Restless Giant, page 6
Most city leaders did not worry a great deal about suburban aesthetics. Rather, they had to cope with deteriorating tax bases caused not only by the exodus of the middle classes but also by the flight to suburbs—and to the South and West—of many businesses. Other industries, notably in manufacturing, were laboring to stay afloat. All such companies had been key sources of property tax revenue and of jobs. Deprived of these resources, many cities struggled to support basic services, not only schools but also mass transit and police and fire protection. In 1975–76, New York City suffered a traumatic fiscal crisis that caused the discharge of some 3,400 police officers, 1,000 firefighters, and 4,000 hospital workers. Nationally aired, the city’s desperate straits symbolized the larger plight of urban America in the economically troubled late 1970s. Three years later, Cleveland, widely ridiculed as the “mistake by the lake,” defaulted on its debt.
In New York City, as in many other metropolises, the “urban crisis” particularly afflicted low-income workers and the “underclasses,” as contemporaries came to brand the residents, most of them black, of poverty-stricken central cores. By the late 1970s, investigative reporters, politicians, and others were graphically exposing the social ills of these “miserable,” “disorganized,” “dysfunctional,” and often “dangerous” “ghetto dwellers.” Some of these accounts were sensationalized, ignoring viable inner-city connections of extended families, churches, and civic groups that combated social disorganization. These accounts followed in a long tradition of scare-mongering exposés of the “dangerous classes” and of the “other Americans.” But there was no doubting that many people living in these areas confronted extraordinarily serious hardships, which stemmed from white racism as well as from structural flaws in the economy, notably the exodus of jobs from the cities.67 In 1978, Senator Kennedy warned of “the great unmentioned problem of America today—the growth, rapid and insidious, of a group in our midst, perhaps more dangerous, more bereft of hope, more difficult to confront, than any for which our history has prepared us. It is a group that threatens to become what America has never known—a permanent underclass in our society.”68
Kennedy, a liberal, sought to direct more federal resources to the underclasses. But many other Americans were frightened by the specter of disorder, crime, and violence that seemed to be threatening central cities. In 1977, a massive power blackout in New York City unleashed a terrifying spate of looting and burning. Within minutes of the blackout at 9:30 P.M. on July 13, a hot and sticky evening, looters—most of them black, many of them teenagers—poured into streets, especially in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Armed with crowbars to pry loose steel shutters and saws to cut through padlocks, they smashed windows and brazenly carried off merchandise. Police, their numbers seriously depleted since the fiscal crisis of 1975, tried to stop them but were hit by barrages of bricks and bottles. Soon the looters, gleeful and defiant, began burning buildings and pelting firefighters who intervened. The mobs seemed indiscriminate. A priest in the Bronx discovered that his altar had been stolen. “Soul Brother” signs erected as safeguards by black storeowners did little to deter the rampaging crowds.69
By the time the rioting subsided some five hours later, more than 1,600 stores had been looted, and more than 1,030 fires—50 of them serious—had been set. Damage was estimated at $1 billion. Police arrested some 3,800 people—compared to 373 who had been charged following disturbances in Harlem in 1964, and 465 who had been arrested in the city as a result of unrest that broke out after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. For many New Yorkers, the blackout of 1977 deepened a culture of despair that lasted for many years.70
Frightening though this rampage was, it was for many Americans but one grim sign of a much larger breakdown of “law and order” that had seemed to spread in the late 1960s and to peak in the 1970s. Murder rates, which had hovered at around 4.5 to 5 per 100,000 people per year in the 1940s and 1950s, swelled after 1963, doubling to 9.6 per 100,000 by 1975. They climbed to an all-time high in the late 1970s and early 1980s of around 10 per 100,000. By then it was estimated that the murder rate in the United States was eight times that of Italy, the next most afflicted industrial nation.
Record rates of other violent crimes in America—rape, aggravated assault, robbery—accompanied these increases in murder. The rate of property crimes such as burglary, larceny, and theft rose almost as rapidly—up 76 percent between 1967 and 1976—and also peaked by 1980.71 As early as 1971, many Americans were applauding the film Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood, playing a rock-hard cop who abuses the civil liberties of a psychopathic killer, welcomes the chance to blow him away. By the mid-1970s, millions of Americans, though beset by stubborn economic problems, were telling pollsters that crime was the nation’s most serious problem. They were also denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which had enlarged the rights of criminal defendants, and its ruling in Furman v. Georgia (1972), which had struck down all existing capital punishment laws.72
Why these dramatic increases in crime? Then and later, criminologists and others struggled to find the answer. Many correctly blamed an upsurge in drug abuse, which peaked in the early 1970s and incited violent gang warfare over control of the trade. Others blamed poverty, which played a role. But they had to concede that hard times in the past—as in the 1930s—had not provoked a rise in crime. Officially measured poverty rates in the 1970s, though serious (hovering throughout the decade at around 12 percent of the population), were a little more than half what they had been in the early 1960s, before the surge in crimes began. An increase in economic inequality that began in the 1970s, thereby sharpening feelings of relative deprivation, may have played a role in the rise of crime. But this inequality also intensified in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, when crime rates at last began to fall off. It was therefore difficult to establish a strong and clear causal connection between economic forces and crime rates.
