Unit 26: The Triumph of Conservatism, 1969–1988
Lecture
The 1960s saw contesting ideals of freedom, most notably between civil rights and
the burgeoning conservative movement. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s
1964 campaign for the presidency helped spread ideas that later defined
conservatism, such as opposition to the welfare state and a reduction in taxes and
government regulations. Goldwater showed that whenever liberals controlled
Washington, conservatives could portray themselves as anti-government populists,
broadening their base and ending their image as upper-class elitists.
The late 1960s and the 1970s saw developments that transformed American
politics—the disintegration of the New Deal coalition forged by Franklin D.
Roosevelt (FDR); an economic crisis that liberal policies could not end; a shift of
population and economic resources to conservative bastions in the South and West;
the growth of an activist, conservative Christianity more and more aligned with the
Republican Party; and a series of US defeats overseas. Together, these events
expanded the influence of conservatives’ ideas, including their definition of freedom.
In the post–World War II era, conservatism seemed marginal in a very liberal
environment. Conservatism was seen as outdated and associated with conspiracy
theories, anti-Semitism, and preferences for social hierarchy over equality. Liberals
believed conservatives were simply alienated or psychologically disturbed. In the
1950s and 1960s, conservatism was reborn. In 1968, a backlash of formerly
Democratic voters against black protest and the anti-war movement helped Richard
Nixon win the White House. But conservatives were dissatisfied with Nixon. Nixon
adopted conservative language but actually expanded the welfare state and
improved relations with the Soviets and China.
Nixon, who won by a thin margin, moved to the center, trying to solidify Republican
support and win disaffected Democrats. Nixon, mostly interested in foreign policy
and wanting to avoid fights with the Democratic Congress over domestic policy,
actually accepted and expanded much of the Great Society and welfare state. Nixon
established new federal regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National
Transportation Safety Board, all of which limited entrepreneurial freedoms. Nixon
spent liberally on social services and environmental initiatives. He abolished the
Office of Economic Opportunity, which had coordinated the War on Poverty, but he
also expanded food stamps and tied Social Security benefits to inflation. The
Endangered Species and Clean Air acts regulated businesses in order to limit
pollution and protect animals threatened with extinction.
Nixon’s great surprise was his proposal for a Family Assistance Plan to replace Aid
to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Under his plan, the federal
1
government would guarantee a minimum income for all Americans. AFDC, known as
“welfare,” gave aid, usually quite limited, to poor families who met local eligibility
requirements. Originally a New Deal program that helped mostly the white poor,
welfare came to be associated with blacks, who by 1970 were half of all welfare
recipients. AFDC rolls expanded in the 1960s, partly because of relaxed federal
eligibility standards. Conservative politicians now attacked welfare recipients as
people who wanted to live off honest taxpayers rather than work. But Nixon’s plan
for a guaranteed annual income, too radical for conservatives and not enough for
liberals, did not pass Congress.
Nixon’s racial policy was ambiguous. He nominated conservative southern jurists
who favored segregation to the Supreme Court to win over the white South, but the
Senate rejected them. The courts lost patience with southern delays in enforcing
civil rights laws and finally forced southern schools to desegregate. Briefly, Nixon
also embraced “affirmative action” programs to raise minority employment. Nixon
expanded Johnson’s efforts to require federal contractors to hire minorities. But
Nixon wanted the affirmative action program as a way to fight inflation by
weakening the power of building trades unions (he believed their control over the
labor market hiked wages to unreasonable levels and increased construction costs).
He hoped the plan would cause tensions between blacks and labor unions and that
Republicans would benefit. Indeed, this is what happened. Trade unions of skilled
construction workers, with few black members, strongly opposed Nixon’s plan.
Nixon hoped to win blue-collar workers over for the 1972 elections, and he quickly
replaced his affirmative action plan with a program that did not require federal
contractors to hire minorities.
When Earl Warren retired as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1969, Nixon
replaced him with Warren Burger, an opponent of the Warren Court’s “judicial
activism.” Burger was expected to lead the court in a conservative direction. But he
surprised Nixon and others by initially expanding much of the Warren Court’s
jurisprudence. In 1971, the Court approved plans to integrate southern schools
through busing, in which students were transported to other schools to make an
integrated student body. Judges everywhere began to order busing, angering many
white parents who wanted to keep their children in majority-white neighborhood
schools. Particularly bitter and violent protests broke out in Boston. In only a few
years, the Court reversed itself, and abandoned efforts to wrest control of local
schools or bus students at great distances to achieve integration. Rulings absolved
suburban districts of the responsibility of enrolling non-white, and often poor,
students from non-suburban neighborhoods. By the 1990s, northern public schools
were more segregated than southern schools.
Efforts to gain more job opportunities for minorities also sparked bitter legal battles
and white resentments. Many whites came to see affirmative action programs as
“reverse discrimination” that violated the Fourteenth Amendment by giving nonwhites special advantages over whites. As affirmative action spread from blacks to
include women, Latinos, Asian- and Native Americans, conservatives demanded that
the Supreme Court ban such programs. The Supreme Court refused but offered no
2
consistent position. But the Court proved more and more hostile to government
affirmative action programs. In 1978, the Court shot down a University of California
admissions program that set aside a quota of places for non-white medical students.
