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Prof's new book chronicles the '70s

By Hope Green

Those who came of age in the 1970s suffer from an image problem, says Bruce Schulman, CAS associate professor of history.

	In 1973 Indian activists staged a two-month protest at the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee, part of a widespread Native American movement in the '70s in support of treaty rights, Indian sovereignty, and cultural preservation. Clashes with authorities left two Indians dead and a federal marshal wounded. © Black Star Picture Collection, Inc.

As a teenager in Smithtown, N.Y., a Long Island suburb, Schulman grew tired of hearing that his generation had missed out on the '60s civil rights marches, Vietnam war protests, and the Summer of Love. By contrast, the '70s seemed to have no lasting imprint on history except bad hair, pet rocks, disco, and disillusionment.

That stereotype persists today. Yet in his new book, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (The Free Press), Schulman, director of the GRS American and New England Studies Program, argues that what transpired in that decade profoundly shaped the nation's future.

Billie Jean King scored a symbolic victory for feminism in the famous Battle of the Sexes tennis match against Bobby Riggs in September 1973. © Corbis

The book defines the '70s era as actually beginning in 1969, with Woodstock and the end of the post-World War II economic boom, and ending in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's successful reelection campaign. Schulman traces the decline of liberalism and the rise of Sunbelt libertarians as Americans grew fed up with the expanding role of government in everyday life. He examines such hard-news events as Watergate, the busing controversy, and the late 1970s tax revolts.

But with equal seriousness, Schulman gives historical context to punk rock, the practitioners of EST, and the stunts of motorcyclist-showman Evil Knievel. He highlights the growing Southern influence on music and entertainment. He explores as well the symbolism of Billie Jean King's tennis victory over Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle of the Sexes match and the dark subplots of Saturday Night Fever.

	Although often parodied, writes Schulman, Saturday Night Fever "drew a dark portrait of American life in the era of malaise." © AP/Wide World Photos

"Every generation has its own traditions and tries to excavate its own history," Schulman says. "That's part of what I was trying to do, because it would allow members of my cohort to relive familiar scenes, but perhaps talk about them in new ways. Many of our memories, especially in the contemporary era, are dominated by the New York/Washington/Hollywood perspective, and when you get outside of that you can see things differently."

Three '70s phenomena in particular, says Schulman, shaped his own perception of that period. One was the nationwide tax revolt, during which voters from California to Massachusetts slashed public services to lower their property tax bills. When Schulman was 17, the residents of his town voted down a proposed school budget, forcing the public schools to go on a state-mandated austerity plan that eliminated many extracurricular programs. Schulman joined a door-to-door campaign for a revised budget.

"I had a lot of doors slammed in my face," he says. "There were a lot of white suburban ethnics who had moved out of the city a generation or so earlier and were very opposed to any budget hikes. So we lost."

In Shaft, one of many "blaxploitation" films produced in the '70s, Richard Roundtree plays a tough private detective who goes after corrupt whites. © MGM/Shaft Productions

Another vivid memory for Schulman was attending concerts of Twisted Sister, a Long Island band that featured drag queens leading audiences in chants of "Disco sucks!" The widespread antidisco sentiment intrigued him at the time, but looking back as a historian, he is able to make more sense of it. Disco, he writes in The Seventies, "obviously threatened suburban white boys who found it too feminine, too gay, too black. But its hybrid form also mocked ethnic nationalists dedicated to preserving distinct black and Latino cultural identities. The black musical establishment hated disco just as fervently as white rock-and-rollers did."

The third important phenomenon for Schulman was the ongoing energy crisis, which began in 1973 with a five-month Arab oil embargo. Fuel prices rose through the '70s, and the crisis peaked again in 1979 with a second embargo during the Iran-Iraq War. At that time Schulman was commuting by car to a summer job at a delicatessen. Under a state-mandated rationing system, motorists could buy gas on alternate days depending on whether their license plates ended in even or odd numbers.

"I remember there was something humiliating about this, and it was clear something was changing: a sense that the great American ride was over and our way of dealing with the world was going to have to change," Schulman says. "I can't say that at the time I understood this, but the gas crisis was the kind of event that got you thinking."

Vietnam's aftermath, taxes, disco, the energy crisis - all were fodder for late-night discussions as Schulman gathered with his college buddies, before and well after they graduated from Yale. The inspiration for The Seventies, he says, largely derives from those conversations, and after considering the book project for several years, "I came to the conviction that far more so than even the fabled '60s, this was a period that was really formative in defining American politics and culture."

Much of what shaped the generation, he writes, had to do with economics and dashed hopes. After a time of tremendous middle-class prosperity in the 1950s and '60s, people were losing their jobs and the U.S. dollar was losing its clout. Calling this era the Great Inflation, Schulman argues that it had a shaping effect on the national psyche just as the Great Depression had, but a vastly different one.

"Depression babies - people who grew up during the '30s - possessed a certain approach to life, a certain suspicion about good times, a thriftiness, a tendency to reuse tea bags and never throw anything away," he writes. "The Great Inflation produced its own generation, altering Americans' relationship to money, government, and each other."

His book describes how in the '70s, cash-strapped Americans began using credit cards, and old taboos against borrowing began to fade. At the same time, he writes, the inflation spiral "changed Americans from savers to investors" as they found their assets losing value in low-interest bank accounts. Schulman goes on to describe the advent of money market and mutual funds, which came about in response to a demand for higher returns.

What makes it hard for people to characterize the '70s in any concrete way, he says, is that conventional distinctions between liberals and conservatives were starting to blur. Grassroots activists on the right, such as tax protesters, adopted some of the militant style and publicity tactics of groups such as the women's movement.

	Punk rockers like the Ramones, says Schulman, embodied an anti-establishment spirit that ironically was taken up by the emerging political right. © Ian Dickson/Cult Images

"In some ways Joey Ramone [of the punk band the Ramones] and Ronald Reagan were on the same side, though they would never have seen themselves as allies," Schulman says. "I wanted to tell that story, too. Punk rock and all the other obvious forms of rebellion in the popular culture of the 1970s embrace and embody a certain suspicion of authority. There was a sense that the establishment had rotted to the core, that you couldn't trust the men in suits who were running American life, whether in labor unions or in Washington or in the corporate film studios or record companies. And that kind of suspicion and contempt for established sources of authority is something that the ascendant new right very much shared."

But what about all that apathy and cynicism? Didn't the '70s generation fail to pick up where their '60s-era siblings left off and make a better world? Schulman doesn't see it that way.

"Certainly the most utopian and idealistic ambitions of the '60s radicals did expire," he says. "But Americans of all types decided they needed to look to other places and other ideas to form their identities and their communities, to change the world and improve it. I don't buy the idea that all of a sudden people gave up on community and reform and just decided to indulge themselves and reject politics. But they certainly moved toward a different kind of cultural politics. You could say that was less idealistic, but maybe it was also more realistic - and in that sense, more effective."

11 May 2001
Boston University
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