Meanwhile, as the Senate investigated obscenity in music, the Reagan White House turned its attention to pornography in magazines and films. In May 1984, after some prompting from the Religious Right, President Reagan announced the creation of a new presidential commission on pornography. There had already been such a presidential commission during the Nixon administration, but Reagan said in his announcement that he disagreed with its essential findings that sexually explicit films and magazines had no negative impact on society. “It is time to take a new look at this conclusion,” the president insisted, “and it’s time to stop pretending that extreme pornography is a victimless crime.” After a year’s worth of preparation, Attorney General Ed Meese formally launched the commission in May 1985. “No longer must one go out of the way to find pornographic materials,” Meese noted. “With the advent of cable television and video recorders, pornography now is available at home to almost anyone—regardless of age—at the mere touch of a button or at the mere dialing of a telephone.” 53
The Meese Commission, as it was commonly known, was made up largely of law enforcement figures and conservative activists who had already engaged in campaigns against pornography. The commission’s chairman, Henry E. Hudson, was a county prosecutor from suburban Virginia who reporters noted had shown “uncommon zeal” in shutting down adult bookstores and making arrests. “Hudson’s record on pornography is clear,” said Barry Lynn of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “He hates it, he wants to get rid of it, and he thinks it’s a public safety menace akin to driving 100 miles an hour in a residential neighborhood.” Setting aside the considerable number of social science studies on the impact of pornography, most of which concluded that it was not a significant social problem, the members of the Meese Commission resolved to do their own research. Over the next year, they personally inspected 2,325 magazines, 725 books, and 2,370 films. As it carried out its work, the commission made it clear that it was concerned not just with the production of pornographic material, but its dissemination as well. Bookstores and major convenience store chains received official letters from the commission’s executive director noting that the panel had “received testimony alleging that your company is involved in the sale or distribution of pornography” and “determined that it would be appropriate to allow your company an opportunity to respond” before it drafted its report identifying such distributors. Intimidated by the government’s letter, several large chains of convenience stores and drugstores, including 7-Eleven and Revco, responded by removing magazines like Playboy and Penthouse from their racks. In response, the two magazines sued the attorney general. According to Christine Hefner, president of Playboy, “this harassment of legitimate business recalls a kind of ‘McCarthy blacklist,’ with pornography serving as the 1980s version of the ‘red menace.’ ” 54
In July 1986, the Meese Commission issued its final report. At its heart, the two-volume, 1,960-page document concluded that pornography caused irreparable harm to society. Specifically, the commission concluded that porn “debased” women and directly led to acts of violence against women and children alike. Accordingly, the Meese Report called for stricter enforcement of existing obscenity laws and a broadened legal definition of obscenity to make even more kinds of sexually explicit material illegal. Following a federal court ruling against the panel, however, the commission did not publish its “blacklist” of vendors as publishers had feared. Still, individual states pressed ahead where the federal government could not, passing tougher new pornography and obscenity laws of their own and launching new waves of arrests. In October 1985, for instance, a new obscenity law in North Carolina had allowed police to seize materials and make arrests without a court order, prompting new crackdowns across the state.55
Meanwhile, the campaign against obscene music continued to spread. A growing concern was the genre of rap music, with its aggressive lyrics and confrontational style. In the late 1980s, much of the controversy centered on 2 Live Crew, a controversial rap group from Miami whose main claim to fame had been its sexually explicit lyrics. After listening to the band’s 1989 album As Nasty as They Wanna Be, PMRC officials duly reported that it contained over 200 uses of the word “fuck,” over 150 uses of the word “bitch,” more than 100 references to male and female genitalia, and over 80 different descriptions of oral sex. While the PMRC merely wanted warning labels placed on the album, more aggressive activists pushed for its complete ban. According to the American Family Association, such music was “mind pollution and body pollution” that could only cause harm. “This stuff is so toxic and so dangerous to anybody,” one attorney argued, “that it shouldn’t be allowed to be sold to anybody or by anybody.” Because children might hear the songs, he continued, the group’s lead singer Luther Campbell was nothing less than “a psychological child molester.” 56
As with the state-level campaigns against pornography, state and local efforts against obscene music succeeded where the national campaign stalled. Such campaigns occurred across the country, from California to Pennsylvania, but they were especially prominent in southern states, serving as a reminder that however nationalizing the decade’s communications might have felt, there were strong pockets of regional resistance. In a small town in Alabama, for instance, record store owner Tommy Hammond was arrested in 1988 for selling a 2 Live Crew cassette tape to an undercover officer, and then convicted and fined $500. (The conviction was reversed on appeal.) Though seemingly minor, the penalty made Hammond, as Tom Wicker noted in the New York Times, “the first American ever found guilty of selling recorded obscenity.” Others would soon join him. Hammond’s brother, for instance, was fined $3,000 and given a year’s suspended prison sentence for selling an album by the rapper Too Short in another Alabama town.57