Some Americans who joined the acrimonious debates about crime that persisted after the 1970s urged fellow citizens to work together in order to advance community cohesion and cooperation. Parents, ministers, and youth leaders, the argument went, should get together with the police to restore communication and order to their neighborhoods. Others came to rely on a “broken window” theory of crime. This held that city leaders and police must act quickly to curb relatively minor acts of vandalism in order to avert the proliferation of more serious crime. In the 1990s, many cities credited this approach with helping to reduce crime.73
Most Americans in the 1970s, however, were inclined to blame “softness” for the rise in crime. They demanded better patrolling of neighborhoods, larger and better-trained police forces, and tougher laws and sentences. The Supreme Court, having ruled in 1972 against death penalties as then applied, backed off and in 1976 allowed executions for certain types of murders, thereby setting the stage for the return of the death penalty in most American states. Utah executed Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer, by firing squad in January 1977. The execution of Gilmore, the first in the United States in ten years, was followed over the ensuing twenty-seven years by 943 more, most of them in southern and western states.74 But neither the reinstatement of the death penalty nor a decided trend in subsequent years toward tougher prosecution and sentences brought crime rates anywhere near to pre-1963 levels.
Still other Americans pointed their fingers at their country’s “gun culture” or, more broadly, at a “culture of violence” exacerbated by bloodletting in Vietnam and by a virtual choreography of mayhem, as they saw it, on television and in films. Would-be assassins, they emphasized, twice tried to kill President Ford in 1975. Films of the early and mid-1970s such as The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part 2 (1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Death Wish (1974) and its four sequels, which made the brooding Charles Bronson into a star, and Taxi Driver (1976) appeared to revel in depicting blood and gore and to highlight the helplessness of authorized law enforcers.
Violence on television, often viewed by children, caused special outrage among contemporary parents and media critics, who charged that it helped to unleash all sorts of evil instincts into the real world. The nation’s best-known historian of the broadcast industry, Erik Barnouw, agreed that TV was a major villain of the piece: “I can’t imagine that this constant display of violence would not affect [people] in some way. . . . We are actually merchandising violence.”75
Many years later, there existed no solid consensus on the causes of rising crime in America. Blaming guns, notably semi-automatics, did draw attention to a major source of violent crime (some 70 percent of murders in the United States in these and later years were caused by guns) but slighted the fact that the non-gun homicide rate in New York City, for example, had long been considerably higher than the rate in London. Those who pointed fingers at TV and film failed to recognize that America had always had considerably higher rates of violent crime (though not of property crime) than other industrialized nations. They added that just as much violence seemed to suffuse television shows (many of them originating in the United States) in other Western nations that had far lower rates of crime, and that the increases in crime that so distressed Americans in the 1970s had started in the mid-1960s, when such depictions in film and on television had been less graphic or commonplace.76
The historian, confronted with so many uncertainties, often falls back on a favorite tool, multiple causation, to fashion explanations for the scourge of crime that frightened Americans in the 1970s and later. One important cause, it seems clear, was demographic: the coming of age of millions of males who were among the 75 million people who had been born in the baby boom years between 1946 and 1964. In 1950, there had been 24 million people in America who were aged fourteen to twenty-four; by the mid-1970s, there were 44 million.77 Men in their teens and twenties are far more likely to engage in crime than are women or older men. Similarly high rates of increase in violent crime occurred in some other industrialized nations, notably Japan and Britain, in these years—in part, it was believed, for similar demographic reasons.
A related cause was racial in nature. Millions of African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s were growing up in unstable families and in crowded, poverty-stricken, central-city neighborhoods. Angry about white privilege and discrimination, and anticipating futures of futility, thousands of these young people—mostly young black men—found a niche in gangs or turned to crime. The rates of arrests and incarcerations of black males far exceeded those of white males and continued to be higher throughout the century. Black males were six times more likely than white males to commit murder. Most of these murders were black-on-black, indicating that interracial hostility was not normally or directly involved. These caused homicide to become the leading cause of death of black men. (Among Americans overall, it was the tenth leading cause.)78
Numbers such as these, highlighted in the media, made it very clear that racial issues were linked to violent crime in the United States. Widespread popular awareness of this connection contributed to a sense among millions of Americans in the troubled late 1970s that the country was badly divided along lines of race and social class and that it was plunging into decline.
2
Sex, Families, Stagflation
Though racial tensions and rising crime rates especially agitated Americans in the 1970s, related anxieties about “moral decline”—and about the “younger generation”—were almost as unsettling. Many older Americans complained that standards of behavior among young people in the huge baby boom cohort had been slipping since the subversive ’60s.1 A number of public school students seemed out of control. Many pupils apparently thought nothing of swearing in the classroom or within earshot of people on the street. Other young people sprayed graffiti on buildings, sidewalks, subway trains, and buses. Per capita consumption of wine and beer and use of cocaine and marijuana, much of it by young adults, soared to frightening highs in the 1970s.2
Then there was sex. Some manifestations of this eternally hot topic did not change appreciably in the 1970s. Informed discussion about a number of sexually related health matters, such as menopause, impotence, and venereal disease, was still difficult to discover in newspapers or on TV. It was even harder to find authoritative articles about homosexuality (which most Americans considered an abomination). Sex education (“health education”) in schools sparked inflammatory debates. Reporters were told not to use “vagina” or “penis” in their stories. It took the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s to push concerns like these a little more into the open.
