While U. Subsequent stories and images eroded public trust even further. In , investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that U. More and more American voices came out against the war. For many Americans, the violent clashes outside the convention hall reinforced their belief that civil society was unraveling. Well aware of domestic pressure to wind down the war, Nixon sought, on the one hand, to appease antiwar sentiment by promising to phase out the draft, train South Vietnamese forces to assume more responsibility for the war effort, and gradually withdraw American troops.
Public assurances of American withdrawal, however, masked a dramatic escalation of conflict. News of the attacks renewed antiwar demonstrations. Another three years passed—and another twenty thousand American troops died—before an agreement was reached. Peace was tenuous, and when war resumed North Vietnamese troops quickly overwhelmed southern forces. By , despite nearly a decade of direct American military engagement, Vietnam was united under a communist government.
The Vietnam War profoundly influenced domestic politics. And yet, while the antiwar demonstrations attracted considerable media attention and stand today as a hallmark of the sixties counterculture, many Americans nevertheless continued to regard the war as just.
Wary of the rapid social changes that reshaped American society in the s and worried that antiwar protests threatened an already tenuous civil order, a growing number of Americans turned to conservatism. Los Angeles police violently arrest a man during the Watts riot on August 12, The civil rights movement looked dramatically different at the end of the s than it had at the beginning. The movement had never been monolithic, but prominent, competing ideologies had fractured the movement in the s.
The rise of the Black Power movement challenged the integrationist dreams of many older activists as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. The political evolution of the civil rights movement was reflected in American culture. The monolith of popular American culture, pilloried in the fifties and sixties as exclusively white, male-dominated, conservative, and stifling, finally shattered and Americans retreated into ever smaller, segmented subcultures.
Marketers now targeted particular products to ever smaller pieces of the population, including previously neglected groups such as African Americans. Styles of dress and physical appearance likewise aligned with cultures of choice.
If the popular rock acts of the sixties appealed to a new counterculture, the seventies witnessed the resurgence of cultural forms that appealed to a white working class confronting the social and political upheavals of the s. The coons are coming! As Bunker knew, African Americans were becoming much more visible in American culture. While Black cultural forms had been prominent throughout American history, they assumed new popular forms in the s.
Disco offered a new, optimistic, racially integrated pop music. A lengthy paean to Black machismo, it became the first rap single to reach the Top Just as rap represented a hypermasculine Black cultural form, Hollywood popularized its white equivalent.
No longer confined to the antiblack terrorism that struck the southern civil rights movement in the s and s, publicly visible violence now broke out among Black Americans in urban riots and among whites protesting new civil rights programs.
In the mids, for instance, protests over the use of busing to overcome residential segregation and truly integrate public schools in Boston washed the city in racial violence. In each, a physical altercation between white police officers and African Americans spiraled into days of chaos and destruction. Tens of thousands participated in urban riots. Many looted and destroyed white-owned business.
There were dozens of deaths, tens of millions of dollars in property damage, and an exodus of white capital that only further isolated urban poverty. Their report became an unexpected best seller. Many white moderates and liberals, meanwhile, saw the explosive violence as a sign that African Americans had rejected the nonviolence of the earlier civil rights movement.
The unrest of the late sixties did, in fact, reflect a real and growing disillusionment among African Americans with the fate of the civil rights crusade. In the still-moldering ashes of Jim Crow, African Americans in Watts and other communities across the country bore the burdens of lifetimes of legally sanctioned discrimination in housing, employment, and credit.
Segregation survived the legal dismantling of Jim Crow. The perseverance into the present day of stark racial and economic segregation in nearly all American cities destroyed any simple distinction between southern de jure segregation and nonsouthern de facto segregation. Black neighborhoods became traps that too few could escape.
To Americans in , the country seemed to be unraveling. Martin Luther King Jr. He had been in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. Prophetically, he had reflected on his own mortality in a rally the night before. Confident that the civil rights movement would succeed without him, he brushed away fears of death.
The greatest leader in the American civil rights movement was lost. Riots broke out in over a hundred American cities. Two months later, on June 6, Robert F. Kennedy was killed campaigning in California. He had represented the last hope of liberal idealists. Anger and disillusionment washed over the country. As the Vietnam War descended ever deeper into a brutal stalemate and the Tet Offensive exposed the lies of the Johnson administration, students shut down college campuses and government facilities.
Protests enveloped the nation. Protesters converged on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August , when a bitterly fractured Democratic Party gathered to assemble a passable platform and nominate a broadly acceptable presidential candidate.