The controversy came to a head in Florida in 1990, with the Miami-based 2 Live Crew once again in the spotlight. Inspired by a series of private “sting” operations orchestrated by the American Family Association, local police conducted their own undercover work. In March 1990, a 19-year-old record store clerk in Sarasota was arrested for selling a 2 Live Crew album to an 11-year-old girl and charged with selling “harmful material” to a minor, a felony that carried a potential penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $5,000. That same month, a Broward County judge ruled the album “obscene” and banned its sale entirely in the county; in June, a federal judge in Ft. Lauderdale agreed, opening the door to further prosecution of record store owners and clerks who sold the album not merely to children but even to adults. “This is a case between two ancient enemies, Anything Goes and Enough Already,” announced US District Court judge Jose Gonzalez, before making it clear that he came down firmly on the side of the latter. Emboldened by the court decisions, a local sheriff promised to arrest the members of 2 Live Crew if they performed songs from the album live. A few days later, his deputies did just that. Republican governor Bob Martinez, then embroiled in a tough reelection fight, took credit for the arrests, insisting he had acted to protect the interests of most of his constituents. “There’s always a small percentage that that [album] will appeal to,” Martinez announced. “It doesn’t to me, and I think it doesn’t to the majority of the people in this state or the majority of people in this nation.” 58
In truth, however, the controversy and the charges of censorship only boosted sales of the album. The fundamental problem for the culture warriors was that large numbers of Americans liked the material that they wanted to eliminate. While some found it politically attractive to try to contain these products, the consuming public generally had little interest in their efforts. Even with a number of major retail chains pulling the album off their shelves in response to conservative activists’ complaints and court orders, As Nasty As They Wanna Be still went platinum, selling 1,200,000 copies in its first year of release and staying in the Top 40 of both Billboard Magazine’s pop and black music album sales charts the entire time. Riding the new wave of notoriety, Campbell set to work on a new album—
“this one dirtier than the last”—and quickly secured a multimillion-dollar deal with a major label. In July 1990, Atlantic Records “proudly” released the follow-up album, pointedly named Banned in the U.S.A., with an initial run of a million copies. On the inner sleeve of the album, Campbell offered a sarcastic “extra special thanks” to Bob Martinez, Tipper Gore, and “all the right-wing people” who had helped make him a celebrity. Even though a number of major record chains refused to carry the album, it quickly sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was certified as a gold record within weeks.59
Meanwhile, the effort to prosecute the group for performing its songs went nowhere. Typically, obscenity charges had only been leveled against individuals engaged in indecent exposure—for acts rather than words. Believing the case represented a significant escalation in a growing climate of censorship, large numbers of academics, journalists, and civil libertarians rushed to defend 2 Live Crew. Though many made their personal distaste for the group clear, they argued that the effort to crack down on sales of the album represented a slippery slope toward greater constriction of artistic expression. “It is unfortunate that, as one astute civil libertarian once said, First Amendment cases often put you on the same side with people you would never invite to your home for dinner,” noted Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. “But those who want to curb the Bill of Rights are clever enough to single out the most objectionable and artless material they can find, hoping to pave the way to later assaults on the more commonplace and meritorious.” At the trial, the defense relied on expert testimony from figures such as Newsday’s music critic John Leland and Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor of literature at Duke University. The jury, swayed by their arguments, quickly returned a not-guilty verdict. “There was very little argument,” the foreman told reporters. “As the cross-section of the community that we are, it was just not obscene. People in everyday society use those words.” 60
Conservatives learned that American culture was rapidly becoming more liberal and more difficult to control as technology balkanized the public square. Even as the changes stimulated a backlash within both parties, the fragmentation of technology made it hard for anyone to control anything. The cultural marketplace seemed to be demanding more sex and more drugs, as well as more politics, and there was little room to push back. The fragmentation created a world with fewer points of commonality in terms of what people heard or saw, even as computing and cable technology emerged as the medium through which most people consumed their cultural goods. The fault lines that emerged in the decade would prove impossible to reverse and would soon have a transformative effect on the foundations of American society.
CHAPTER 8
Dividing America
THE FAULT LINES OF AMERICAN POLITICS HARDENED IN the late 1980s, as conservatives and liberals alike adjusted to new issues that were taking hold. Across three seemingly disparate fronts—the Cold War, which overwhelmed foreign affairs; the Supreme Court, which determined the boundaries of life at home; and the AIDS crisis, which ravaged and destroyed individual lives—the late 1980s witnessed sharp new lines of division.
First, in the realm of foreign policy, the final years of the Cold War embodied a range of tensions, at home and abroad. The Iran-Contra scandal intensified the role partisan politics played in the prosecution of American foreign policy, raising it to levels that hadn’t been seen since the earliest days of the Cold War. But as those divisions worsened at home, other dividing lines abroad suddenly came down—literally so, with the toppling of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. Rather than moving beyond the internal political division that had shaped partisan politics over fighting Communism, tensions in many ways worsened as Americans no longer shared a common fear of the Soviet Union.