But sex of a more titillating sort seemed to be advancing in the culture almost as rapidly as violence. Some central-city areas in the 1970s, notably New York City’s Times Square, became virtual Sodoms where massage parlors, live sex shows, porn theaters, and street prostitution literally confronted passersby.3 Commercialized, erotica sold briskly. Sexually graphic movies such as Last Tango in Paris (1973), starring Marlon Brando, left little to the imagination.4 Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying: A Novel (1973) celebrated the “zipless fuck” and dwelt on scenes of meaningless sex between strangers. It sold 6 million copies in the United States alone.5
Sexual themes on TV, reaching families in the supposed sanctity of the home, became more explicit and widespread, in advertisements as well as in programs. In 1967, Ed Sullivan, emcee of the nation’s leading variety program, had told the Rolling Stones that they could not appear on his show unless they agreed to change the lyric, “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together.” Thereafter, standards changed with startling speed. In a scene on the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show, which started in 1970, Mary’s mother reminds her father, “Don’t forget to take your pill.” Mary, thinking that her mother is talking to her, replies, “I won’t.” At that time, this was thought to be a daring conversation. By 1976, the widely watched show Charlie’s Angels, which featured sexy young women chasing bouncily after villains, struck one critic as “an excuse to show sixty minutes of suggestive poses by walking, talking pinup girls.” Another critic quipped that the show was a “massage parlor in the living room.” Three’s Company, a sitcom that began a long and successful run in 1977, followed the romantic adventures of a young man and his two often scantily clad female roommates. Critics labeled it “Jigglevision.”6
Television hits like these reflected a sexualizing of the culture at large in the 1970s—the decade when the long-emerging sexual revolution that had surged speedily ahead in the 1960s shot still farther forward to become a mainstream phenomenon in the United States. This was in many ways a generational phenomenon that especially affected young people; many older Americans were appalled by the goings-on. Wider availability (by prescription) of birth control pills, which had been legalized in 1960, and of other methods of contraception helped to drive the changes. So did the rise of women’s liberation, which advanced in the late 1960s and 1970s. An especially powerful force propelling these trends, as it did so many of the cultural changes that affected the United States in these and later years, was the greater emphasis that millions of people—especially young people—were placing on personal choice and freedom.
Mainly affecting the behavior of young women, whose sexual experiences until the late 1960s had generally been less extensive than those of men, the revolution offered a bonanza for males, who discovered that it was considerably easier than in the past to find willing sexual partners.7 For instance, the percentage of unmarried white girls aged nineteen who had engaged in sexual intercourse had been around 20 to 25 in the mid-1950s; by the mid-1970s, it was still lower than that of white men, but it was racing upward, reaching nearly 75 percent by 1990.8 The age-old double standard, which had restrained the sexual freedom of women, was collapsing. As the critic Tom Wolfe put it, the “uproars” of sexual experimentation that had created anxiety in the 1960s became by the 1970s “part of the background noise, like a new link of I-95 opening up.”9 The journalist David Frum later added, “The 1970s blew to smithereens an entire structure of sexual morality.”10
Reflecting these trends, the Supreme Court in 1972 voted, six to one, to advance the right of privacy, by branding a Massachusetts law that had barred the sale of contraceptives to single people an “unwarranted governmental intrusion.” “Everyone,” the Court added, “including unmarried minors, had a right to use contraception.”11 Millions of unmarried Americans, relying on condoms already, scarcely noticed. On a more exotic sexual front, the porn movie Deep Throat (1972) became a hit. (With later videocassette and DVD sales and rentals, it ultimately made more than $600 million, thereby becoming one of the most profitable films in history.)12 Linda Lovelace, the star of the film, was featured as a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Even more successful was Dr. Alex Comfort’s illustrated The Joy of Sex, which also appeared in 1972. Appropriately subtitled A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, the book was organized like a cookbook, with chapters such as “Starting,” “Main Courses,” and “Sauces and Pickles.” By the early 2000s, it had sold an estimated eight million copies.
The shift toward a freer, more open sexuality in the United States was part of a larger trend that affected the Western world. Last Tango in Paris was made in Paris and had an Italian director. Comfort was a British author, and his book was first published in Britain. Still, the changes in America were sharp and significant, indicating that sexually explicit material was attracting a large and mainstream audience that no longer worried about being seen as sexually venturesome. As Gay Talese, whose book Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980) explored sexual behavior in the United States, later pointed out: “What was special about Deep Throat was that it required people to expose themselves, to go into a theater, to be seen walking in or walking out. That was a revolutionary act in the 1970s.”13
