Chapter 33: Politics and Society, 1968–1980
TIMELINE
1968 |
Richard Nixon elected president |
1969 |
Apollo Mission lands on moon |
1970 |
Environmental Protection Agency established |
1971 |
Ping-Pong Diplomacy opens relations with the People’s Republic of China |
1972 |
Roe v. Wade decided • Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed by Congress • Watergate Hotel broken into • Nixon re-elected |
1974 |
United States v. Nixon decided • Articles of Impeachment passed by House Judiciary Committee • Nixon resigns, and Gerald Ford takes office • Ford pardons Nixon |
1976 |
Jimmy Carter elected president |
1978 |
Steep rise in gasoline prices begins • University of California v. Bakke decided • Camp David Accords negotiated • ERA fails to win 38 votes |
IMPORTANT PEOPLE, PLACES, EVENTS, AND CONCEPTS
ABM Treaty
Rachel Carson
détente
Gerald Ford
John Mitchell
Ping Pong Diplomacy
shuttle diplomacy
Watergate
Salvador Allende
Jimmy Carter
Earth Day
Betty Friedan
National Organization of Women (NOW)
Roe v. Wade
smoking gun
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Warren Burger
The Committee to Re-Elect the President
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Iran Hostage Crisis
New Federalism
SALT
United States v. Nixon
Camp David Accords
Cover-up
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
Henry Kissinger
OPEC
Saturday Night Massacre
University of California v. Bakke
“The President has only 12 votes in the Senate. He has lied to me…. [and] to my colleagues for the last time.”
—Senator Barry Goldwater, 1974
INTRODUCTION
The heady times of the 1960s profoundly influenced the next decades. If the Antiwar Movement could be credited with bringing down Lyndon Johnson, it could also take credit for the atmosphere that made reporters and Congress pursue Nixon in Watergate. Similarly, Nixon’s anger at the student “bums” and his adult “enemies” were key motivations for the actions of the Watergate conspirators. The second wave of feminism and the environmental movement were continuations of the methods and thinking of the Civil Rights, Antiwar, and Student Movements. There was a turn to the right, but each step was fought in the streets and in the halls of Congress.
SOCIAL ISSUES
Desegregation of Schools
In 1968, segregation was still a reality by law (de jure) in the South and by neighborhood (de facto) in the North. When Nixon took office, 67 percent of African Americans in the South attended school without white classmates, but by 1974, that had changed to 10 percent. In the North, however, about half of all children attended segregated schools. Mass marches and boycotts had forced change in the South, but in Boston, a backlash in 1974 produced opposition to busing for racial balance. White flight from urban areas in the North produced black majorities in the cities, leaving a deteriorating tax base, poor schools, and inadequate services.
Supreme Court Decisions
Although Chief Justice Earl Warren resigned in 1969, the Supreme Court continued to expand on his decisions under Warren Burger. Furman v. Georgia (1972) declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Roe v. Wade (1973) legalized abortion in early pregnancy. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) granted the use of affirmative action as long as no quotas were involved.
Nixon’s appointees, William H. Rehnquist and Lewis Powell, were key figures in turning the court against its Warren precedents in the 1980s. Justice Harry Blackmun, a third Nixon appointee, became more liberal, defending Roe and Furman.
FEMINISM
The Second Wave of Feminism began in the late 1960s among radicals in the Antiwar and Civil Rights Movement and spread through an informal network of small group meetings. At these consciousness-raising groups, women discovered that their personal difficulties in breaking out of the traditional roles of housewife were societywide political obstacles. The analyses in Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), which described the oppression of housewives and how women were portrayed in literature and psychology, andBetty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) lent ammunition to the burgeoning movement. With the founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966 and the publication of Ms. magazine in 1972, the movement gained organizational bases that could sponsor demonstrations and exchange ideas. Between 1975 and 1988, women employed as physicians went from 13 percent to 20 percent; as bus drivers, from 37.7 percent to 48.5 percent; and as telephone operators, from 93.3 percent to 89.8 percent. The issues of rape, abortion, and spousal abuse became common topics of conversation, and the government passed laws to protect the economic, civil, and educational rights of women. Women were also entering the mainstream of sports on the strength of these laws.
Equal Rights Amendment
Passed by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) stated simply that “equality of rights under law shall not be abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Only 35 of the necessary 38 states passed it by 1978. The successful opposition included a group of women led by Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative intellectual and political activist who believed the ERA would lead to women being drafted by the military, the establishment of unisex bathrooms, and the loss of benefits enjoyed by dependent housewives.