The majority rejected the ideas of quotas while ruling that race could be one factor
among many in college admissions. In the 1990s, affirmative action was
ambiguously employed in higher education, although in 2003 the court reaffirmed
that race could be a factor in college admissions.
Alarming conservatives, the sexual revolution became mainstream in the 1970s.
Premarital sex was more widely accepted, the number of divorces and age of
marriage rose, and by 1975, more divorces occurred than first-time marriages.
American birthrates dropped dramatically, the result of women’s changing lives and
the availability of birth control and legal abortion.
In the Nixon years, sexual equality advanced in law and policy. In 1972, Congress
approved Title IX, banning gender discrimination in higher education, and the Equal
Credit Opportunity Act, requiring that married women have access to their own
credit. Huge sexual discrimination suits against large employers worth millions of
dollars were won in courts. The number of working women continued to rise. By
1980, 40 percent of women with children worked; in 1990, 55 percent. Working
women had various motivations, from being a professional in careers traditionally
limited to men to bolstering family income as the economy faltered.
The gay and lesbian movement also expanded in the 1970s. By 1979, there were
thousands of local gay rights groups through the country. They elected officials,
pressed states to decriminalize homosexuality, and passed anti-discrimination laws
in major cities. They urged gay men and lesbians to “come out of the closet” and
forced the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of
mental illnesses. By the 1970s, the counterculture’s emphasis on personal freedom
and individuality had become mainstream. Americans became obsessed with selfimprovement in fitness, diets, and psychological therapies.
Conservatives also believed Nixon was “soft” in foreign policy. Certainly, Nixon and
Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, continued their predecessor’s policies
of trying to undermine governments that seemed to endanger U.S. strategic or
economic interests. Nixon sent arms to pro-American dictators in Iran, the
Philippines, and South Africa. When Chileans elected the socialist Salvador Allende
president, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped his domestic opponents
launch a coup on September 11, 1973, that overthrew and killed Allende and
installed a bloody regime ruled by General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of
Allende’s supporters, including some Americans, were tortured and murdered,
while others fled the country.
In relations with major communist countries, however, Nixon decreased Cold War
tensions. Nixon launched his political career as a militant anti-communist, but he
and Kissinger were “realists.” They were more interested in power than ideology
and preferred stability to endless conflict. Nixon hoped that better relations with the
3
Soviets would pressure North Vietnam to end the Vietnam War on terms acceptable
to America. Nixon also realized that China had its own interests, separate from those
of the Soviets, and would soon be a major world power. In early 1972, Nixon made a
highly publicized trip to Beijing, which led to China finally occupying its seat in the
United Nations. Although full diplomatic relations with China were not established
until 1979, Nixon’s visit sparked a vast trade increase between the United States and
China. Three months after his China trip, Nixon became the first president to visit
the Soviet Union, where he negotiated with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. The
talks led to increased trade and two landmark arms control treaties: the Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks, which capped each country’s arsenal of intercontinental
ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which
banned the development of systems for intercepting income missiles. Nixon and
Brezhnev declared a new age of “peaceful coexistence” in which “détente”
(cooperation) would replace Cold War hostility.
In his 1968 campaign, Nixon pledged that he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam
War. Once in office, he declared a new policy, Vietnamization, in which U.S. troops
would gradually be withdrawn while South Vietnamese troops, backed by U.S
.bombing, would take up combat. But Vietnamization did not limit the war or end
the anti-war movement. In early 1970, Nixon ordered U.S. troops into neutral
Cambodia, in order to disrupt supply lines to the South. But the invasion did not
achieve its military goals, and it destabilized the Cambodian government, starting a
chain of events that brought the Khmer Rouge to power (who forced most
Cambodians to migrate into the countryside and massacred millions), and sparked
the largest student protests in U.S. history. In protests at Kent State University, the
Ohio National Guard killed four anti-war protests; at Jackson State University, two
students were killed by police. More than 350 colleges and universities had student
strikes and 21 campuses were occupied by troops.
Simultaneously, troop morale dropped. Although all young men were subject to the
draft, most college students received deferments. The army was mostly composed of
working-class whites and poor racial minorities. Blacks complained of having
disproportionately higher casualty rates than white soldiers. And the military was
not immune from domestic social and cultural changes. More and more soldiers
wore peace and black power symbols, used drugs, refused orders, deserted, and
assaulted and killed unpopular officers. The erosion in discipline convinced many
high-ranking officers that the United States had to pull out from Vietnam.
At the same time, public support for the war declined. Revelations in 1969 that U.S.
forces had committed a massacre of some 350 civilians at My Lai the year before
shocked the nation. In 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a
classified government report that traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam back to World
War II and showed how multiple presidents had misled the American public about
it. The Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s effort to suppress the papers’ publication. In
1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which limited presidential authority by
requiring congressional approval for troop commitments overseas.
