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President Barack Obama, speaking to the prime minister of Iraq in February 2009, was determined to repair the damage that he believed President Bush had caused overseas with the war in Iraq. (Photo: President Obama Presidential Library)
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Tea Party protest in St. Paul, Minnesota, on April 15, 2010. After pushing through Congress an economic stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, President Obama stimulated a fierce right wing backlash. Tea Party activists helped elect a Republican House in 2010. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue/Flickr)
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A mural in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, in 2011. Chicago, like many American cities, was transformed by new waves of immigration in the late twentieth century. By the year 2000, over a quarter of Chicago’s population was Hispanic. (Photo: Adam Jones, PhD/Wikimedia Commons)
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Black Lives Matter became a national movement in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Here, Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrate at Hofstra University before the first 2016 presidential debate. (Photo: Brian Allen/Voice of America)
* * *
President Obama and President-elect Trump, who represented two very different directions for the country, meet following the historic and shocking 2016 election. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
* * *
One of the major themes of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was the untrustworthiness of the mainstream media. He used social media to convey this theme. President Trump continued to attack the media as president; in this tweet from February 2017, Trump calls the media the “enemy of the American People.” (Photo: Twitter)
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO have provided invaluable support to this project.
The book began in 2012, when the two of us launched a course at Princeton University focusing on American history since 1974. Over the years, we kept refining the lectures until we realized that we had a book on our hands. Several graduate students who served as teaching assistants in the course, and the undergraduates who took the class, helped us to sharpen our understanding of the period and to refine our arguments considerably.
The process of turning those lectures into book chapters was much more challenging than we expected, especially as the period “since 1974” kept becoming more and more complicated, but this has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Our editor at Norton, Jon Durbin, has been a source of enthusiasm and support from the very beginning, urging us to produce a book that would excite general readers and educate university students. We hope that we have lived up to his hopes.
Along the way, we have benefited considerably from the insight and expertise of our colleagues, both at Princeton and throughout the historical profession. In particular, we owe a tremendous debt to James Anderson, Kathryn Brownell, Nathan Connolly, Joe Crespino, Linda Gordon, Norman Markowitz, Margaret O’Mara, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Eric Rauchway for providing thorough readings of the manuscript at various stages of the process and giving us incredibly constructive criticism.
David Walsh, a doctoral student at Princeton, provided us invaluable service helping us to fact-check the manuscript and to obtain permission for the images and photographs. Although it was an arduous process, he was persistent and made sure that we obtained everything that we needed. Lily Gellman at Norton offered us insightful feedback while prepping the manuscript. Gary Von Euer, our copy editor, polished the final draft into something more presentable, and then Jake Blumgart provided one final round of fact checking before the book went into production.
While we are extremely grateful to all of these individuals, we dedicate the book to our families. In particular, Kevin thanks his wife, Lindsay, and their kids, Maggie and Sam. Julian thanks his wife, Meg, and their kids, Abigail, Sophia, Nathan, and Claire. As we devoted our energies to bringing alive the recent past, they kept us grounded in the present and hopeful about the future.
NOTES
Introduction
1.Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 12.
2.Carla Herreria, “President Barack Obama Bids America a Heartfelt Farewell,” Huffington Post, 11 January 2017; Marina Fang, “Obama’s Farewell Address to Lay a Path Forward Under Trump,” Huffington Post, 2 January 2017; “Obama’s Farewell Address Tonight: A Look Back on His Impact,” MSNBC.com, 10 January 2017; Paige Lavender, “The Obamas Got Emotional During the President’s Farewell Address,” Huffington Post, 10 January 2017; Alana Horowitz Satlin, “No One Is Sadder About Barack Obama Leaving Office Than These Pets,” Huffington Post, 11 January 2017.
3.Sean Hannity, “Obama Farewell Can’t Hide a Disastrous Legacy,” FoxNews.com, 11 January 2017; “Hannity” Transcript, “Laura Ingraham Rips Obama’s Farewell Address; Austan Goolsbee Defends President’s Accomplishments,” FoxNews.com, 10 January 2017; Charlie Spiering, “Obama’s Farewell Campaign Speech: ‘Post Racial’ America Was Never ‘Realistic,’ ” Breitbart.com, 10 January 2017.
4.Historian Dan Rodgers called this era the “Age of Fracture.” His book, which has been extraordinarily valuable to our understanding of the intellectual currents in this era, stresses fragmentation and fracture while we trace more coherent lines of division. See Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).
