Chapter 20
In This Chapter
● Taking a look at President Clinton
● Handling homegrown terrorism
● Dealing with the outbreak of AIDS and the use of drugs
● Introducing e-mail, the Internet, and a global economy
● Viewing the new look of Americans
In the last decade of the twentieth century, America was on top of the world. Communism had crumbled. The economy, after a slow start, spent much of the decade in overdrive, sparked by revolutions in how we communicate and do business with each other and the rest of the world.
But the 1990s weren’t all fun and games. Terrorism and violent confrontations between the government and domestic fringe groups came home to this country after having been regarded as events that were confined to foreign shores. And the president of the United States got caught with his zipper down.
Bill, Newt, and Monica
Less than half the people who voted for a presidential candidate in 1992 voted for Bill Clinton, which shows there was a pretty fair number of people who disliked him or didn’t trust him. At 46, he was the youngest president since John F. Kennedy. Like JFK, Clinton could be charming and affable, was a convincing public speaker — and had a weakness for women. A Democrat, Clinton was the first of the baby-boomer generation — those born between 1946 and 1960 — to be president. He had avoided the draft during Vietnam and admitted that he smoked marijuana at least once. In short, he was a new kind of chief executive.
Presiding over a nation
On the foreign front, Clinton was cautious. He did push through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which greatly reduced barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But his biggest challenge came in what was the former country of Yugoslavia. It had split into smaller states after the collapse of Soviet dominance in Europe in the late 1980s. In Bosnia, which was one of those states, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian groups were fighting a civil war that threatened to spread. When diplomatic efforts failed, the United States and other nations sent in peacekeeping troops to enforce a fragile truce. Later in the decade, U.S. military forces and other countries also intervened when the former Yugoslavian state of Serbia invaded and terrorized Kosovo. The allied forces restored order, at least temporarily.
Clinton was much less successful — and apparently less interested — in solving problems in Africa. He inherited a mess in Somalia, where U.S. troops had been sent in as part of a UN peacekeeping force. They failed to restore order, and in October 1993, Americans were repulsed by video of the bodies of U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets of Somalia’s capital. U.S. troops were removed in 1994. Clinton also failed to intercede in the genocidal conflict in Rwanda, where millions were killed or forced to become refugees (although he did apologize in 2005 for his “personal failure” to do more).
In 1998, a radical Islamic terrorist group called al-Qaida bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton ordered retaliatory missile attacks against suspected al-Qaida havens in Sudan and Afghanistan, to little effect. Frustrated with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspections, the United States and Great Britain launched air strikes against Iraq in late 1998, also to little effect. Both the terrorist group and the dictator would prove to be even bigger headaches for Clinton’s successor.
Clinton was much more interested and engaged when it came to domestic policies. His first big battle as president was over his ambitious plan to reform the country’s healthcare system. It was a system plagued by soaring costs, confusing programs, and increasing unavailability to the unemployed and the uninsured. As the baby boomers aged and needed more medical care, the strain on the system would only get worse.
Clinton put his wife, Hillary, in charge of getting his reforms through Congress. But her efforts were hampered when she became embroiled in a probe into the financial dealings of an Arkansas company called the Whitewater Development Corporation. The Whitewater probe led to Hillary Clinton becoming the first first lady to be subpoenaed in a criminal investigation. The scandal, Hillary’s stubbornness in refusing to compromise with legislators, and a massive and well-financed campaign by the health and pharmaceutical industries combined to sink the president’s healthcare reforms.
In turn, the failure of Clinton’s healthcare reforms, a series of mini-scandals at the White House, and the clever political strategy of a Georgia congressman named Newt Gingrich gave the Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1995 for the first time since 1946. Gingrich was elected House speaker.
Pushing the “Contract with America”
During the 1994 congressional campaign, Republicans had come up with a conservative litany of policies they said they would pursue if they came to power. They called it the “Contract with America,” and after the election they began pushing an array of programs that were aimed at reducing federal spending on social programs, softening environmental rules, cutting taxes, and cutting government regulations on business and industry.
Clinton, sensing that the political mood of the country was shifting to the center, went along for the ride. In August 1996, he signed into law the Welfare Reform Act, which tightened up federal aid to those who wouldn’t or couldn’t work and shifted more responsibility to the states. By the end of the decade, welfare rolls in much of the country had shrunk considerably. Well before the welfare bill, however, Clinton had shown his willingness to hug the middle. Shortly after taking office in 1993, he tried to end the ban on gays in the military. When a firestorm of opposition arose, he retreated to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that said gays could serve in the military as long as they didn’t tell anyone they were gay.