4
In 1973, Nixon sealed the Paris peace agreement and started to withdraw U.S.
troops. The compromise left South Vietnam’s government intact, but it also left
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in control of parts of the South. U.S.
bombing stopped and the draft ceased. But the North Vietnamese launched a final
offensive in 1975 that toppled South Vietnam’s government. The United States
evacuated its embassy, and Vietnam was reunified under communist rule. The
Vietnam War was a military, political, and social disaster, in which 58,000
Americans were killed, along with 3 to 4 million Vietnamese. The war cost the
United States $100 billion, but the higher cost was to Americans’ confidence in their
own institutions and their nation’s ideals and purposes. Policymakers behind the
war, such as former defense secretary Robert McNamara, have since said the war
was a terrible mistake.
Nixon’ s domestic and foreign policy successes secured his re-election in 1972. He
won a landslide victory over liberal Democrat George McGovern and gained more
support in Democratic strongholds in the South and among northern working-class
whites. But triumph was succeeded by disaster. Nixon was obsessed with secrecy
and did not tolerate differences of opinion. He viewed critics as national security
threats and created an “enemies list” of unfriendly reporters, politicians, and
celebrities. When the Pentagon Papers were published, Nixon established a special
investigative unit in the White House known as the “plumbers” to get information
about Daniel Ellsberg, the former government official who had leaked the papers to
the press. The plumbers raided Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to discredit him. In
June 1972, five former employees of Nixon’s re-election committee were caught
breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment
complex in Washington, D.C., and were arrested.
The arrests did not affect the 1972 presidential campaign. But in 1973, the judge
presiding over the prosecution of the Watergate five tried to find out who was
behind the break-in. Washington Post journalists revealed that persons close to
Nixon had ordered the Watergate operation and tried to “cover up” Nixon’s
involvement. Congressional hearings soon revealed a wider pattern of wiretapping,
break-ins, and attempts to sabotage political opponents. A special prosecutor
appointed reluctantly by Nixon demanded copies of tapes that the president had
made of his conservations. The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to provide them,
reaffirming that presidents are not above the law.
The scandal unfolded for weeks, and by mid-1974, it was obvious that Nixon had at
least ordered the cover-up of the Watergate break-in (it was unclear whether he had
ordered the break-in itself). In August 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to
recommend that Nixon be impeached for conspiracy to obstruct justice. Nixon soon
became the only president to resign. His presidency is the classic example of the
abuse of political power. In 1973, Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, resigned
after it was revealed he took bribes from construction firms. Nixon’s attorney
general and two aides were convicted of obstructing justice in the Watergate affair
and went to jail. Nixon insisted he did nothing wrong, and that previous presidents
5
also lied and conducted illegal activities. While not excusing Nixon, subsequent
Senate hearings held by Frank Church of Idaho revealed a history of abusive actions
by every Cold War–era president, including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
spying on millions of Americans and disruptions of civil rights groups, and CIA
covert operations to overthrow foreign governments, assassinate foreign leaders,
and organize a secret army in Laos, bordering Vietnam.
The Church Committee revelations, along with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and
the Vietnam War, seriously eroded Americans’ confidence in their government.
Congress soon placed restrictions on the FBI and Central Intelligence (CIA), which
banned spying on American citizens and overseas covert operations without
congressional knowledge. While liberals celebrated Nixon’s downfall, they did not
realize that liberalism itself—the idea that government can be trusted to take
positive action to solve social problems and promote the public good and individual
freedom—was damaged by these events. These events contributed greatly to a
growing public belief that a powerful central government could not be trusted, and
it distracted Americans from the looming economic crisis that shook America in the
1970s.
In the 1970s, postwar economic expansion and consumer prosperity ended,
followed by slow growth and high inflation. The end of capitalism’s “golden age” was
caused by many factors. With a booming economy driven in part by a militaryindustrial complex, administrations had not realized how the Cold War might have
less positive economic consequences. To check the Soviets, the United States had
promoted the economic reconstruction of Germany and Japan and supported new
manufacturing in places like South Korea and Taiwan. It encouraged American
companies to invest overseas and didn’t complain when allies protected their own
industries while seeking unrestricted access to U.S. markets. Steel imports, for
example, devastated the American steel industry. And the strong dollar, tied to gold
by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, made it harder to sell goods overseas. In
1971, for the first time in the twentieth century, the United States had a trade deficit
(importing more goods than exporting). By 1980, almost all goods produced in the
United States were competing with foreign-made products and the number of
manufacturing workers had declined to 28 percent (it had been 38 percent in 1960).
The Vietnam War produced higher federal deficits and rising inflation.
In 1971, Nixon announced a radical departure in economic policy. He took the
United States off the gold standard, ending the Bretton Woods agreement which
fixed the value of the dollar and currencies in gold. From now on, world currencies
“floated” in relation to one another, their worth determined not by treaty but
international currency markets. Nixon hoped this would promote U.S. exports, but
the end of fixed currency rates destabilized the world economy. Nixon also froze
wages and prices for ninety days to stabilize the economy. These policies briefly
stopped inflation and reduced imports, but a war between Israel and its neighbors
Egypt and Syria led Middle Eastern governments to hike the price of oil and suspend
oil exports to the US for several months. By this point, the United States imported
one-third of its oil. Congress lowered the speed limit and urged conservation to save
6
fuel. The energy crisis focused public attention on domestic energy sources like oil,
coal, and natural gas. Oil exploration increased in the American West. And the high
oil prices set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
benefited western energy companies.