As the fault lines over international relations were remade, new ones were exposed at home. Long-simmering domestic disagreements over politics, race, and sexuality now came to a head at the Supreme Court. Key vacancies on the court shifted its balance of power considerably in the mid-1980s, sparking some of the ugliest confirmation hearings in the history of the institution, especially the one for Robert Bork. In the end, an uneasy truce was drawn, but conservatives and liberals alike left the episode ready to do battle again.
Third came the AIDS epidemic, America’s most serious public health crisis in more than a half-century’s time. The rapid spread of the deadly disease fostered new fault lines in both senses of the term—intensifying gay rights direct action and homophobic reaction, but also sparking a debate about the victims’ own culpability for the crisis.
Unfolding at the same time, these revolutionary developments effectively changed the relationships that Americans had with the world at large, with the politics and laws of their nation, and with their own bodies and the bodies of others.
The Crack-Up of the Cold War
Shortly before the 1986 midterm elections, the media uncovered a shocking story: the Reagan administration had been trading arms to Iran in exchange for its assistance in securing the release of American hostages still held in Beirut. In 1984, Reagan had withdrawn US forces from the civil war in Lebanon following the devastating bombing of the barracks of US and French forces that left 200 Marines and 21 additional service members dead. But hostages still remained, under the control of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization with ties to the Iranian government.
Rumors of secret arms deals to the Iranian regime had been bubbling up for the better part of a year, but a day before the November 1986 midterms, a Lebanese magazine put the pieces together, noting America’s role in the illegal scheme. The news wasn’t immediately picked up by American media outlets, but Democrats nevertheless did well in the elections, picking up more seats in the House and taking back the Senate for the first time in Reagan’s presidency. Then within days, news of American involvement in arming the Iranian regime came to dominate domestic headlines. “U.S. Sent Iran Arms for Hostage Releases,” read a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times, over a story that detailed how “the Tehran government received planeloads of military equipment” in a deal made “with the personal approval of President Reagan.” 1 The president’s involvement was especially shocking because Reagan had repeatedly singled out Iran as a “terrorist state” that represented a dangerous part of “a new international version of Murder Incorporated.” His promise to be tougher than Carter in resolving the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980 had been one of his principal campaign pledges. Insisting he would never negotiate with its leaders under any circumstances, Reagan directly asserted that “America will never make concessions to terrorists.” Despite such strong words, it soon became clear that Reagan had given his full support to the secret negotiations with Iran.2
As the press dug into the details, the scandal only widened. Despite an explicit congressional ban against funding the anti-Communist Nicaraguan rebels known as “Contras,” it was soon revealed that the administration had found a way to do precisely that. Marking up the price of arms sold to Iran, the CIA then diverted the excess profits to the Contras. As the public learned the details of the twin scandals now linked together as “Iran-Contra,” the administration found itself under fire. When the arms-for-hostages connection came to light in November 1986, Reagan categorically denied the charges in an Oval Office address. “The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists,” Reagan said sternly. “Those charges are utterly false.” The public, however, did not believe the president. Polls showed that only 14 percent of Americans accepted Reagan’s claims of innocence. The president tried to cut off the scandal, insisting that his National Security Advisor John Poindexter and White House staffer Lt. Col. Oliver North had undertaken the operation without his knowledge and accepting their resignations at the end of November. This was, he argued, a case of reckless advisors making mistakes, no
t impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. But few Americans believed him. According to Gallup, the president’s approval rating plummeted from 63 percent to 47 percent that month, the single largest drop in their history of presidential polling.3
With his back to the wall, the president authorized an investigation led by Texas Republican senator John Tower, the staunch conservative who had long stood as an administration ally. In early 1987, the Tower Commission issued a report that focused on the administrative mismanagement that allowed the operation to take place. The commission did not say that Reagan had done anything illegal or unethical, emphasizing instead how poorly the president had led his own White House. It was, in essence, a slap on the wrist: chiding the president without implicating him in any kind of crime. Congress, skeptical of the Republican Tower’s impartiality, pursued its own investigation through joint congressional hearings, while Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh conducted a multimillion-dollar investigation of his own. Notably, Walsh was appointed under the independent counsel law that Congress passed in 1978 to check executive branch corruption in the wake of Watergate. Contradicting the Tower Commission, Walsh concluded that the illegal acts had been directed from the top levels of the White House and that North and others had only stepped forward as “scapegoats whose sacrifice would protect the Reagan Administration in its final two years.” Despite the endless comparisons between “Contragate” and Watergate, Congress was unable at the time to find any “smoking gun” evidence that the president had known about the Nicaraguan portion of the operation or directly authorized it. (Iran-Contra documents were famously destroyed in the so-called “shredding party” conducted by Oliver North with the help of his then-secretary Fawn Hall.) 4
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