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Still, Reagan clearly encouraged advocates of deregulation. In 1982 he signed a bill, little noticed at the time, that increased the amount of federal insurance available to savings-and-loan (S&L) depositors, from $40,000 to $100,000. Congress further authorized S&Ls to engage in a wide range of loans and investments, including junk bonds and other high-risk securities. Heads of S&Ls soon engaged in all sorts of bad deals; some stole from their institutions and stashed away millions. Though a few mid-level administration officials tried to stop these activities, Reagan and other top aides paid them no heed, thereby making a bad situation worse. In the late 1980s, many S&Ls collapsed, devastating depositors and necessitating a series of huge governmental bailouts. Estimates of the cost of these bailouts vary, but one reliable account set the amount by 1999 at $161 billion, of which $132 billion came from public funds.68 The S&L collapse was the costliest financial scandal in United States history.
Other scandals that stemmed in part from Reagan’s lax oversight of federal agencies marred his administration. Especially notable were revelations of high-level corruption in HUD, which a House investigation concluded was “enveloped by influence peddling, favoritism, abuse, greed, fraud, embezzlement, and theft.” A criminal investigation by an independent counsel lasted nine years and resulted in seventeen convictions and more than $2 million in fines.69
Nothing better revealed Reagan’s negative attitude toward governmental regulation than his approach to environmental policy. The president, who loved to tend to his ranch in California, considered himself a great friend of the outdoors, but he did not believe that the environment was seriously endangered, and he largely ignored scientific studies concerning acid rain and global warming. On one occasion Reagan blundered by saying that trees and other vegetation were a source of air pollution. Students at Claremont College greeted him with a sign tacked to a tree: CHOP ME DOWN BEFORE I KILL AGAIN.70
Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, proved to be a special target of environmentalist opponents of the administration. A Wyoming native, Watt had been a strident supporter of a “Sagebrush Rebellion” of westerners who hotly resented federal interference in their affairs. They complained bitterly that the federal government clung to ownership of millions of acres of land in the West—some 40 percent of all acreage in California and 90 percent in Nevada. There, as in other western states, disputes over water, forests, predators, and grazing rights roiled state politics. For these reasons, the roots of western hostility to “elitist eastern bureaucrats” and governmental “meddlers” ran deep. Drawing upon these and other resentments, the GOP was to enjoy great success in western political contests from 1980 on.
Watt, however, was politically maladroit. Deeply religious, he stated publicly that protecting the environment was unimportant compared to the imminent return of Jesus Christ to the earth. He divided people into two categories, “liberals” and “Americans.” When Audubon Society leaders demanded his dismissal, he called them a “chanting mob.” Vowing to “mine more, drill more, cut more timber,” he favored oil exploration off the California coast and a moratorium on the acquisition of land for national parks. Within a short time, Watt’s extremism galvanized environmentalists: Membership in the Wilderness Society, at 48,000 in 1979, shot up to 100,000 to 1983—and to 333,000 in 1989.71 Bumper stickers read: I KNOW WATT’S WRONG.
By early 1983, it was clear to Reagan’s advisers that Watt was a political liability. When he made the mistake of announcing that a departmental advisory committee consisted of “a black . . . a woman, two Jews, and a cripple,” these advisers forced him out. Thereafter, contentious environmental battles over Reagan’s policies quieted down, but the president continued to resist advocates of environmental protection, angering them by moving slowly to clean up toxic sites. As earlier, he called for cuts in appropriations for the EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Reagan’s narrow focus on economic and foreign policy issues led him to pay relatively little attention even to the agenda of social conservatives, including the Religious Right. Conservative Christians were stepping up efforts to censor textbooks, develop private academies, and home-school their children.72 Though Reagan said he favored a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, he never gave a live address to an anti-abortion rally. Congress, meanwhile, predictably refused to endorse the amendment. Reagan declared May 6, 1982, a “national day of prayer,” and he backed a proposed constitutional amendment to restore prayer in the public schools, but this, too, did not receive the two-thirds majorities in Congress that were necessary to send it to the states for ratification.