But most Americans were far more interested in pocketbook issues than gays in the military, and when it came to the economy, Clinton shone. The federal budget deficit of $290 billion in 1993 was transformed to a surplus of about $70 billion by 1997. Clinton had backed a tax increase in 1993 to balance the budget; when it was balanced in 1997, he signed a bill cutting U.S. income taxes for the first time since 1981.
He was also more stubborn on economic issues than on some other issues. When the president and Congress could not agree on a federal budget, the government all but shut down in November 1995 and January 1996. The public largely blamed the Republicans in Congress, in part because Gingrich was viewed as something of a political weasel outside of Washington. By 1998, the “Republican resurgence” was over, although Republicans continued to hold majorities in both houses of Congress. In November 1998, Democrats picked up a total of five congressional seats when they had expected to lose 20. Gingrich stepped down as speaker and soon left Congress altogether.
The public’s apathy toward the Republicans’ “contract” combined with the fact that the economy was doing well. It was enough to allow Clinton to easily win reelection over Kansas Sen. Bob Dole in 1996. One of Clinton’s most ardent supporters in his reelection effort was a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
I shall not tell a lie. ...
"I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie a single time. Never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people."
— President Bill Clinton, January 21, 1998.
Judging a president
Bill Clinton had had troubles with women before. During the 1992 presidential campaign, a nightclub singer named Gennifer Flowers claimed she and Clinton had a long affair while he was governor of Arkansas. Clinton first denied it, and then acknowledged that during his marriage he had committed adultery. As president, he was also unsuccessfully sued for allegedly sexually harassing a former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones while he was governor.
Then in January 1998, it was revealed that an independent investigator named Kenneth Starr, appointed by Congress to look into the Whitewater real estate mess around Hillary Clinton, was also looking into a possible sexual relationship between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky came to the White House in 1995 as a 21-year-old, unpaid intern. She went on the White House payroll a few months later, but was transferred to the Pentagon after some Clinton aides thought she was getting too cozy with the president.
At first, Clinton and Lewinsky denied any hanky-panky. Clinton also adamantly denied he ever asked Lewinsky to lie about their relationship. As the months passed, however, the truth began to emerge. In a national TV address in August 1998, Clinton admitted to “a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”
On October 8, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to bring impeachment charges against Clinton, basically for fooling around with Lewinsky and then lying about it (although the formal charges were obstructing justice, tampering with witnesses, and lying under oath). He was impeached a few weeks later, the second president in U.S. history to be tried in the Senate.
But public polls showed that while most Americans were pretty disgusted with Clinton’s morals, they didn’t want to see him thrown out of office for them. The Senate agreed, and on February 12, 1999, it voted to acquit him.
Bettor days
Americans have always been gamblers. Many of our ancestors gambled big-time just to get here in the first place. But chances are very few of them ever envisioned just how much legal U.S. gambling there would eventually be.
Fueled by relaxed moral views, more leisure time, and governments looking to raise money without raising taxes, legal gambling boomed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. By 2008, 42 states ran lotteries, 28 had casinos run by Native Americans, and only two — Utah and Hawaii — had no forms of legal wagering. It's estimated Americans bet $720 billion in 2003, which is more than they spent on groceries, movie tickets, and books combined.
Some of the biggest beneficiaries of all this betting were Native Americans. Thanks to their status as sovereign nations and a 1988 congressional act, many — although by no means all — tribes were prospering from casinos they opened on tribal lands.
In 1999, a special federal gambling commission ended a two-year examination of the nation's gambling habits and made more than 70 recommendations to Congress and state legislatures, including urging a slowdown in the spread of more gambling. Few, however, were willing to bet on that happening.
Homegrown Terrorism
For most of the twentieth century, terrorism — using acts of violence to make a political point — was something most Americans regarded as a foreign pastime. But in the 1990s, a series of events brought terrorism closer to home.
Not everyone thought terrorism was confined to the private sector. A small but fervent group of Americans believed the U.S. government was part of various international conspiracies bent on world domination. By 1997, rightwing paramilitary or survivalist groups had developed in every state. Some were led by Vietnam-era vets who felt betrayed by the government, others by religious fanatics, and still others by white supremacists.