Initial protests were peaceful, but the situation quickly soured as police issued stern threats and young people began to taunt and goad officials.
Attendees recounted vicious beatings at the hands of police and Guardsmen, but many young people—convinced that much public sympathy could be won via images of brutality against unarmed protesters—continued stoking the violence. Clashes spilled from the parks into city streets, and eventually the smell of tear gas penetrated the upper floors of the opulent hotels hosting Democratic delegates.
The Chicago riots encapsulated the growing sense that chaos now governed American life. For many sixties idealists, the violence of represented the death of a dream. Disorder and chaos overshadowed hope and progress. And for conservatives, it was confirmation of all of their fears and hesitations.
Americans of turned their back on hope. They wanted peace. They wanted stability. Richard Nixon campaigns in Philadelphia during the presidential election. National Archives. Beleaguered by an unpopular war, inflation, and domestic unrest, President Johnson opted against reelection in March —an unprecedented move in modern American politics.
The forthcoming presidential election was shaped by Vietnam and the aforementioned unrest as much as by the campaigns of Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and third-party challenger George Wallace, the infamous segregationist governor of Alabama. The final tally was close: Nixon won Wallace, meanwhile, carried five states in the Deep South, and his The Electoral College vote was more decisive for Nixon; he earned electoral votes, while Humphrey and Wallace received only and 45 votes, respectively.
Although Republicans won a few seats, Democrats retained control of both the House and Senate and made Nixon the first president in years to enter office with the opposition party controlling both houses.
Once installed in the White House, Richard Nixon focused his energies on American foreign policy, publicly announcing the Nixon Doctrine in On the one hand, Nixon asserted the supremacy of American democratic capitalism and conceded that the United States would continue supporting its allies financially.
The strategy seemed to work. In , Nixon became the first American president to visit communist China and the first since Franklin Roosevelt to visit the Soviet Union. Direct diplomacy and cultural exchange programs with both countries grew and culminated with the formal normalization of U. By , after almost thirty years of Cold War tension, peaceful coexistence suddenly seemed possible.
Soon, though, a fragile calm gave way again to Cold War instability. The embargo launched the first U. By the end of , the global price of oil had quadrupled. Individual gas stations ran out of gas. American motorists worried that oil could run out at any moment.
A Pennsylvania man died when his emergency stash of gasoline ignited in his trunk and backseat. The crisis extended into the late s. Like the Vietnam War, the oil crisis showed that small countries could still hurt the United States. In , the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to sue the New York Times and the Washington Post to prevent the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a confidential and damning history of U.
However, no scandal did more to unravel public trust than Watergate. After being tipped off by a security guard, police found the men attempting to install sophisticated bugging equipment. The names could then be given to the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service IRS to conduct spurious investigations into their personal affairs.
Blow the safe and get it. Whether or not the president ordered the Watergate break-in, the White House launched a massive cover-up. Nixon distanced himself from the incident publicly and went on to win a landslide election victory in November The Senate held televised hearings. In July , the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill to impeach the president. Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on impeachment.
He became the first and only American president to resign from office. Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as his successor and a month later granted Nixon a full presidential pardon. Nixon disappeared from public life without ever publicly apologizing, accepting responsibility, or facing charges. Abandoned Youngstown factory. Stuart Spivack, via Flickr.
American workers had made substantial material gains throughout the s and s. During the so-called Great Compression, Americans of all classes benefited from postwar prosperity. Segregation and discrimination perpetuated racial and gender inequalities, but unemployment continually fell and a highly progressive tax system and powerful unions lowered general income inequality as working-class standards of living nearly doubled between and But general prosperity masked deeper vulnerabilities.
Perhaps no case better illustrates the decline of American industry and the creation of an intractable urban crisis than Detroit. Detroit boomed during World War II. After the war, however, automobile firms began closing urban factories and moving to outlying suburbs.
Several factors fueled the process. Some cities partly deindustrialized themselves. Municipal governments in San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia banished light industry to make room for high-rise apartments and office buildings. Mechanization also contributed to the decline of American labor. Detroit began to bleed industrial jobs. Between and , Chrysler, which actually kept more jobs in Detroit than either Ford or General Motors, cut its Detroit production workforce in half.
In the years between and , East Detroit lost ten plants and over seventy-one thousand jobs. When auto companies mechanized or moved their operations, ancillary suppliers like machine tool companies were cut out of the supply chain and likewise forced to cut their own workforce. Between and , the number of manufacturing firms in the city dropped from over three thousand to fewer than two thousand.
