by Norman Stone
It was a strange inflation. Ordinarily, when prices started rising, there was a heightening of activity as people worked harder to make ends meet, or for that matter dealt in the black economy (as had happened in post-war France, Italy or Germany). In 1974 this did not happen. The American economy declined by 6 per cent between 1973 and 1975, and unemployment rose to 9 per cent. This was in defiance of the rules, because money had indeed been spent — and spent, and spent, and not just on Vietnam. Nixon had not reversed the sixties programme — quite the contrary. A budget of $5.5bn in 1964-5 became $144bn by 1993; welfare spending rose twenty-five times by the end of the seventies, taking half of the budget and three times the earlier share of the GNP (12 per cent). Under Johnson, permanent deficit-financing had become the rule, as distinct from conscious additions strategically thought through: $3.7bn in 1966 became $8.6bn in 1967 and $25.1bn in 1968. In March 1968 the Treasury Secretary protested that this would bring down the dollar, and so taxes were put up, such that there was even a surplus in 1969 — the last time for a generation. Thereafter control was lost, and by 1975 federal spending had reached $332bn, the deficit being over $50bn. By then government spending was taking almost 25 per cent of the entire output of the economy. All of this added to the national debt, which started to climb. It had reached $271m after the war, fell somewhat as a proportion of GNP until 1965, and then, under Johnson, grew and grew.
Nixon had to wrestle endlessly with the external problems, including of course that of the dollar’s world role, and he neglected the internal problems — finding Congress difficult to deal with, and anyway lacking powers to deal with it head-on. The Constitution itself in effect left the State sometimes paralysed: it was weaker in many ways even than the Swiss central state (where on occasion the cabinet had nothing to do but play cards). By contrast, the legal machinery was much more developed: there were 312 lawyers per 100,000 people, as against 190 in Germany and 134 in England. Given that the President could be frustrated by Congress and/or the Supreme Court, if they so decided, the very system of government was not well-equipped to deal with a general crisis, and in 1973 much went wrong.
With Nixon’s resignation, the United States went into a sort of tailspin. The inflation — or rather ‘stagflation’ — went together with a, for the USA, very strange phenomenon, that much of business now appeared to fail: some of the greatest names in American business got into trouble, symbolized by the fall of one of the largest modernizing enterprises of all, the Penn Central railway. Chrysler itself was saved by the Republicans only as a national symbol: by 1980 the collapse of public services was such that 88 per cent of Americans went to work by automobile. ‘The pursuit of happiness’, in the foundation charter of the United States, has always struck foreigners as funny. That is a misunderstanding of the original, which was just a polite way of saying ‘money’ (‘commodity’ is a similar euphemism, and in English ‘honorarium’, ‘remuneration’, etc. have the same function). As the seventies went on, the expression could only be used with irony. Much of the country — in its way, the real part — was still innocent and old-fashioned: churches got a billion dollars for building, twice what public hospitals got, and the modern ills of family breakdown and drug addiction passed these parts by. But overall the country was paying for the very obverse of the pursuit of happiness, and there was a sort of civil war. It was an extremely strange period. Hollywood became anti-patriotic, and embarked upon a campaign of anti-American film-making, with Robert Redford in the lead, though he had several less talented imitators. But there was hysteria at large. Senators George McGovern and Ed Muskie referred to Nixon in apocalyptic terms: ‘one-man rule’, ‘this tyrant’. The ‘Pentagon Papers’ affair, in 1971, which had then led to Watergate, was a disaster for the whole concept of national security, encouraging babyish attention-seeking among journalists without the talent of the pioneers in the business; and a campaign was launched against the old CIA, its assorted enemies being cast as martyrs (e.g. Seymour Hersh’s work on the Chilean coup in The New York Times in 1974). Various radicals were acquitted, and there were the usual conspiracy theories as to the Kennedy assassination, even a House committee accepting primitive legendry as to how the Mafia had caused it. Tom Wolfe wrote a superb little essay, ‘Radical Chic’, on the attitudinizing of New York money at social events staged on behalf of grotesque killers.
