could not be denied because of sex. It had been introduced in Congress every year since 1923. It finally passed in 1972 and went to the states for ratification. (p. 462)
At first it looked unstoppable. Hawaii ratified the same day Congress passed it, and thirty states had ratified within a year. Then momentum faded. Indiana became the thirty-fifth state in 1977, and the amendment needed only three more. (p. 462)
Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign turned the tide. At a time when many women shared Betty Friedan's frustration with the homemaker role, Schlafly praised the life of a homemaker and mother. With religious conservatives behind her, she lobbied legislators and held counter-rallies. Her argument was that laws protecting families, such as the husband's duty to support his wife and children, would be lost. (pp. 462–463) The deadline ran out in 1982, and the amendment died. Its failure showed how deeply Americans disagreed about sex and gender, and it pointed to the conservative surge of the 1980s. (p. 463)
Watergate still weighed on voters. Democrats gained heavily in the 1974 midterms, and Ford's pardon of Nixon hurt him in 1976. Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor, peanut farmer, and Southern Baptist navy man, won the Democratic nomination. He fit neither the liberal nor the conservative wing. He ran on honesty and moral character rather than big issues, a clear contrast with Nixon. He won narrowly in November. (pp. 463–464)
Many Democrats hoped Carter would expand the New Deal. His early steps were liberal: $4 billion for public works, food stamps for 2.5 million more people, a larger Earned Income Tax Credit, and an expanded CETA jobs program. (p. 464) But many post-Watergate Democrats in Congress were more moderate. Some joined Republicans to defeat a proposed federal consumer protection office. (p. 464)
Carter's own views also held liberalism back. In 1978 he said government could not end poverty, inflation, or illiteracy. One historian called him the first president to govern in a "post–New Deal framework." (p. 464) Labor felt abandoned: he gave tepid support to national health insurance and did not push hard for labor law reform, which business groups defeated. Liberals backed the Humphrey-Hawkins bill to guarantee jobs, but without Carter's enthusiasm it was watered down to a symbol. (pp. 464–465)
In 1978 the IRS announced it would revoke tax exemptions for segregated private Christian schools. This built on a Nixon-era policy. Still, evangelicals said Carter was singling them out. One activist called it the "spark" that drew the religious right into real politics. Many of these schools had been founded to avoid court-ordered desegregation. The New Right focused on government interference and played down segregation. (pp. 465, 468)
Carter inherited an economy hit by oil shocks, inflation, weak growth, and falling wages. (p. 465) Some causes went back to postwar trade policy. To strengthen allies against communism, the US encouraged export-driven economies in West Germany and Japan and tolerated limits on its own imports. Those countries grew strong in autos, steel, machine tools, and electrical goods. By 1970 the US ran large trade deficits. (p. 465) Even after allies dropped some barriers, they used subtler tools like state subsidies. (p. 466)
The result was stagflation: high inflation and economic stagnation at the same time. Ford and Carter could not protect American jobs. Manufacturers moved overseas, investment left, and industrial productivity fell. (pp. 466–467)
In 1976 Carter attacked Ford with the misery index, which adds the unemployment rate and the inflation rate:
The measure later turned against him. Unemployment rose from 6 to 7.8 percent, and inflation went from 6 percent in 1978 to about 20 percent by 1980. That gives an index near 28. (p. 467)
Carter wanted a policy based on human rights rather than fear of communism. He cut aid to dictators in South Korea, Argentina, and the Philippines. He negotiated the return of the Panama Canal in 1977, which cost him political support at home. In 1978 the Camp David Accords between Israel's Begin and Egypt's Sadat marked the first time an Arab state recognized Israel. (p. 467)
But the Cold War limited this approach. The US kept backing Iran's shah, whom Carter praised in 1978. When the shah fell in 1979, revolutionaries seized the US embassy and held fifty-two Americans for 444 days. A failed rescue killed eight servicemen, and the revolution caused another oil crisis. (p. 468)
Critics like Ronald Reagan called Carter weak and helped kill his arms control efforts. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the Carter Doctrine (1980) promised to defend US interests in the Middle East by any means, including force. It marked a turn from détente and human rights toward Cold War hawkishness. (p. 468)
At home, disability activists in the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities occupied HEW offices. They wanted enforcement of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which barred discrimination against people with certain disabilities. The government then began drafting guidelines. (p. 468)
In a July 15, 1979 address, Carter called a "crisis of confidence" a fundamental threat to democracy. (p. 469) A failed war, scandal, economic collapse, and cultural division had produced a sense of unraveling.
It is a mistake to think Nixon's 1968 win was a conservative counterrevolution. Politics on both sides stayed fairly moderate in the 1970s. But anger and anxiety built beneath the surface. Carter's failure to stop the decline opened the way for a new conservatism by 1980. (p. 469)