But rising oil prices affected the global economy and contributed to the combination
of stagnant economic growth and high inflation known as “stagflation.” Between
1973 and 1981, the inflation rate in developed nations was 10 percent per year,
while economic growth was down from the 1960s to 2.4 percent per year. The socalled misery index—the sum of unemployment and inflation rates—stood at 10.8
in 1970; by 1980, it was near 22. With higher oil prices, Americans bought more
fuel-efficient foreign cars, hurting the domestic auto industry.
The economic crisis helped erode the postwar social compact. Facing lower profits
and more global competition, corporations eliminated more high-paying
manufacturing jobs through automation and moving jobs overseas. Older industrial
cities and areas were devastated, while smaller industrial cities suffered even more,
and as their tax bases disappeared, so did public services. The higher flows of
population, jobs, and investment to the non-union, low-wage Sunbelt states
increased the political influence of this conservative region.
Always a junior partner in the Democratic coalition, labor found itself on the
defensive in this era, and has been so ever since. The declining power of unions and
the continuing economic shift from manufacturing to service jobs adversely
impacted ordinary Americans. While median family income had doubled between
1953 and 1973, real wages between 1973 and 1993 did no rise at all. The 1970s was
one of only two decades in the twentieth century when Americans were poorer than
when it began.
The economic crisis troubled Nixon’s successors. Gerald Ford, appointed to replace
vice-president Agnew, assumed the presidency when Nixon resigned. Ford named
Nelson Rockefeller of New York as his vice-president. For the first time in U.S.
history, both offices were occupied by persons for whom no one had voted. One of
Ford’s first acts was to pardon Nixon, which prevented his prosecution for
obstruction of justice. This was a deeply unpopular decision. Ford had no significant
accomplishments in domestic policy. Ford and his economic advisor, Alan
Greenspan, wanted Americans to spend less and save more to build money for
investment, and they called for tax cuts and less government economic regulation.
The Democratic majority in Congress did not approve. To fight inflation, Ford urged
Americans to shop wisely, reduce spending, and wear “WIN” buttons (for “Whip
Inflation Now”). Though inflation fell, unemployment rose in 1975 to the highest
level since the depression. But Ford continued Nixon’s policy of détente, and the
United States signed an agreement with the Soviets at Helsinki, Finland, that
recognized the permanence of the division of Europe. The Helsinki Accords inspired
movements for more freedom in Eastern Europe’s communist countries.
7
In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor unknown outside that state, ran
as a Democratic candidate untainted by a highly unpopular federal government. He
won with a comfortable margin over Ford. A devout evangelical Baptist, Carter
promised a disillusioned American electorate that he would be virtuous and honest.
He wanted to make government more efficient, protect the environment, and
morally improve politics. He also supported black aspirations, and he appointed
unprecedented numbers of African-Americans to federal office. Even though the
Democrats controlled Congress, however, Carter and the Congress rarely
cooperated. Seeing inflation and not unemployment as the main economic problem,
proposed cuts in domestic programs; viewing competition as a way to reduce prices,
he deregulated the trucking and airline industries; and supporting the Federal
Reserve Bank’s policy of raising interest rates to reduce economic activity and thus
wages and prices, he hoped to stop inflation, but higher oil prices kept inflation
alive. Carter also embraced nuclear power as a way to reduce dependence on
foreign oil, but a near-fatal accident in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in
Pennsylvania released radiation and sparked public fears about nuclear power and
stopped the industry’s expansion. Carter even repudiated his party’s legacy as the
party of affluence and economic growth when he gave a speech in 1979 about the
nation’s “crisis of confidence,” seeming to blame it on Americans themselves and
their bankrupt definition of freedom as “self-indulgence and consumption.”
Under Carter, a commitment to human rights defined U.S. foreign policy for the first
time. Human rights groups in the 1970s that influenced Carter began to identify
human rights violations not only by communist nations but by U.S. allies as well,
especially Latin American dictatorships that used death squads to kill political
opponents. In 1978, Carter cut off aid to the military dictatorship in Argentina
which, in the name of anti-communism, had launched a “dirty war” against its own
citizens, kidnapping and murdering 10,000 to 30,000 persons. As Argentina was an
important U.S. ally, this shocked Latin American regimes dependent on American
aid. By his presidency’s end, Carter had made human rights central to American
policy. He believed that in the post-Vietnam era, U.S. policy should move away from
Cold War assumptions and instead combat Third World poverty, prevent the spread
of nuclear weapons, and promote human rights. Carter also pardoned Vietnam-era
draft resisters.
Carter’s emphasis on peaceful solutions to international problems brought some
important results. In 1979, he brokered the Camp David accords between Egypt and
Israel. He improved Latin American affairs by promising to transfer control of the
Panama Canal in 2000. He resisted calls to intervene against a left-wing revolution
fighting Somoza, Nicaragua’s dictator. He also cut military aid to the right-wing
government of El Salvador, which sponsored death squads. But despite criticisms
from “realists” that his focus on human rights was damaging U.S. power in the
world, Carter continued to pour billions into defense and the United States
continued to support allies with records of human rights violations, such as
Guatemala, the Philippines, South Korea, and Iran.