Politics fell into paralysis, and foreign policy for a time became mouthings. Congress was now cutting the powers of the presidency. In November 1973, even before he fell, Nixon had faced a Resolution preventing him from sending troops overseas for any length of time if Congress did not formally give support, and the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1973-4 put an obstacle in the way of his policies towards the Soviet Union, by cancelling favourable trade arrangements if Moscow did not cease harassing Jewish would-be emigrants. In July-August 1974 Congress again paralysed US handling of another strategic headache, on Cyprus, where first Greeks and then Turks had intervened. Both were in NATO, and each had treaty rights to invoke; Cyprus mattered because there were British bases there, and the island was on the very edge of the Middle East. One set of Greeks attacked another set of Greeks, and there was a Turkish minority with paper rights, which the Turkish army then invoked, occupying a third of the island. The enraged Greek lobby intervened, against the advice of Kissinger, who felt that it was giving up the chance of a long-term solution in order to vent short-term steam, a judgement proven correct. That autumn Congress restricted the CIA, and in 1975 frustrated any positive policy towards Angola, where a civil war killed off a fifth of the population. Endless new committees in both Houses now supervised aspects of foreign affairs, and the old congressional committees which had been notorious for insider dealings, with long-term chairmen who knew which levers to pull, were replaced by an allegedly open system in which nothing worked at all. The staff monitoring the White House rose to 3,000.
The seventies were a period when the formula of fifties America appeared to be failing, and there was a symbol of this. The very capital of capitalism was in trouble. New York was reigned over by a Mayor John Lindsay, a man in the Kennedy mould, who shrank from making enemies. The city’s workers were collecting wages that, with inflation, bought less and less; in 1968 the rubbish was not collected for a week, and rats ran through the streets of Manhattan. The sewage workers then struck, and from Harlem hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage floated along the river. This (1971) was the background to the famous riot, in which ‘hard hats’ working on building sites near Wall Street and the World Trade Center attacked anti-war protestors demonstrating there. The protestors fled, to fight (successfully) another day. Lindsay had attitudinized in their direction, decreeing that the city administration’s flag should, in mourning, be put at half-mast. He was forced to restore it to celebration mode, but then found another and much more damaging way to deal with the situation. He made bargains with the unions. In the USA these often had some association with organized crime, and might turn into protection rackets. The transport workers got an 18 per cent salary increase, an extra week of vacation, and fully paid pensions; the district councils, bureaucrats, had higher wages and were allowed retirement after twenty years; the teachers received increases of 22-37 per cent. Lindsay made New York the capital of crime. In the 1960s it had 7.6 murders per 100,000 people and from 1971 to 1975 21.7.
1. and 2. Old business. The former Chief of the High Command, Wilhelm Keitel, fails to persuade the Nuremberg judges not to hang him, while a delighted former finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, signs autographs after his acquittal, September and October 1946
3. and 4. Germany in 1946. Berliners collecting firewood in the Berlin Tiergarten, and a tram filling with passengers in Dresden
5. and 6. The chilly Communist future. The young Erich Honecker being voted first chairman of the Free German Youth; a post-Christmas meeting of the French Communist Party at the Vel d’Hiv, Paris, complete with gloomy Christmas tree, both January 1946
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p; 7. and 8. Aftershocks. Surviving Jewish families fleeing from Poland in the summer of 1946 following anti-Semitic violence; the origins of the American space programme: a V2 rocket being fired in New Mexico, August 1946
9. and 10. The end of the British Empire. British troops pulling casualties from the rubble of their headquarters at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, July 1946, and Greek Communist prisoners in Salonica with ‘The British Must Go’ spelled out in French on their shirts, March 1947
11. and 12. and 13. The Cold War coalesces. George C. Marshall with Vyacheslav Molotov, March 1947; Jan Masaryk and Edvard Beneš in Hradčany Castle, March 1947; Mátyás Rákosi at his desk
14. and 15. Stalin. Stalin celebrates his seventieth birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre, January 1950; from right to left: Beria, Malenkov, Vassily Stalin, Molotov, Bulganin and Kaganovich carrying Stalin’s coffin, March 1953
16. and 17. Communism on the March. Chinese Red Army troops during the assault on Shanghai, May 1949; Korean refugees fleeing from Communists in the north, with frozen rice paddies in the background, January 1951
18. and 19. Hungary 1956. Partisans with the corpses of secret policemen, Budapest, November 1956, and a Soviet tank in Budapest later in the same month