Frustrated by the lack of change, religious conservatives grew restive. Reagan and his political advisers responded by naming opponents of choice, such as C. Everett Koop (who became surgeon general) to federal positions, by inviting religious leaders from time to time to the White House, and by offering them other symbolic reassurances, as when they enlisted Falwell to give the final benediction at the 1984 GOP nominating convention. Reagan did little of substance, however, for he was less of a true believer than—as Garry Wills later put it—an “amiably and ecumenically pious” politician. Well aware that a small but steady majority of Americans was pro-choice, he was careful not to take steps that would hurt him badly at the polls. He knew that most adherents of the Religious Right, faced with choosing between the GOP and liberal Democrats, would ultimately have no option but to back him.73 Failing to achieve their political goals, leaders of the Religious Right complained with increasing bitterness in the late 1980s of discrimination against them by government and the media.
This, however, did not mean that activists for choice and other women’s rights were confident during the Reagan years. They were not. Though the earnings gap that separated women’s wages from those of men narrowed (from 62 percent of men’s wages and salaries in 1980 to 72 percent in 1990), it remained far too large to satisfy activists for equality. As earlier, many women complained about the “double shift” that kept them on the go at home as well as at work. Advocates of choice were especially worried during the Reagan years. Anti-abortion activists, employing rights-based rhetoric, continued to champion the rights of the fetus.74 After 1987, many of them joined a militant new organization, Operation Rescue, which adopted the direct action methods, notably sit-ins, of Martin Luther King in efforts to block access to abortion clinics. Thousands were arrested and jailed in 1988–89.75 A few, failing in their campaigns, later resorted to violence, bombing clinics and killing medical practitioners. Advocates for women, using rights talk of their own, devoted major energies to contesting these activities. Their broader agenda, in the 1980s and thereafter, also included struggles against sexual harassment and wife battering. During the Reagan years, however, advocates of women’s rights often felt beleaguered.
Trends in popular culture during these years further discouraged activists for women’s causes. Gone was the She Decade of the 1970s. Popular magazines featured articles cool to feminism, such as Newsweek’s cover story in 1984, “What Price Day Care?” that lamented the record-high rates of divorce and questioned whether career-oriented “Supermoms” were doing the right thing.76 Ms. magazine abandoned its feminist stance after mid-decade and focused on stories about celebrities. In the clothing industry, suits for women fell out of fashion, replaced by “feminine” attire that featured frills and bustles. Miniskirts sold well again after 1986. “Girls want to be girls again,” a designer (like most, a man) explained. By the end of the decade, Victoria’s Secret stores were proliferating and promoting a so-called Intimate Apparel Explosion.77
LIBERALS AND OTHERS WERE ANGERED, finally, by the administration’s unfeeling reaction, as they saw it, to the rise of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. First noticed in 1981, AIDS was transmitted sexually and via contaminated needles, many of them shared by IV drug abusers. In 1984, by which time AIDS had begun to spread around the world, researchers managed to identify the infectious agents—human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV)—but had no way to alleviate the syndrome, let alone to cure it: A diagnosis of AIDS was a virtual death sentence. To millions of Americans who had come to question authority since the 1960s, AIDS was bitter confirmation of how little the “experts” knew about serious medical problems. Many people continued to believe that AIDS could be acquired from toilet seats, from kissing, or from the air.78 It quickly became a scourge that wasted and killed its victims, most of whom were young males. By the beginning of 1985, AIDS had felled an estimated 5,600 Americans. By January 1989, when Reagan left office, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had confirmed 82,764 AIDS cases and 46,344 deaths. The CDC estimated that ten Americans were infected with the virus for every case that had been reported.79
By the mid-1980s, it was clear that AIDS was especially devastating to the gay population, but it baffled all Americans, three-quarters of whom said at the time that they did not know anyone who was gay.80 The president, uncomprehending, was slow to confront the issue, mentioning it only once publicly before the movie actor Rock Hudson, a friend of the Reagans, died of AIDS in October 1985. At that point Reagan sought out the White House physician, who gave him a full explanation of the syndrome. Still, the president did not speak about AIDS again until February 1986, at which point he asked Koop to draw up a report on the problem. Reagan’s budget at that time, however, called for a reduction in AIDS research.81