8
U.S. support for Iran undid Carter’s policies and administration. Iran, strategically
located on the Soviet Union’s southern border, was a major supplier of oil and
importer of U.S. military equipment. Carter’s 1977 visit in support of the Shah, Iran’s
ruler, inspired a more militant opposition, and in 1979, a popular revolution led by
the Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah and declared Iran an
Islamic republic. The Iranian revolution marked a shift in opposition movements in
the Middle East from socialism and Arab nationalism to religious fundamentalism.
This had long-term consequences for America. When Carter allowed the deposed
Shah to come to America, Khomeini’s followers invaded the US embassy and seized
dozens of hostages. They regained their freedom only in January 1981, the day
Carter’s term ended, and the hostage crisis deeply hurt Carter’s popularity.
The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 by the Soviets, who sought to reinforce a
friendly government fighting an Islamic rebellion, also confronted Carter with a
crisis. Over time, the Soviet war in Afghanistan proved to be its own Vietnam, with
high casualties, costs, and mounting domestic dissatisfaction. At first, however, it
seemed to indicate a decline in U.S. power. In response, President Carter announced
the Carter doctrine, declaring the United States would use military force, if
necessary, to protect its interest in the Persian Gulf. He retaliated against the Soviets
with boycotts and withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties. The United States also
began to give arms and money to Islamic fundamentalist rebels in Afghanistan,
giving rise to the Taliban.
Domestic and international troubles in the 1970s made Americans anxious and
emboldened conservatives. Economic crisis made lower taxes, less government
regulation, and social spending cuts to spur business investment seem appealing.
Fears about declining U.S. world power led to calls for renewing the Cold War. The
civil rights and sexual revolutions produced fears and resentments that eroded the
Democratic coalition, and rising urban crime created calls for law and order. In the
1970s, conservatives abandoned overt opposition to blacks’ struggle for racial
justice, as the confrontations of George Wallace where replaced by demands for
local control and resistance to the federal government. The language of individual
freedom especially appealed to growing numbers of mostly white suburbanites
leaving the cities and urban problems. The suburbs became the base of the modern
conservatism. But conservatives also organized at the grass roots level, and
organized to win local elections and take local government, even school boards. One
set of conservatives, the “neo-conservatives,” turned against the federal government
and liberalism, citing a decline in moral standards and respect for authority. They
wanted to end welfare, decrease taxes and regulations, and return to fighting the
Cold War.
The rise of religious fundamentalism in the 1970s expanded conservatism’s base.
More and more Americans embraced traditional religious values. While
membership in mainstream Protestant denominations declined, evangelical
churches flourished. Evangelical Christians seemed alienated from a culture that
seemed to discount religion and promote immorality. They demanded the reversal
9
of Supreme Court decisions that banned prayer in public schools, protected
pornography as free speech, and legalized abortion. In 1979, Virginia minister Jerry
Falwell created a group, the Moral Majority, to wage “war against sin” and elect
“pro-life, pro-family, pro-America” candidates. Falwell labeled supporters of
abortion rights, easy divorce, and reduced defense budgets as agents of Satan trying
to undermine God’s plans for America. But Christian conservatives seemed most
angered by the sexual revolution, which they saw as an immoral threat to traditional
families. They thought the 1960s had turned freedom into moral anarchy.
In the 1970s, “family values” became central to conservative politics, most
prominently in the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). First proposed in
the 1920s, the ERA was revived by second-wave feminists. Its affirmation that
“equality of rights under the law” could not be abridged “on account of sex” seemed
uncontroversial, and Congress approved it in 1972 with little controversy and sent
it to the states for ratification. But it sparked protest from those who believed it
would discredit the role of wife and homemaker. The ERA revealed divisions among
women, as well. To its supporters, the ERA guaranteed women’s freedom in the
public sphere. To its opponents, freedom for women was in their roles as wife and
mother. Opponents claimed that the amendment would erode male breadwinners’
support for wives. Though polls showed that most male and female Americans
supported the ERA, it did not achieve the required ratification of thirty-eight states
in order to become law.
Far more bitter was the battle over abortion rights, which conservatives saw as
liberals spreading sexual immorality at the cost of moral values. A movement to
reverse Roe v. Wade started among Roman Catholics, but soon included evangelical
Protestants and social conservatives. The movement insisted that life began at
conception, and that abortion was murder. Feminists argued that women’s right to
control her own body includes the right to safe, legal abortions. Both sides showed
how the rights revolution had reshaped political language, as opponents of abortion
appealed for the “right to life,” while supporters celebrated the “right to choose.”
The anti-abortion movement successfully pressured Congress, over President Ford’s
veto, to end federal funding for abortions for poor women in the Medicaid program,
and by the 1990s, some extreme anti-abortion activists were bombing medical
clinics and assassinating doctors who terminated pregnancies.