The Fight over Abortion
Pro-choice activist lawyers had won Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court on the basis of the 4th Amendment right of privacy. Pro-life opposition claims that abortion was murder often reflected religion-based viewpoint, which argued that the fetus was a sacred human life.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Activism regarding the environment and nuclear power were also continuations of the movements of the 1960s. On April 25, 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated on college campuses all over the country. There were sit-ins, teach-ins, and celebrations of clean air and fresh water as a way to build a safe legacy now and for future generations. The threats to health and well-being described in the Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968) and the threat of pesticides pointed out in Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) represented a new approach to environmentalism. These warnings were quite different from the calls for the preservation of natural beauty and space for recreation advocated by Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and John Burroughs in the early 20th century. Congress responded in 1970 by passing a Clean Air Act and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the latter of which dealt with automobile and factory emissions, solid wastes, and the health of workers in factories and offices.
THE ECONOMY
Richard Nixon began the Republican campaign to reduce the size of the federal government with his revenue-sharing New Federalism programs. These provided block grants to states, allowing them to decide how money was to be spent. The inflation that started as a result of the Vietnam War produced an unusual combination of high prices and high unemployment called stagflation. Finally, the oil embargo organized by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) created an ongoing energy crisis during the 1970s.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Nixon has been credited with uncommon expertise in foreign affairs, excluding Vietnam. He and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, arranged the opening of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Discussion began when the ping pong teams of the United States and China played against each other in 1971. “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” successfully exploited the rift between the Soviet Union and China, which had been in existence since 1959. Full diplomatic relations waited until 1979. The policy ofdétente, or a lessening of tensions in the Cold War, was intended to reduce the balance of terror with the USSR and other nuclear powers. The main agreements were the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, to limit defensive missiles, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), to limit offensive missiles.
Israel engaged in two major wars in which it fought Egypt and other Arab nations—the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Kissinger helped dampen the tensions through shuttle diplomacy (traveling back and forth among the combatants) but not before U.S. support of Israel prompted an Arab oil embargo. The energy crises of the early and late ’70s had their roots here.
THE WATERGATE SCANDAL
The scandal began as a scheme to create the biggest win possible in the 1972 election. The Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREP), called CREEP by opponents, had bugged the offices of the Democratic Party campaign headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and office building in Washington, D.C., in June of 1972. One of the “burglars,” who had worked for the CIA, was an employee of CREP and had in his pocket the telephone number of John Mitchell, the former U.S. attorney general and head of Nixon’s 1972 campaign. The revelations that followed, brought out by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as well as by Senate investigations and confessions of participants trying to bargain for shorter sentences, amounted to a record of wrongdoing going back many years. The scandal involved hundreds of thousands of dollars in payoffs for silence, stolen information from a psychiatrist’s office, the planting of false information in newspapers about opponents, and a convoluted cover-up of illegal activities.
Nixon and Watergate
The key question, according to Republican Senator Howard Baker of the Senate Watergate Committee, was “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Tapes of White House conversations, arranged by Nixon, revealed that despite his repeated denials, he did have full knowledge of the activities of the burglars. In the “smoking gun” tape, it was revealed that he had also ordered the CIA to stop an independent FBI investigation into Watergate matters. The president could now be charged with obstruction of justice. Obtaining the tapes was a major constitutional battle. Nixon claimed that executive privilege permitted him to withhold them from Congress and the courts. After forcing out two attorneys general in the “Saturday Night Massacre” because they would not fire the special prosecutor, Nixon had to appoint a second prosecutor and take his case to the Supreme Court. In United States v. Nixon (1974), the court ruled against the president. He was now facing the possibility of impeachment, and he lacked support in the Senate. Conservative Barry Goldwater explained that “the President has only 12 votes in the Senate. He has lied to me … [and] to my colleagues for the last time.”
Nixon and Ford
After Nixon resigned in August of 1974, Gerald Ford of Michigan became president. Nixon’s longtime vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in disgrace in 1973 after it was revealed that he had accepted bribes as governor of Maryland. Ford entered office with the soothing words that the “long national nightmare is over,” but then he shocked the country when he pardoned Nixon after only a few months in office.
THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION
In the 1976 election, former Democratic Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter, who ran as an anti-D.C. “outsider,” beat Gerald Ford in the wake of Watergate and the pardon but only with 50.1 percent of the vote. Carter promised “never to lie” to the American people and to cut government spending and waste. One of his first tasks in office was to begin the process of deregulating the airline industry. Inflation had reached 13 percent, and oil prices soared as OPEC limited production and Americans’ gas-guzzling cars ate up fuel. He tried to discuss the inability of the country to deal with its problems as a loss of faith and a “malaise,” but doing so did nothing to lift his poor ratings.
Foreign Affairs
Carter negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to Panama by the end of the century, but his biggest triumph was the negotiation of the 1978 Camp David Accords: Egypt recognized Israel and won the return of the Sinai. Carter recognized the democratically elected pro-Cuba Sandinista government of Nicaragua (1979), and he maintained a position on human rights that condemned the USSR for its treatment of dissidents and Jews and for its invasion of Afghanistan.