Rallying around Ruby Ridge
One such group formed in Idaho, about 40 miles from the Canadian border, at a place called Ruby Ridge. On August 21, 1992, U.S. marshals were watching a white supremacist named Randy Weaver when shots were fired. A marshal and Weaver’s 14-year-old son were killed. The next day, an FBI sniper killed Weaver’s wife and wounded another man. At a subsequent trial, Weaver and another defendant were acquitted of all but one minor charge, and the government agreed to pay $3.1 million to the Weaver family for the incident. “Ruby Ridge” became a rallying cry for “militia” groups of all types.
Jimmy Buffett
Quick, name the six authors who have topped the New York Times bestseller lists for both fiction and non-fiction. Right: John Steinbeck, William Styron, Ernest Hemingway, Irving Wallace, Dr. Seuss — and Jimmy Buffett.
Buffett was born on Christmas Day, 1946, in Mississippi. After spending some time in college, Buffett tried to become a country music star. But it soon became clear his musical mixture of rock, country, and Caribbean sounds, infused with engaging stories and hedonistic themes in his lyrics, didn't easily fit any one genre.
Neither did Buffett. While few of his records were smash hits, his concerts were consistently among the biggest draws in the country. He parlayed that popularity into a writing career that saw both a 1992 novel and a 1998 autobiography top the charts. He also wrote and produced a successful musical, opened a couple of popular restaurants, put out a line of clothing, and did it all while piloting his own seaplane.
"He calls me from time to time for advice," said billionaire investor Warren Buffett, his cousin, "but I should be calling him."
Taking down a cult: Waco
By his own admission, Vernon Wayne Howell had an unhappy childhood, and by the time he was 22, he was still seeking something to belong to. So in 1981, he chose the Branch Davidians, a religious sect that in 1935 had settled about 10 miles outside of Waco, Texas. By 1990, Howell had changed his name to David Koresh and was head of the cult. Koresh called himself the Messiah and took multiple wives from among his followers.
On February 28, 1993, federal agents looking for illegal weapons and explosives tried a surprise raid on the Branch Davidian compound. But Koresh had apparently been tipped off that they were coming, and a gunfight erupted. Four agents and two cult members were killed, and a 51-day siege of the compound began.
On April 19, after negotiations with Koresh to surrender had stalled, federal agents attacked the compound and fired tear gas inside. A fire broke out and spread rapidly. When it was over, at least 82 people were dead, including 17 children. The government contended it had acted responsibly. Critics claimed it was at best a reckless mistake, and at worst, murder. One of the critics was a skinny, 29-year-old, former soldier named Timothy McVeigh.
The People versus "The Juice"
It may have been unique in U.S. history: a national icon who was an accused double murderer.
Orenthal James Simpson — better known to his fans as "O.J." or "The Juice" — was a Hall-of-Fame football player who had been a successful movie actor and TV commercial spokesman. On June 12, 1994, Simpson's former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, were brutally knifed to death in front of Nicole's Los Angeles condominium.
Simpson was a suspect and agreed to surrender to police. Instead, he led them on an incredible, slow-motion, nationally televised chase along L.A. freeways before surrendering in the driveway of his mansion. The evidence against Simpson seemed overwhelming. But after a trial that became an international media circus, Simpson was acquitted.
Critics claimed it was a result of a rich man being able to hire the best criminal defense attorneys in the country. Simpson lost a 1997 civil suit to the families of Nicole and Goldman and was ordered to pay $33.5 million for being responsible for their deaths. But he vowed never to pay a dime of the award because he insisted he was innocent of the murders.
In December 2008, Simpson was convicted in Las Vegas of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and several other charges, and sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison.
Bombings rock the nation
Not all the mayhem of the 1990s involved government action. On February 26, 1993, a 1,210-pound bomb that had been packed in a van rocked the World Trade Center building in New York City. The bomb killed six people. Members of a radical Islamic group, some of whom were also accused of plotting to bomb the UN building and two New York City tunnels, were arrested and convicted.