With liberals unable to check deindustrialization and declining real wages, economic
anxiety also fostered conservatism in economics. Unlike during the Great
Depression, economic crisis inspired a critique of government, rather than of
business. New environmental regulations sparked calls for less government
regulation of the economy, especially in the West, where the “Sagebrush Rebellion”
sought to reduce federal bureaucracies’ control over and conservation of precious
land, water, and minerals. But everywhere the end of affluence and the rise of
stagflation created support for conservatives who claimed that government
regulations raised business costs and eliminated jobs. Economic crisis in particular
spread support for lower taxes. Conservatives welcomed tax cuts as a way to both
enhance profits and reduce resources for government, thus preventing new social
10
programs and reducing existing ones. Many Americans found taxes more
burdensome, as wage increases were cancelled by inflation and pushed families into
higher federal tax brackets. In 1978, conservatives ran a successful campaign to ban
further increases in property taxes, and demonstrated the power of anti-tax politics.
The new law benefited business and homeowners, but cut funds for schools,
libraries, and other public services. Anti-tax sentiment flourished throughout the
nation, and other states passed similar laws.
By 1980. Carter was deeply unpopular. Conservatism seemed on the rise
everywhere. In England, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, promising to
sell state-owned industries to private firms, shrink the welfare state, and reduce
taxes and the power of unions. In the United States, Ronald Reagan’s campaign for
the presidency united conservatives around promises to end stagflation and restore
America’s confidence and its role in the world. Reagan also appealed to white
backlash against civil rights, voicing support for states’ rights, vilifying welfare
recipients, and condemning busing and affirmative action. Although not devout and
a divorcee, Reagan won the support of “family values” religious conservatives.
Reagan won the election, taking former Democratic bastions such as Illinois, Texas
and New York, while Carter received only 41 percent of the popular vote. While
Carter went on to lead anti-poverty, human rights, and diplomatic efforts around the
world, his presidency is considered by most to be a failure and his defeat launched
the Reagan Revolution, which made freedom the domain of the right in American
politics.
Reagan’s path to the presidency was unusual. Originally a New Deal Democrat and
head of the Screen Actors Guild, he became the spokesman for General Electric in
the 1950s, preaching the virtues of unregulated capitalism. His nominating speech
for Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention brought him national
renown. In 1966, he was elected California’s governor, and in 1976 challenged Ford
for the Republican nomination, almost winning it. His victory in the 1980 election
brought together old and new conservatives: Sunbelt suburbanites and urban
working-class ethnics; anti-government crusaders and aggressive Cold Warriors;
and libertarians and the Christian Right.
Although Reagan, the oldest men ever to hold political office, was often
underestimated by his opponents, he was politically experienced and a gifted public
speaker whose optimism and good humor appealed to many Americans. Reagan
made conservatism seem progressive, and he reiterated themes of America’s
mission to be an example of freedom in the world that had their origins in the
American Revolution. Freedom became the watchword of the Reagan Revolution,
and Reagan used the word more than any other president before him.
Reagan reshaped the nation’s agenda and political language more effectively than
any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Reagan promised to free government
from “special interests,” which he defined not as business groups but as unions,
minorities, and others who wanted to use Washington’s powers to attack social
inequalities. His Justice Department wanted to make the Constitution “color-blind”
11
and gutted civil rights enforcement. Reagan seized the terms of debate and put
Democrats on the defensive.
While Reagan, like his predecessors, invoked “economic freedom,” he defined it as
reducing union power, dismantling regulations, and radically reducing taxes. In
1981 and 1986, Reagan won tax reforms from Congress which dramatically reduced
taxes for the wealthy and moved America away from the ideal of progressive,
graduated income taxes. Reagan also appointed conservatives to lead regulatory
agencies, who reduced environmental and workplace safety opposed by business.
Liberals since the New Deal had tried to fuel economic growth by using government
power to raise Americans’ purchasing power. Reagan, using “supply-side
economics” (called “trickle-down economics” by opponents), relied on high interest
rates to curb inflation and lower tax rates for business and the wealthy to stimulate
private investment. This policy assumed that cutting taxes would make Americans
at all income levels work harder, because they would keep more of what they
earned, and that everyone would benefit from increased business profits and a
growing economy, which would raise government revenues despite lower tax rates.
Reagan also began an era of hostility between government and labor unions. In
1981, when members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization
(PATCO), the air traffic controllers’ union, went on strike in defiance of federal law,
Reagan fired them all and used the military to supervise air traffic until new
controllers were trained. Reagan inspired many employers to launch anti-union
offensives, and more businesses now hired workers to permanently replace
workers who had gone on strike. Manufacturing employment continued its longterm decline, further reducing union strength. When Reagan left office, both the
service and retail sectors employed more Americans than manufacturing, and only
11 percent of non-government workers were union members.
“Reaganomics,” as critics called the administration’s policies, initially created the
most severe recession since the 1930s. But a long period of economic expansion
followed the recession of 1981–1982. As employers reduced their workforces,
shifted production overseas, and used new technologies, they became more
profitable. Simultaneously, inflation dropped dramatically, in part because of
greater oil production. The stock market rose, and despite a sharp drop in 1987, the
stock market continued to climb upward.