The Iran Hostage Crisis proved to be Carter’s undoing, however. The new fundamentalist Shiite Muslim Khomeni government in Iran (1979) blamed the United States for selling arms to the deposed shah. Fifty-two American embassy workers were taken hostage by angry students with the support of the Khomeni government. They spent 444 days in captivity and were only released on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1980.
SUMMARY
There was more to the 1960s than Vietnam. The conservatives learned at least as much as the liberals from the mass movements. New laws were enacted, accompanied by public discussions of race, gender, government lying, environmental damage, and the dangers of nuclear power. All the President’s Men (1974), by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, told the story of Watergate. Conservatives and Northern white workers, who were hurt by stagflation, fought back with an intensity that shocked liberals, who had assumed that American history always went their way. Phyllis Schlafly helped defeat the ERA, while integration, affirmative action, and the right to have an abortion were under attack. The government was still the protector of the unions, but Nixon’s New Federalism and Carter’s deregulations were portents of the future.
THINGS TO REMEMBER
• Backlash: This was the reaction of some whites to the Civil Rights Movement and the urban riots of the 1960s. The formerly solidly Democratic South started voting Republican following the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and many whites sent their kids to private schools instead of letting them sit next to blacks in public schools in both the North and South. Many whites left the cities for the more homogeneous suburbs, and negative attitudes about African Americans taking advantage of affirmative action and welfare became widespread among whites.
• Consciousness-raising groups: Feminists employed organizations and discussion methods in the late 1960s and early ’70s in which women would exchange experiences of discrimination, read radical analyses of oppression, and develop an understanding that the patriarchal or sometimes capitalist society was causing their insecurity and lack of advancement in the business and academic world, not their own actions or lack of them. These groups developed the slogan “the personal is political.”
• Pro-choice: The political position that favors abortion on demand
• Pro-life: The political position that opposes abortion
• Second Wave of Feminism: The first wave was in the 1830s through the early 20th century, when the radicals Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott advocated equality, employment, education, and suffrage. The second wave, which advocated these same ideas (except suffrage, which had been won in 1920), came about in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller, and Kate Millet were all Second Wave feminists.
• Stagflation: The economic state in which prices are rising (inflation) and unemployment is high, producing stagnation of growth
• White flight: The exodus of white, middle-class families from cities to suburbia following World War II, partially caused by the migration of African Americans to urban centers
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Which of the following statements from the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848 was NOT a concern of the feminist movement of the 1970s?
I. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
II. He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
III. Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people in this country, we insist that [women] have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as women.
(A) I
(B) II and III
(C) III
(D) I and III
2. The Carter Administration faced
(A) the Iran-Contra scandal.
(B) the energy crisis.
(C) record deficits.
(D) Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
(E) revolution in Jamaica.
3. Nixon resigned because
(A) he was impeached.
(B) the Senate voted to impeach him.
(C) there were too many demonstrations.
(D) he was threatened with impeachment and did not have support in the Senate.
(E) he had lied to Congress.
4. Match the author with the book:
A) Rachel Carson
B) Betty Friedan
C) Kate Millet
D) Paul Ehrlich
E) Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
1) Sexual Politics
2) All the President’s Men
3) The Population Bomb
4) Silent Spring
5) The Feminine Mystique
Answer choices:
(A) A-4, B-1, D-2, E-3
(B) B-1, C-5, D-2, E-3
(C) B-5, C-3, D-4, E-2
(D) A-1, C-5, D-3, E-2
(E) A-4, B-5, C-1, D-3
ANSWERS AND EXPLANATIONS
1. C
The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called for much more than suffrage, though suffrage was the most notable feature of the document at the time. By the 1970s, suffrage, discussed in choice (III), was not an issue because women had obtained the right to vote in 1920 with the 19th Amendment. (I) refers to God—not a primary preoccupation of the modern feminist movement—but it also addresses the existence of separate sphere of activity that confined women. (II) parallels a central argument of Betty Friedan’s “The” Feminine Mystique, an important book for the feminist movement of the 1970s.
2. B
Oil prices rose very high in the middle and late ’70s. The Iran-Contra scandal occurred in 1985 in the Reagan administration. The invasion of Kuwait took place in 1990 during George H. W. Bush’s presidency. There was a revolution in Haiti (1990), not Jamaica.
3. D
Nixon was not impeached; he was threatened with impeachment, because the House Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment and the House was expected to vote to impeach him. He resigned because, if impeached, he would have been convicted in the Senate and would have had to leave office. Impeachment is a two-part process that starts in the House of Representatives; he would have been tried in the Senate. There were no significant anti-Nixon demonstrations, and he was not found guilty of lying to Congress.
4. E
Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring; Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique; Kate Millet wrote Sexual Politics; and Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward wrote All the President’s Men.