But it was Waco that stuck in the mind of Timothy McVeigh. A Gulf War veteran, McVeigh believed the U.S. government had become part of an international totalitarian conspiracy. With a friend, Terry Nichols, McVeigh decided to do something about it.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Building, a federal office complex in Oklahoma City, was blasted by a powerful bomb. The blast rained down concrete and glass for blocks around. A total of 168 people were killed, including 19 children who had been at the building’s day care center. It was America’s worst act of terrorism, and it stunned the nation. “This is why we live in Oklahoma,” exclaimed a disbelieving woman. “Things like this don’t happen here.”
McVeigh and Nichols were arrested shortly after the bombing. At their trials, prosecutors charged the bomb — a mixture of fertilizer and fuel oil in a truck parked outside the building — had been set to mark the second anniversary of the Waco tragedy. McVeigh was sentenced to death in 1997 and executed in 2001. Nichols received a life sentence.
In between the bombing and the sentencings of McVeigh and Nichols, America was shook by yet another bombing, this one in a park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Two people died and 111 were injured.
Don't open that mail: The Unabomber
Other 1990s terrorists were more intellectual than McVeigh. Theodore Kaczynski was an eccentric hermit who had been a university math professor and had retreated to life in a tiny plywood shack in Montana. From there he mailed bombs to people he deemed were part of society’s “evil” homage to technology. Over 18 years, Kaczynski mailed 16 bombs, killing three people, injuring 23, and triggering a massive manhunt. He became known as the “Unabomber,” because his initial targets were universities and airlines.
He was caught after he successfully demanded The Washington Post publish a long and rambling “manifesto” he had written. Kaczynski’s brother recognized the thoughts as his brother’s and contacted federal agents. Kaczynski was arrested. He pleaded guilty in 1997 to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.
Incidents like that in Oklahoma City and whackos like the Unabomber served notice on America that it was no longer an oasis of security in a dangerous world. If Americans needed another reminder, it came in 1995. Mindful of the possibility of a terrorist attack, Pennsylvania Avenue, the street in front of the White House, was closed to traffic.
Within five years, the New York City, Unabomber, Atlanta, and Oklahoma City bombings would be overshadowed by an even greater act of terrorism.
Making Ourselves Sick
While the bombs and terrorism of the 1990s were scary, many more Americans were affected by different kinds of horrors: the twin plagues of AIDS and drugs.
Suffering from AIDS
First documented in 1981, AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was found to come from the HIV virus, which in turn was spread by the exchange of bodily fluids, such as blood and semen. People could have the virus — be “HIV-positive” — and not have AIDS. Once the virus transmuted, however, death was a near certainty. Most of the early cases were among gay men, and there weren’t all that many cases. “Only” 21,517 were reported in 1986.
Still, AIDS was sobering on two levels besides the most important, which was the loss of life. Medical science had conquered many diseases by the end of the twentieth century and lessened the impact of many others. AIDS was a chilling reminder that man was still not master of his own medical fate.
The other level of AIDS’s impact was political. Gays and lesbians had made important strides in gaining the status of other minority groups. Some openly gay candidates had won elective office, and some states and cities had begun banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But the spread of AIDS was seen by many homophobes as God’s revenge against gays, and many people who previously considered themselves open-minded on the issue began to worry about contracting the disease from even casual contact with homosexuals.
As the disease spread from the gay community to intravenous drug users and heterosexuals, the numbers became epidemic. By the early 1990s, as many as 1.5 million Americans were believed to have the HIV virus, and 280,000 had died. But as the number of victims grew, so did public tolerance of the afflicted. Public sympathy was fueled in part by the revelations of public figures with the disease, such as basketball star Magic Johnson and Olympic diver Greg Louganis.
In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal disability laws covered people with the HIV virus. And while no cure had been found by the end of the century, drug treatments had begun to show some success in staving off the disease, and AIDS-prevention education programs had begun to reduce the number of new AIDS cases.
Dealing with drugs
A much longer-lived malady than AIDS was America’s drug habit. It was a habit that could be traced back to the addictions of Civil War veterans to laudanum and other painkillers used in the war.
Toni Morrison
She turned to writing because of an unhappy marriage, and her husband's loss turned out to be the literary world's gain.
Chloe Anthony Wofford was born in Ohio in 1931 to an African American family who had left the South to escape racism. Wofford grew up in a relatively racism-free environment. After graduating from college (where she took the name "Toni" because some people had trouble pronouncing her name), she became a university teacher. She married a young architect named Harold Morrison in 1958. But the marriage was an unhappy one, and she joined an amateur writing group to escape.