Chapter 1: A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
1.“Most Think Nixon Did Right Thing,” Chicago Tribune, 11 August 1974; “Ford Calls Resignation ‘Courageous,’ ” Los Angeles Times, 11 August 1974; Anthony Lewis, “The Resignation Proves Impeachment Works,” New York Times, 11 August 1974; “Tragedy and Triumph,” New York Times, 11 August 1974; Joseph Kraft, “The Larger Meaning of Mr. Nixon’s Presidency,” Washington Post, 11 August 1974.
2.“Text of Ford’s Pardon Statement,” Atlanta Constitution, 9 September 1974.
3.Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: Norton, 2010), 14; David Gergen, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership: Nixon to Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000): 118.
4.Douglas Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford (New York: Times Books, 2007), 69.
5.“Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, 23 September 1974, 27.
6.Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Anchor, 2011), 21.
7.Craig Unger, American Armageddon: How the Delusions of the Neoconservatives and the Christian Right Triggered the Descent of America—And Still Imperil Our Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 100.
8.Gerald Ford, “Statement on the Federal Campaign Act Amendments of 1974,” 15 October 1974, The American Presidency Project.
9.Julian E. Zelizer, On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1945–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 163; John A. Lawrence, The Class of ’74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
10.Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
11.John Darnton, “Reporter’s Notebook on City Fiscal Crisis,” New York Times, 10 November 1975.
12.Cited in Jeff Nussbaum, “The Night New York Saved Itself From Bankruptcy,” The New Yorker, 16 October 2015.
13.“Ford to City: Drop Dead,” New York Daily News, 30 October 1975; Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 177–89.
14.Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 228.
15.http://pix11.com/2013/07/12/remembering-the-1977-new-york-blackout-on-anniversary/.
16.Cited in Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The G
reat Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 107.
17.Joseph S. Nye Jr., Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King, Why People Don’t Trust Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 81.
18.Adam Cohen, “After 30 Years, the Mood of ‘Nashville’ Feels Right Again,” New York Times, 6 June 2005.
19.“The Half-Dead Monster,” Wall Street Journal, 2 February 1976.
20.Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 58; William C. Berman, America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 70; Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
21.Mark Green, “Financing Campaigns,” New York Times, 14 December 1980.
22.Bruce McCabe, “The World of R. C. Woodstein,” Boston Globe, 4 October 1974.
23.Diane White, “The Hard Line in Soft News,” Boston Globe, 14 November 1974; “Covering Watergate: Success and Backlash,” Time, 8 July 1974; Wayne Warga, “Answering a Call to the Post,” Los Angeles Times, 15 August 1975.
24.William Safire, “The Vietgate Solution,” New York Times, 12 September 1974; Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, “ ‘Winegate’ Trial Ends With Jail, $4 Million in Fines,” Baltimore Sun, 19 December 1974; Jonathan Steele, “Korean Gifts Scandal Hits US Congress,” Guardian, 30 November 1976; Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
25.Charles B. Seib, “Pack Reporting Unhealthy,” Austin American Statesman, 19 February 1977; Timothy Leland, “Controversy in Investigative Journalism,” Boston Globe, 27 June 1977.
26.Tom Wolfe, “Birth of the ‘New Journalism’: An Eyewitness Report,” New York, 14 February 1972; Colman McCarthy, “Did Bad News Kill the Messenger?” Newsday, 29 December 1978.
27.Jann S. Wenner, “Worry About the Quality of News Reporting,” New York Times, 19 December 1976.
28.Jill Lepore, “Bad News,” The New Yorker, 20 June 2014.
29.Lee Marguiles, “Networks: And Then There Were Four?” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1977; Les Brown, “Is a Fourth Network About to Hatch?” New York Times, 8 May 1977.
30.Jerry Parker, “Medium’s Message of ‘Network,’ ” Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1976; Network (1976).
31.Tom Shales, “ ‘Network’: Hating TV Can Be Fun,” Washington Post, 24 October 1976.
32.Parker, “Medium’s Message of ‘Network’ ”; Joan Barthel, “Paddy Chayefsky: ‘TV Will Do Anything for a Rating. Anything!’ ” New York Times, 14 November 1976.
Chapter 2: A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE
1.James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 451.
2.Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016).
3.David A. Andelman, “Gasoline Supply Drops Across U.S.,” New York Times, 9 December 1973.
4.Robert Buckhorn, “Gasoline Lifeblood for Car-Happy Americans,” The Middlesboro Daily News, 11 March 1974.
5.Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Mariner, 2002), 5.
6.Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
7.“Spreading Oil Fouls Beach, Harbor at Santa Barbara,” Baltimore Sun, 6 February 1969; Jennifer Latson, “The Burning River That Sparked a Revolution,” Time, 1 August 1969; Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003 (New York: Vintage, 2004); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 30.