Reagan’s policies, deindustrialization, and rising stock prices contributed to
increasing economic inequality. By the mid-1990s, the richest 1 percent of
Americans owned 40 percent of America’s wealth, twice their share of 20 years
earlier. Most spent their income, not on productive investments and charity, as
supply-side economists predicted, but on luxury goods, real-estate speculation, and
corporate buyouts that often led to plant-closings. Middle-class income stagnated,
especially for families with stay-at-home wives, while the income of the poorest
12
declined. With less investment in public housing, the release of mental patients from
state hospitals, and cuts to welfare, more and more Americans became homeless.
Deindustrialization and the decline of unions particularly devastated minority
workers, who only recently had won skilled work in union jobs. While affirmative
action expanded the black middle class by offering more educational opportunities,
black workers suffered. Though Jim Crow ended in many workplaces in the 1970s,
black workers lost their jobs as manufacturing declined. By 1981, the black
unemployment rate was higher than 20 percent, more than double that of whites.
The 1980s are now seen as a decade ruled by misplaced values. Buying out
companies generated more profits than running them, and making deals, not
products, was the way to get rich. Corporate mergers produced billions in fees for
lawyers, economic advisers, and stockbrokers. Wall Street financiers praised
“greed” as “healthy.” Taxpayers paid for some of the consequences. The deregulation
of savings and loans associations allowed these institutions to invest in risky realestate ventures and mergers. When loses pushed the Federal Savings and Loan
Insurance Corporation, which insured depositors’ accounts, toward bankruptcy, the
federal government bailed out the savings and loans institutions, at a cost of $20
billion. Though supply-side advocates argued that lower taxes would increase
government revenues by stimulating economic activity, federal spending on the
military in particular created enormous budget deficits. The national debt under
Reagan tripled to $2.7 trillion. But Reagan remained very popular and easily
defeated the Democratic candidate Walter Mondale in the 1984 election.
Reagan in some ways disappointed conservatives. While his administration sharply
reduced programs such as food stamps and school lunches, it left intact core
elements of the welfare state, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Reagan also did little for the Christian Right. Abortion stayed legal, women
continued to enter the labor force, and Reagan appointed the first female member of
the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor. Reagan voiced support for a
constitutional amendment that would allow prayer in public schools, but the effort
went nowhere. The administration launched a “Just Say No” campaign against illegal
drug use, but failed to stop the spread of crack, a cheap form of cocaine, in urban
areas. And Reagan did little to halt affirmative action.
Yet Reagan revived the Cold War. He vigorously denounced the Soviet Union as an
“evil empire” and started the largest military buildup in U.S. history, including longrange bombers and missiles. In 1983, he proposed a Strategic Defense Initiative to
develop a space-based system to intercept and destroy enemy missiles. The ideas
was not technologically feasible, and if deployed, would have violated the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty. But Reagan wanted to reassert America’s world power. He
pressed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into deploying short-range
nuclear weapons in Europe. The renewed arms race and Reagan’s talk of wining a
nuclear war spread alarm and fear around the world. In the early 1980s, a mass
13
movement in the United States and Europe called for a nuclear freeze—an end to
nuclear arms development.
Reagan also wanted to end American’s reluctance to commit U.S. forces overseas,
the result of Vietnam. He sent troops to invade Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island, to
remove a pro-Castro government; he bombed Libya to retaliate against that
government’s alleged involvement in a terrorist attack in West Berlin; and in 1982,
he sent U.S. marines to Lebanon to keep the peace in a civil war, but quickly
withdrew them after a bomb exploded at a U.S. barracks, killing 241 Americans. But
Reagan preferred to achieve his objectives through military aid, not US troops. He
abandoned Carter’s emphasis on human rights and affirmed that the United States
should support authoritarian anti-communist regimes. Under Reagan, the country
became closer to anti-communist dictatorships in Chile and South Africa. His
administration also sent money and arms to the governments of El Salvador and
Guatemala, whose armies and associated death squads committed atrocities against
civilian opponents.
U.S. involvement in Central America created the great scandal of Reagan’s
presidency, the Iran-Contra affair. In 1984, Congress banned military aid to the
Contras, those in Nicaragua fighting the Sandinistas who in 1979 had ousted the
U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. In 1985, Reagan secretly authorized the sale
of arms to Iran (then engaged in a war with Iraq) in order to get the release of
American hostages held by Islamic groups in the Middle East. But the director of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the
National Security Council diverted funds from the arms sales to buy military
supplies for the Contras, in defiance of Congress. In 1986, the scheme was exposed
in the media, and Congress held televised hearings which showed lying and
violations of the law that recalled the Nixon era. Eleven members of Reagan’s
administration were convicted of perjury or destroying documents or plead guilty
before they were tried. Reagan denied knowledge of the scheme, but the affair
undermined the public’s confidence in him.
Surprisingly, Reagan in his second term softened his anti-communism and
established good relations with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev had
come to power in 1985 and wanted to reform the Soviet Union’s political system
(glasnost) and reinvigorate its economy (perestroika). The USSR had fallen far
behind the United States in producing and distributing consumer goods and relied
more and more on food imports to feed itself. Gorbachev realized the reforms he
wanted required cuts in military costs. Reagan was ready to negotiate, and they held
a series of talks on arms control which concluded agreements to reduce nuclear
weapons stockpiles. In 1988, Gorbachev started to withdraw Soviet troops from
Afghanistan. Reagan, despite starting his presidency as a Cold Warrior, left office
repudiating his earlier, militant anti-Soviet stance.