After getting a divorce, Morrison moved to New York and became a book editor. She also continued to write and published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. Her fifth novel, Beloved, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was given the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African American woman to win the award.
"Tell us," she challenged black writers in her acceptance speech, "what it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company." Morrison has told us that, and more.
But it really became epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of “crack,” a cheap, potent, and smokable form of cocaine, especially in the country’s inner cities. The production and distribution of crack and other drugs became a multi-billion-dollar business, and America became the most lucrative market in the world for drug cartels in Asia and Central and South America. A 1997 national survey found 77 million Americans said they had used an illegal drug at least once.
The blossoming drug trade triggered deadly turf wars in U.S. cities as rival gangs battled for control of the local drug markets. Not since the gang wars of Prohibition had American streets seen so much gunfire — and this time it was with automatic weapons that sprayed bullets all over the place and killed many innocent bystanders.
By 1990, more people were being sent to U.S. jails and prisons for drug-related offenses than for any other crime. The war on drugs ground on through the 1990s, and when the use of crack declined, the use of methamphetamine, or “crank,” grew. By the end of the decade, a new drug called “ecstasy” had made an appearance, and the U.S. justice system had made little lasting impact on America’s addictions.
A World of Change
The last decade of the twentieth century saw America — and the rest of the world — undergo some pretty revolutionary changes. One of the biggest was in the development of technology, particularly in computers. The speed of their development was staggering. A theory put forward in 1975 by Gordon Moore, a pioneer in computer technology, was that silicon chips — the souls of computers — would double in complexity every two years, and it turned out to be even faster. As the chips got more complex, their uses grew, and as their uses grew, their prices dropped. In 1994, a computer sophisticated enough to do high-speed, three-dimensional graphics for things like military flight simulators cost $300,000. In 2000, better computers than that were available in kids’ video game systems for $400.
Many of the advances were in communications, and sharing information became as big a business as manufacturing a product. The number of cellphones in the country, for example, jumped from less than 10 million in 1990 to more than 100 million in 2000.
You've got mail!
In the early 1960s, some American scientists began kicking around the idea of a computer system, using research computers called nodes, that could continue to function even in the event of a nuclear war. That possibility was of keen interest to the Pentagon, which financed much of the work.
The result, in late 1969, was the birth of the Internet, which led to e-mail, which led to a communications revolution. By the late 1990s, virtually every part of the world was linked to every other part. Americans alone sent an estimated 2.2 billion e-mail messages per day, or about seven times the number of pieces of first-class mail. By the end of 2000, it was estimated that e-mail messages had replaced 25 percent of what was now referred to as “snail mail.”
One-way communication via television also underwent significant changes. In 1996, President Clinton signed legislation that significantly deregulated telecommunications and set the stage for the creation of hundreds of new cable TV networks. Under pressure from federal regulators, broadcasters pledged to include at least three hours per week of programming that was educational and aimed at kids.
A pawn for Deep Blue
Garry Kasparov didn't offer to shake hands with his opponent after winning a chess match four games to two in February 1996. It wasn't just Kasparov's well-known arrogance. The fact was that his opponent had no arms. Kasparov, the world chess champion since 1985, had beaten IBMRS/6000SP, a computer christened "Deep Blue" by its IBM Corporation designers.
The win was called a victory for man over machine in an age seemingly dominated by machines that could do nearly everything better than humans. Kasparov readily agreed to a rematch the following year.
It was a bad move for the grandmaster. On May 11, 1997, Kasparov stormed out of a small room in New York City after being soundly thrashed by the computer, which had been tweaked and tuned since the first match. Deep Blue could execute 200 million possible moves in a second.
Kasparov did prove, however, that there are some things machines still can't match up to humans on: After its loss in 1996, the machine didn't whine or complain nearly as much as the defeated man did after his in 1997.
The following year, a company called Teleworld Inc. launched a product called TiVo. It allowed viewers to digitally store programs so they could be watched at the viewers’ leisure. Even more marvelous, it allowed programs to be paused and restarted without missing anything — and it could block commercials.
But the Internet, which gave birth to a network of information sources called the World Wide Web, did far more than make it easier to check in on Grandma or chat with Uncle Louie in the old country. It allowed businesses to reduce their costs and be more efficient by instantly knowing how much inventory they needed to keep on hand, how much of a product they needed to make, and who could supply them with the raw materials and parts they needed.