An evangelical Christian with a Dutch sea captain’s beard, Koop was a famed pediatric surgeon. Liberals, identifying him as a foe of abortion, had opposed his appointment, but he undertook a serious study of the matter and issued a no-nonsense report on it in late 1986. It estimated that 179,000 Americans would have died of AIDS by the end of 1991.82 The American people, he declared, must change their personal behavior. His remedy was, “one, abstinence; two, monogamy; three, condoms.” Koop called for widespread sex education in the schools, even in the elementary grades.83
Though some conservatives supported Koop, many others, including Phyllis Schlafly and William Bennett, the president’s secretary of education, hotly opposed his support of the use of condoms and of sex education. AIDS, many conservatives insisted, was a “gay plague” stemming from deviant homosexual behavior that violated biblical injunctions. Patrick Buchanan, who was Reagan’s director of communications, had earlier (before signing on with the administration) exclaimed: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”84
As Buchanan’s comment indicated, the rise of AIDS exposed already widespread American hostility toward homosexuality. In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld, five to four, a Georgia law that criminalized sodomy that involved private and consensual same-sex relations between adults.85 At the time twenty-four other states and the District of Columbia had similar measures on the books, all aimed against what some of the laws termed “deviant sexual intercourse,” even in private. Many Americans, especially older people and social conservatives, refused to jettison such laws; gay rights issues, like other cultural struggles at the time, provoked sharp generational and regional divides. Americans resisted a range of public health initiatives, including needle exchanges and televised messages about safe sex. In most areas of Western Europe, where such initiatives were common, the incidence of HIV infection remained far lower than in the United States.86
Attitudes such as these infuriated gays and lesbians, some of whom had been organizing to promote their rights since the late 1960s. As early as 1977, gay activists had attracted nationwide attention in their efforts to prevent the repeal of the ordinance protecting gay rights in Miami. Though they had lost this battle, the struggle accelerated the growth of an increasingly militant movement to promote equal rights. Gay rights activists were especially vocal in some big-city areas, notably the Castro section of San Francisco. By the 1980s, the Castro had become a virtually all-gay community, featuring gay bars, restaurants, stores, political organizations, and public celebrations.87
Once AIDS broke out, gay activists in San Francisco and elsewhere were so determined to protect their rights that they fought against efforts to ban gay bathhouses, which public health officials had identified as sites of dangerously promiscuous sexual behavior. Only in late 1984 did the activists lose this fight in San Francisco. Militant gay people also organized ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which staged a parade of 500,000 people in New York City on Columbus Day 1987. Spokesmen for the marchers demonstrated loudly for better funding of AIDS research and laws guaranteeing equal rights. Larry Kramer, an especially vocal militant, proclaimed that “AIDS is our Holocaust and Reagan is our Hitler.”88
The president, facing pressures such as these, went so far as to say in 1987 that AIDS was “public enemy Number One,” but even then he had not yet spoken personally with Koop about his report. Ignoring the counsel of his wife, he refused to endorse the use of condoms. From a widely awaited address in May 1987 to the American Foundation for AIDS Research, he allowed his speechwriters to delete mention of Ryan White, a hemophiliac teenager who had been ostracized in his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana, after he had contracted AIDS from a blood-clotting agent. By 1987, White had become a national spokesman for AIDS victims. Reagan did not meet with White until March 1990, fourteen months after he had left office and less than a month before White died in an Indianapolis hospital at the age of eighteen. At that point Reagan wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post in which he paid tribute to White and added, “How Nancy and I wish there had been a magic wand we could have waved that would have made it [AIDS] all go away.”89
As a sharp letter to the editor made clear, this was a belated gesture. Reagan’s leadership on the issue was badly flawed. Even so, his dithering while president did not seem to hurt him with the American people, many of whom singled out homosexual behavior as the source of AIDS. Attitudes such as these indicated that cultural changes can be slow to occur. In the 1980s, as in the 1970s, Americans were more ready to watch sexually titillating material on television and film (or to pay for dial-a-porn, which began to flourish on cable TV) than they were to consider frank public discussion of condoms or sexually transmitted illness.