Reagan’s presidency showed the contradictions of modern conservatism. Though he
wanted to appeal to the religious right, the Reagan Revolution undermined
14
traditional and conservative values by inspiring speculation, business mergers, and
investors to pursue profits at the cost of plant closings, job losses, and devastated
communities. Deindustrialization, unemployment, and downward pressure on
wages all threatened local traditions and family stability and undermined a common
sense of national purpose by expanding income and wealth inequality.
Because of Iran-Contra and huge deficits, Reagan left office with a tarnished
reputation. But few figures have so decisively reshaped American politics. Reagan’s
vice-president, George H. W. Bush, defeated Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis,
governor of Massachusetts in the 1988 election in part because Dukakis could not
deny that he was a “liberal,” now a term of political abuse. Conservative ideas about
the virtues of free markets and the evils of “big government” dominated the media
and debates. Those receiving public aid were now seen not as unfortunate, but as a
burden on taxpayers. The Democratic president of the 1990s, Bill Clinton, embraced
many of these ideas.
The 1988 election saw politics at new lows. The Democratic frontrunner dropped
out of the race after a sexual affair was revealed. Both parties ran negative
campaigns. The lowest point of the campaign were Republican television ads that
said Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts had released from jail Willie Horton, a
black murderer and rapist. Bush achieved a substantial victory, winning 54 percent
of the popular vote, but the Democrats retained control of Congress.
15
Chapter 26
The Triumph of Conservatism,
1969–1988
President Nixon
• Nixon’s Domestic Policies
Map 26.1 Center of Population, 1790-2000
President Nixon
• Nixon and Welfare
• Nixon and Race
President Nixon
• The Burger Court
• The Court and Affirmative Action
President Nixon
• The Continuing Sexual Revolution
Figure 26.1 Median Age at First Marriage, 1947–1981
President Nixon
• Nixon and Détente
Vietnam and Watergate
• Nixon and Vietnam
Vietnam and Watergate
• The End of the Vietnam War
Vietnam and Watergate
• Watergate
Vietnam and Watergate
• Nixon’s Fall
The End of the Golden Age
• The Decline of Manufacturing
• Stagflation
Table 26.2 The Misery Index, 1970–1980
The End of the Golden Age
• The Beleaguered Social Compact
• Labor on the Defensive
The End of the Golden Age
• Ford as President
• The Carter Administration
• Carter and the Economic Crisis
Map 26.2 The Presidential Election of 1976
The End of the Golden Age
• The Emergence of Human Rights Politics
The End of the Golden Age
• The Iran Crisis and Afghanistan
The Rising Tide of Conservatism
• The Religious Right
The Rising Tide of Conservatism
• The Battle over the Equal Rights
Amendment
• The Abortion Controversy
The Rising Tide of Conservatism
• The Tax Revolt
• The Election of 1980
The Reagan Revolution
• Reagan and American Freedom
The Reagan Revolution
• Reaganonomics
• Reagan and Labor
The Reagan Revolution
• The Problem of Inequality
• The Second Gilded Age
Figure 26.3 Changes in Families’ Real Income,
1980–1990
The Reagan Revolution
• Conservatives and Reagan
• Reagan and the Cold War
The Reagan Revolution
• The Iran-Contra Affair
• Reagan and Gorbachev
The Reagan Revolution
• Reagan’s Legacy
• The Election of 1988
Additional Art for Unit 26
Ronald Reagan addressing the Republican national
convention
Richard Nixon (on the right) and former
Alabama governor George
Table 26.1 Rate of Divorce: Divorces of Existing
Marriages Per 1,000 New Marriages, 1950–1980
Daryl Koehn, of Kansas,
Richard Nixon at a banquet
A distraught young woman kneels beside one of
the four Kent
Dramatic demonstrations
Buttons and flags for sale
Herbert Block’s 1973 cartoon
The oil crisis of 1973
The World Trade Center under construction
Figure 26.2 Real Average Weekly Wages, 1955–1990
President Gerald Ford
The deregulation of the airline industry
The 1979 accident
Celebrating the signing of the 1979 peace
treaty between Israel and Egypt
Television gave extensive coverage
The Reverend Jerry Falwell
DougMarlette’s cartoon
A 1979 anti-abortion rally
Women demonstrating in support for abortion rights.
Phyllis Schlafly Campaigning against the Equal
Rights Amendment
Map 26.3 The Presidential Election of 1980
A delegate to the Republican national convention
Sprague Electric Company in North Adams
A homeless Los Angeles family
A family of affluent “yuppies”
The drug crack being openly sold
Hollywood joined enthusiastically in the revived
ColdWar.
Map 26.4 The United States in the Caribbean and
Central America, 1954-2004
President Reagan visited Moscow
The inauguration of George H.W. Bush, January 1989
Purchase answer to see full
attachment