20. and 21. Colonial delusions. French African troops at Port Said (the shortly to be blown up statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps in the background); British troops posing for a street photographer in a different part of the same town, November 1956
22. and 23. and 24. Leaders. Georgy Malenkov about to watch Arsenal play Manchester United during a visit to London, March 1956; Nikita Khrushchev and Władysław Gomułka at the United Nations, September 1960; John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower leave the White House for the former’s inauguration, January 1960
25. and 26. The non-Atlantic in the ascendant. Two symbols of Communist glamour: Yuri Gagarin and Fidel Castro; the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer-Platz, August 1962
27. and 28. The Atlantic in trouble. Some of the hundreds of thousands of white settlers fleeing Algeria, May 1962; captured American airmen being paraded through the streets of Hanoi, July 1966
29. and 30. The new Europe. Ludwig Erhard and Charles de Gaulle at a dinner hosted by Konrad Adenauer, September 1962; Willi Stoph and Willy Brandt, May 1970
31. and 32. Prague 1968. Nicolae Ceauşescu and Alexandr Dubček, Prague, August 1968; Prague later in the same month
33. and 34. The 1970s. Leonid Brezhnev, southern Russia, summer 1971; Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Paris, December 1972
35. and 36. Cold War spin-offs. Salvador Allende with his new head of the Chilean armed forces, Augusto Pinochet, August 1973; Sheikh Yamani and Edward Heath in London to discuss the oil crisis, November 1973
37. and 38. Awkward social occasions. President Carter, King Hussein and the Shah, Teheran, January 1978; President Tito and the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, Heathrow, March 1978
39. and 40 and 41. Good and bad populism. Helmut Schmidt, April 1977; Jimmy Carter, September 1978; Süleyman Demirel, the great Turkish survivor, May 1977
42. and 43. The men who made Thatcher. General Galtieri (centre) with Admiral Lambruschini (left) and Brigadier General Graffigna, Buenos Aires cathedral, May 1980; Arthur Scargill, Orgreave colliery, May 1984
44. and 45. Couples. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, June 1984; Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu with folkloric Romanian children, c. 1985
46. and 47. More couples. Elizabeth II and Rupert Murdoch, Wapping, February 1985; General Wojciech Jaruzelski and Pope John Paul II, Warsaw, June 1987
48. and 49. Cold War spin-offs. President Mohammed Najibullah meeting Soviet troops, Kabul, October 1986; Prime Minister Turgut Özal meeting Ronald Reagan, April 1985
50. and 51. The end. The East German leader Egon Krenz about to lose his job, with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, November 1989; Boris Yeltsin earlier in the same year
It was of course a racial matter. Crime was associated substantially with non-whites, including the Puerto Ricans. Jonathan Reider, in his well-known study of the white backlash in Canarsie, Brooklyn, said that his interlocutors ‘spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully… one police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of times in five years.’ In a notorious case in 1972 the police chief ordered all white policemen away from a hospital, when he gave in to the black rabble-rousing politicians Louis Farrakhan and Charles Rangel rushing in to defend criminals who had killed a policeman.
The crisis of 1973 wrecked the city’s finances, as stock exchange dealings fell, whereas welfare costs remained fixed. New York City was only narrowly saved from collapse in 1974, though Lindsay himself had by then given up, and in the later 1970s ordinary city services often came apart — snow not shifted; in 1977 a power failure that lasted for almost thirty hours, during which there was a great deal of looting. As was said, the cheerful city of Breakfast at Tiffany’s turned into the bleak battleground of Midnight Cowboy. Around this time, too, came a further extraordinary flouting of ancient rules: the release of mental patients onto the streets, as asylums were closed. Progressive-minded specialists had urged this, and New York acquired a sort of black-humour chorus to its problems. And so any American big city had the horrible sight of mentally ill people roaming the streets and combing through the rubbish. Much of this went back to sixties bestsellers, whether Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) or Thomas Szasz’s book of 1961, The Myth of Mental Illness, and it was the judges who ruled that this had something to do with human rights. The overall sense of these works — Laing’s the best-known — was to the effect that madness was, in this world, a sane response, and there was something to be said for this view. Much the same happened as regards crime. Progressive-minded criminologists had been arguing quite successfully for non-use of prison, but crime rates doubled in the 1960s whereas the numbers in prison actually fell, from 210,000 to 195,000 (by 1990 they had risen again, to one million), in accordance with modish behaviouralist ideas, and in the later 1970s, although there were 40 million serious crimes every year, only 142,000 criminals were imprisoned. The National Rifle Association membership grew from 600,000 in 1964 to 2 million in 1981. If the police and the courts would not defend Americans, what else were they supposed to do?