These struggles over AIDS policies, among the bitterest battles in a host of contemporary cultural controversies involving sex and gender issues, were noteworthy as political phenomena.90 Later, in the early 1990s, they showed what a highly determined interest group—one that demanded action, and action now!—might ultimately accomplish if it besieged government, the ultimate dispenser of rights and entitlements. By 1992, lobbies like ACT-UP managed to secure from Congress $2 billion for AIDS research, prevention, and treatment. This was more than the government spent to fight cancer, which killed twenty-two times as many people.91 Still, popular American attitudes toward homosexuality remained predominantly cool during the early 1990s.
These attitudes did liberalize a little in the late 1990s, driven mainly by young people. Concerning homosexuality, as so many other controversies involving sex, gender, and race, the younger generations led the charges for change. The pace of movement quickened a little early in the new century. In 2003, the Supreme Court (in a six-to-three vote) reversed its decision of 1986 that had upheld the criminalizing of same-sex sodomy. In November of that year, the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided, by a vote of four to three, that it was a violation of the state constitution to deny same-sex couples access to marriage. The court set May 17, 2004—the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—as the day when such marriages must be permitted. So it was that grass-roots activism, interest group politics, rights-consciousness, and rulings from America’s ever more influential courts came together, however slowly, to advance liberal goals in the nation’s sometimes tempestuous struggles over cultural issues.92
DESPITE THE RISE OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC, a number of advances in technology, basic science, and public health in the 1980s encouraged optimistic visions in America. In April 1981, the first reusable space shuttle, using the orbiter Columbia, shot into space.93 In 1988, scientists introduced genetic fingerprinting, and later improved genetic understanding of such ailments as schizophrenia and cystic fibrosis. Per capita cigarette smoking, which had declined only slightly during the 1970s, at last began to drop sharply—and continued to do so for the remainder of the century. By the late 1980s, cities and towns began banning smoking from public buildings and restaurants.94 Other social trends that had alarmed Americans in the 1970s—record or near-record-high rates of divorce and welfare take-up—remained worrisome but stabilized during the 1980s. For these and other reasons, popular alarm that the nation was in decline, which had been pervasive in the mid- and late 1970s, weakened after the mid-1980s.
Optimists derived further satisfaction from an event in 1982 that may have helped to ease angry feelings about the Vietnam War. This was the dedication of Maya Lin’s innovative, widely praised Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Many Vietnam vets marched in a cathartic “welcome home” parade on that occasion, pleased to participate in the first important public commemoration of their participation in the war. Thereafter, the “Wall,” though criticized by some veterans’ groups, became by far the most visited Washington site. Two years later, many Americans commemorated a very different military experience: D-Day. Led by a triumphant President Reagan in Normandy, they jubilantly celebrated the fortieth anniversary of that militarily huge event, thereby reaffirming widespread patriotic feelings.
Notwithstanding healing occasions such as these, many Americans during the Reagan years continued to bewail the sorrier sides of life in the United States. As earlier, liberals demanded reform of the nation’s health insurance system. A combination of forces—the aging of the population, the spread of high-tech and often life-saving medical procedures (an area of R&D in which the United States outpaced the rest of the world), escalating paperwork expense, and rising expectations about what it meant to be “healthy”—were jacking up the cost of medical care, which rose rapidly from the 1970s on (from 7 percent of GNP in 1970 to 14 percent by 2000). Thanks in part to the weakening of labor unions, corporate health benefits were also in danger. Though Medicare offered partial insurance coverage for most of the elderly, and Medicaid assisted many of the poor, large holes remained in the medical safety net. In the late 1980s some 14 percent of Americans lacked health insurance. Conservative interests, however, opposed major efforts to expand governmental involvement. For this and other reasons, the United States remained the only developed nation in the West without a system of universal health insurance coverage.