8.Dwight Tewes, “Against the 55 Limit,” Chicago Tribune, 13 October 1975; Al Martinez, “ 55 M.P.H. Limit Drivers Race to Obey Law,” Los Angeles Times, 2 January 1974.
9.Schulman, The Seventies, 126.
10.James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.
11.Tony A. Freyer, “Managerial Capitalism Contested,” in The Columbia Reader of Post–World War II History, ed. Marc Carnes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 441.
12.Yanek Mieczkowksi, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 212.
13.Torry D. Dickinson and Robert K. Schaffer, Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World (Oxford, UK: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), 56.
14.Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: Norton, 2010), 57.
15.William B. Hamilton, “Hard Times Not New to New Bedford,” Boston Globe, 2 March 1975.
16.Lee Smith, “Hard Times Come to Steeltown,” Fortune, December 1977, 86–93.
17.Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-Rock N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 251.
18.Freyer, “Managerial Capitalism Contested,” 441.
19.“U.S. Economic Gloom Is Mirrored Abroad,” Baltimore Sun, 5 January 1975.
20.Bethany Moreton, “Make Payroll, Not War: Business Culture and Youth Culture,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 62.
21.William Lazonick, “Creating and Extracting Value: Corporate Investment Behavior and American Economic Performance,” in Understanding American Economic Decline, ed. Michael A. Bernstein and David E. Adler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102.
22.Mieczkowski, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s, 138.
23.Richard Reeves, “Ladies and Gentleman, The President of the United States,” New York Magazine, 25 November 1974.
24.Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 47.
25.Derek Thompson, “ 80 Percent of Americans Don’t Trust Government, Here’s Why,” The Atlantic, 19 April 2010; Gary Orren, “Fall From Grace: The Public’s Loss of Faith in Government,” in Why People Don’t Trust Government, ed. Nye, Zelikow, and King, 80.
26.Sophie Gilbert, “The Year Political Advertising Turned Positive,” The Atlantic, 9 June 2015.
27.Douglas Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 136.
28.Kalman, Right Star Rising, 57.
29.Christopher Lydon, “Carter Issues Apology on ‘Ethnic Purity’ Phrase,” New York Times, 9 April 1976.
30.Thomas Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Knopf, 1993).
31.Julian E. Zelizer, Jimmy Carter (New York: Times Books, 2010), 1.
32.Bernstein, “Understanding American Economic Decline,” in Understanding American Economic Decline, 21.
33.Greg Adamson, We All Live on Three Mile Island: The Case Against Nuclear Power (Sydney, Australia: Pathfinder, 1981), 49.
34.“Memorial Day Gas Shortage,” 28 May 1979, WTVK; “Gas Prices in 1979,” March 1979 (n.d), WEWS News; Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, 196–232.
35.MacNeil-Lehrer Report, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7SnaMphvug).
36.Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2008), 672.
37.“N.Y. Man Charged in Gas Line Slaying,” Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1979.
38.Kevin Mattson, What the Heck Are You Up To Mr. President? Jimmy Carter, ‘America’s Malaise,’ and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 112–13.
39.Yergin, The Prize, 674.
40.Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, 239.
41.Editorial, “The Hustle Expands,” Wall Street Journal, 6 August 1979.
42.William J. Eaton, “Analysts Said 20 Years of Mista
kes Led to Plight,” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1979.
43.Warren Brown, “A Plant and Its City Fall Victim to Chrysler’s Decline,” Washington Post, 14 November 1979.
44.Charles B. Camp, “No. 3 Auto Firm’s Plea for Federal Aid Shakes Industry, Washington,” Wall Street Journal, 3 August 1979.
45.Steven Rattner, “Debate On in Capital,” New York Times, 2 August 1979.
46.“Many Top Executives Oppose Chrysler’s Plea for Federal Assistance,’ Wall Street Journal, 17 September 1979.
47.“GM Chairman Spurs Debate as He Faults Chrysler Bailout Bid,” Wall Street Journal, 6 August 1979.
48.William H. Jones, “Chrysler Aid Plan Is Not Unique,” Washington Post, 2 August 1979.
49.U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Hearings on the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, 96th Congress, 1st session, 1979.
50.“Chrysler’s Crisis Bailout,” Time, 20 August 1979.
51.“Chrysler Quits Roundtable Over Bailout Position,” Washington Post, 27 November 1979.
52.Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 18.
Chapter 3: A CRISIS OF IDENTITY
1.President Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, 3 October 1965.
2.William F. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 109–20; Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 1–7; David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 78.
3.David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 85; Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin, 2015).
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