Contempt for ordinary Americans also showed in the interpretation of the desegregation laws. The worst cases happened over school segregation. Boston schools that served poor districts were dictated to by judges who unashamedly sent their own children to private schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had expressly stated that there would be no enforced bussing of children from one district to another to keep racial quotas. But the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued regulations in defiance of this. The argument was that if there were not sufficient white children, then segregation must be occurring. The courts backed this in 1972. Almost no-one actually wanted the bussing, but it went ahead, with riots and mayhem, and there was a move out of town, and a rise in private-school enrolment (from one ninth to one eighth). In the north-east racial isolation became worse than before — 67 per cent of black pupils were in black-majority schools in 1968 and 80 per cent in 1980 (more than even in 1954). There were horrible stories at South Boston High, where black children were exempted from fire drills out of fear for their safety if they left the building. A journalist, J. A. Lukas, wrote the classic book on the story, all the more gruesome because the grand liberals did not have to have anything directly to do with their handiwork. Michael Dukakis lived in a decent suburb and sent his children to private school; Edward Kennedy used St Alban’s School, and the liberal journalists of Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post did likewise.
Where was American democracy? Law was passed by an apparent ‘Iron Triangle’ of lobbyists, bureaucrats and tiny subcommittees. The Democrats (now essentially controlled from the north-east) reformed the House
in such a way as to remove the old men from committee chairmanships, as from October 1974, when one of them became involved in a sex scandal involving a whore. The old system had been able to deliver votes, for instance for the Marshall Plan, but it could also be used to stop left-Democrat aims because experienced chairmen knew how to do it. A San Francisco congressman, Phil Burton — he supported Pol Pot in Cambodia, in 1976 — was backed by labour, but the result, with many now open committees, was that lobbyists flourished, and the small print of enormous legislative documents contained provisions to satisfy them, quite often unnoticed by scrutineers. It became impossible to get the budget in on time, and there had to be endless ‘Continuing Resolutions’ which simply enabled the government to go on spending as before: in 1974, $30bn more; between 1974 and 1980 spending (beyond defence) rose from $174bn to $444bn.
It was not surprising that so many Americans felt hostile to the whole process, and a radical, Christopher Lasch, wrote powerfully as to how a bureaucracy-dominating elite had taken power from people to run their own lives. He particularly despised the endless fuss made about cigarette-smoking — it started with a ban in Arizona, in 1973, on smoking in public buildings — but this was a frivolous period, the landmarks down. What Leszek Kołakowski called the politics of infantilism went ahead. Alvin Toffler pronounced in 1970 that the future would amount to endless leisure. For some, it did. In 1970, 1.5 million drew a disability pension, but 3 million in 1980; one tenth of the nation’s families was headed by a single woman, living on welfare. Paul Ehrlich in 1968 looked at The Population Bomb and asserted that there would be famine in the 1970s, and thought that pets should be killed, to save resources. One man made his name in the seventies with the claim that there would be a new Ice Age, and made his name again twenty years later with a further claim that global warming would mean apocalyptic floods. The wilder shores of the sexual revolution were explored, Niall Ferguson remarking that the only people who wanted to join the army were women, and the only people who wanted to get married were gays. Feminism, a cause that went back to hesitant beginnings under Kennedy, was vigorously promoted through the courts, and quotas for ‘positive discrimination’ were allowed — although Congress had never voted for this. Equality was applied, with many absurdities resulting (Edward Luttwak got himself off guest lists when he pointed out that heavy military lorries, driven by women, might crash because the driver’s legs were not strong enough for the controls). In Ohio women were at last ‘allowed’ to lift weights heavier than 25 pounds; in February 1972 the ghastly little word ‘Ms’ was allowed in government documents; women were ‘allowed’ to enter sports teams’ locker rooms; in New York women were permitted to become firemen; and in 1978 women were allowed to serve on naval vessels, ten of the first fifty-five becoming pregnant. Here was America at its witches-of-Salem weirdest.