The labor force was gutted. Manufacturing jobs fell from , to , over the same three decades. Subject to residential intimidation and cut off from traditional sources of credit, few could afford to follow industry as it left the city for the suburbs and other parts of the country, especially the South.
Segregation and discrimination kept them stuck where there were fewer and fewer jobs. Over time, Detroit devolved into a mass of unemployment, crime, and crippled municipal resources. When riots rocked Detroit in , 25 to 30 percent of Black residents between ages eighteen and twenty-four were unemployed. Deindustrialization in Detroit and elsewhere also went hand in hand with the long assault on unionization that began in the aftermath of World War II.
Lacking the political support they had enjoyed during the New Deal years, labor organizations such as the CIO and the UAW shifted tactics and accepted labor-management accords in which cooperation, not agitation, was the strategic objective.
This accord held mixed results for workers. On the one hand, management encouraged employee loyalty through privatized welfare systems that offered workers health benefits and pensions. Grievance arbitration and collective bargaining also provided workers official channels through which to criticize policies and push for better conditions.
At the same time, bureaucracy and corruption increasingly weighed down unions and alienated them from workers and the general public.
Workers—though still willing to protest—by necessity pursued a more moderate agenda compared to the union workers of the s and s. More and more saw poverty as stemming not from structural flaws in the national economy, but from the failure of individuals to take full advantage of the American system.
Union leaders in the s and s typically supported such programs and philosophies. Internal racism also weakened the labor movement. While national CIO leaders encouraged Black unionization in the s, white workers on the ground often opposed the integrated shop.
White workers similarly opposed residential integration, fearing, among other things, that Black newcomers would lower property values. By the mids, widely shared postwar prosperity leveled off and began to retreat. Growing international competition, technological inefficiency, and declining productivity gains stunted working- and middle-class wages. As the country entered recession, wages decreased and the pay gap between workers and management expanded, reversing three decades of postwar contraction.
At the same time, dramatic increases in mass incarceration coincided with the deregulation of prison labor to allow more private companies access to cheaper inmate labor, a process that, whatever its aggregate impact, impacted local communities where free jobs were moved into prisons.
The tax code became less progressive and labor lost its foothold in the marketplace. Unions represented a third of the workforce in the s, but only one in ten workers belonged to one as of Some went overseas in the wake of new trade treaties to exploit low-wage foreign workers, but others turned to anti-union states in the South and West stretching from Virginia to Texas to Southern California. With this, they contrasted the prosperous and dynamic Sun Belt.
Urban decay confronted Americans of the s and s. As the economy sagged and deindustrialization hit much of the country, Americans increasingly associated major cities with poverty and crime. In this photo, two subway riders sit amid a graffitied subway car in New York City. National Archives Coined by journalist Kevin Phillips in , the term Sun Belt refers to the swath of southern and western states that saw unprecedented economic, industrial, and demographic growth after World War II.
During the Cold War, Sun Belt politicians lobbied hard for military installations and government contracts for their states. Thereafter, cheap, nonunionized labor, low wages, and lax regulations pulled northern industries away from the Rust Belt. Skilled northern workers followed the new jobs southward and westward, lured by cheap housing and a warm climate slowly made more tolerable by modern air conditioning.
The South attracted business but struggled to share their profits. Middle-class whites grew prosperous, but often these were recent transplants, not native southerners. As the cotton economy shed farmers and laborers, poor white and Black southerners found themselves mostly excluded from the fruits of the Sun Belt. Sexual politics. While the general permissiveness of the counterculture encouraged sexual freedom, other factors also contributed to the change in attitudes toward sexuality.
Many states had already legalized abortion, and the new women's movement was committed to making the procedure even more widely available. The starting point for contemporary feminism was the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which argued that women should be allowed to find their own identity, an identity not necessarily limited to the traditional roles of wife and mother. The number of women attending college skyrocketed during the s, and many became involved with both the New Left and the civil rights movement.
Even these organizations remained dominated by men, however. During the takeover at Columbia University, for instance, women were assigned duties such as making coffee and typing. Consequently, although the political activism of the s was a catalyst for women's liberation, feminism became most effective when it created its own groups.
Women, however, were not the only group that began to demand equality in the s. Laws against homosexuals were common, and groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis had campaigned for years with little effect against gay discrimination. The treatment of homosexuals and lesbians gradually became a national civil rights issue. Previous Johnson and the Great Society. Next The Kennedy Years. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.
Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks? My Preferences My Reading List.
US History II. Home Study Guides U. History II The Counterculture of the s.
0コメント