Retail customers could comparison-shop in businesses across the country and around the world — and they did. Online shopping for the Christmas holidays in 1999 was estimated at $7.3 billion. In 2000, it had jumped to more than $12 billion.
The computer revolution had impacts far beyond shopping and business. It led to amazing advances in medicine and biological research. And it led to a very real reduction in the time and space between America and the rest of the world, creating a true “global economy.”
Trading under a global economy
The global economy — an economy that closely tied together the production and consumer patterns of many nations — was created not only by the development of information-sharing technologies and computers, but by many countries dropping their trade barriers and opening their markets to the rest of the world.
One of the effects of the global economy was the creation of a wave of mega mergers among big corporations from different countries: Daimler Benz of Germany with Chrysler in automobiles, British Petroleum of England with Amoco in oil. The bigger companies promised, and often delivered, more efficiencies, better products, and lower prices.
But there were drawbacks. The intertwining of economies meant America was more affected by downturns in other parts of the world than it had been before. Products from other parts of the world were often more attractive to American consumers than their U.S.-made counterparts, and the country’s trade deficit steadily rose — from $155 billion in 1997 to $299 billion just two years later.
And many U.S. companies exported jobs as well as products by transferring their manufacturing operations to countries where the cost of labor was much lower. In Thailand, for example, a worker might be paid $2 for a nine-hour day making footwear, or a worker in Haiti might be paid $2.50 a day to make shirts. But while critics complained it was exploiting foreign workers, the companies responded that the wages were fair by Third World standards and helped the countries build their own manufacturing bases.
The global economy did seem to favor the top of the economic food chain. The top 1 percent of income earners saw their incomes grow an additional 31 percent between 1991 and 1997, while the bottom 90 percent’s income grew just 3 percent. And it was so easy to spend money, Americans did it with enthusiasm. Savings rates dropped to almost nothing by the end of the decade, leaving many Americans in a precarious position when and if the economy went into a tailspin.
There were few signs of that happening, however, as the century ended. In 1997, the average U.S. family’s annual income passed $40,000 for the first time. The number of people below the poverty level set by the federal government fell to 11.8 percent, the lowest since 1979, and the poverty rates among African and Asian Americans fell to their lowest levels ever. Even Congress couldn’t spend fast enough to keep up with the sparkling economy. The federal budget went from having an annual deficit of $300 billion at the beginning of the decade to a surplus of $123 billion at the end.
Going Gray — and Non-White
America entered the twenty-first century with a lot more gray around the temples than it had 100 years earlier. The number of Americans over the age of 65 more than doubled from 1960 to the mid 1990s, and the number past the age of 85 more than tripled.
Even as people were living longer, the birthrate in the 1980s and 1990s declined, and the oldest of the baby boomers were entering their 50s. The result of this “graying of America” was a growing political concern with medical care, Social Security, and other “senior” issues. The growth in their numbers also gave seniors more political clout as a group.
But gray wasn’t the only color America was turning. Immigration had generally declined from 1910 to 1970. But in the 1970s, there were four million legal immigrants, and six million more in the 1980s. Millions more came illegally. Most of the newcomers were from Asia or Latin America. In the nation’s most populous state, California, more than half the residents were non-white in 1999.
As usual, when there was a surge in immigration, there was an outcry from some quarters that the new immigrants would prove a drain on the country’s social service resources and the economy. Actually, a 1997 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that the impact of immigrants on the economy wasn’t all that big a deal either way.
But at least one group of new immigrants was being welcomed with open arms. In October 2000, Congress overwhelmingly approved a bill that would almost double the number of legal immigrants who had skills in high-technology fields.
There've been some changes made
It's been called "the American Century," and it surely wasn't the same at the end as it was in the beginning. Some of the changes that occurred over the twentieth century:
● Average workweek: In 1900, 60 hours. In 2000, 44 hours.
● Number of millionaires: In 1900, 3,000. In 2000, 3.5 million.
● Number of automobiles: In 1900, 8,000. In 2000, 130 million.
● Percentage of homes with electricity: In 1900, 8 percent. In 2000, 99.9 percent.
● Consumption of beer: In 1900, 58.8 gallons per year per adult. In 2000, 31.6 gallons per year per adult.