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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OliETWsZxc0 Your assignment is to watch the video and write out some feedback (no citations needed) to the four questions listed below. The goal is for students to connect the unit’s written lessons with visual depictions of these stories. To earn their full credit, please write somewhere between 100-150 words, per question, and answer all the question’s parts. The instructor may deduct points for repeated instances of unclear (non-college) writing. 1. What was this movie about? How did it relate to other material in this module? Did you know about this topic prior to learning about it in HIST 101? 2. What are the two most memorable things you took from this movie? What would you tell someone (educational things, please) about this topic had they zero knowledge and wanted to learn? 3. In what ways did seeing the movie’s events help you to better understand the stories laid out in the lecture and textbook? 4. What was your overall impression of this period? Who/What do you see as the most significant episode that scholars and filmmakers should continue to document?

 

America in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s

 

What makes this lecture challenging is we are looking at a wide landscape, a big mural, and trying to “take in” as much of the details and meaning as we can. The US changed a great deal between the 1950s and 1970s. This is true about politics, culture, race and gender relations, and of course foreign policy. Trying to understand how the 1950s, which were the most economically prosperous period in US history, would later become the 1970s in which the economy was ruined and Americans were more desperate than in modern times is our task for this week. We will examine a few basic stories and people that should help us focus our eyes on the most significant events that shaped these pivotal decades in US history.

 

Civil rights, and the broader civil rights movement, are one aspect of change that touched all people living during this time. One hundred years now had passed since the Civil War. Much of the country had modernized in both its technology and also its attitudes towards freedom. This was not the case, however, in Jim Crow southern states where blacks lived in less than equal conditions. It was not 1950 for them. Younger blacks, especially those born and raised outside of Jim Crow areas, did not know how much southern blacks had to deal with. The Emmett Till case during the 1950s, which shocked the nation and continues to upset students decades later, captures the urgency with which the civil rights movement took hold. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American youth who was on a summer vacation from his home on Chicago’s South Side, was kidnapped by two white men from his uncle’s home in LeFlore County, Mississippi. Four days later, Till’s badly beaten body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. A 75-pound cotton gin fan was attached with barbed wire to his neck. It was brutal murder.

 

What was the reason for this vigilantism? Were the two murderers ever punished for their crimes against Till? No, this was not the ways things unfolded at all. And race issues were the main reason for the story going the way it did. According to white witnesses, the young man named Till had allegedly entered a grocery store, bought some bubble gun, and whistled at a white woman who worked there. The woman’s husband and his half-brother became aware of this violation of Jim Crow etiquette and then decided they would kidnap and kill the fourteen-year-old boy. As one of the two later men publicly stated: “I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.” This was no cause for alarm in Mississippi during the 1950s. An all-white jury acquitted the two men in an hour and seven minutes. One juror commented: “If we hadn’t stopped to drink a soda pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”

 

It was in this sort of atmosphere that the federal government in Washington DC attempted to break the Jim Crow system that had grown during the one hundred years that followed the Civil War. It was not easy and many in the South resisted the effort as a second Northern invasion, this time over civil rights rather than ending slavery. The first major confrontation occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the summer of 1957. Eighteen African American students were chosen to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School to comply with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. This decision was extremely important to US History since it said that the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was not correct and that the Southern could not segregate its public schools. The state’s governor in Arkansas was known as being friendly to African Americans, but the issue was more about whether the federal government had the power (and should use it) to forces social changes on southern states. Governor Orval Faubus stated that if the black students were placed in an all-white high school by federal troops “blood would run in the streets.”

 

For three weeks, the National Guard, under orders from the governor, prevented the nine students from entering the school. President Eisenhower privately pressed Faubus to comply with the court order. When Faubus refused to comply, the president responded by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and sending in 1,000 paratroopers from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into the school.

 

An angry white mob assembled around the school. They hurled racial epithets and were hostile to the changes. Inside the school, there were still separate restrooms and drinking fountains for black and white students. During the school year, the African American students were ostracized and physically harassed. They were shoved against lockers, tripped down stairways, and taunted by their classmates. Not all the African American students were able to turn the other cheek. One was expelled for dumping a bowl of soup on a classmate’s head. The remaining students were greeted the next day with a sign that said, “One down, eight more to go.” Only one of the Little Rock nine graduated from Central High. In the fall of 1958, Governor Faubus shut the public high schools down to prevent further integration. The schools did not re-open for a year. This was the extent of race relations and also political tensions between the states and federal government during the 1950s.

 

Into the 1960s, the struggle for equality and the tensions it raised politically continued to evolve. So many people were involved; so many different heroes and stories of courage. Of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of these leaders. He had worked since the 1950s, into the 1960s, pressing the need for ending Jim Crow and making the U.S. more equal. It was a tremendous challenge for which he would earn the Nobel Peace Prize. Where did he march? The answer is that he was everywhere, across the South, where oppression and bigotry stained the landscape with fear. By the end of 1961, protests against segregation, job discrimination, and police brutality cropped up from Georgia to Mississippi and from Tennessee to Alabama. Staunch segregationists responded by vowing to defend segregation. The symbol of unyielding resistance to integration was Alabama’s George C. Wallace. Elected on an extreme segregationist platform, Wallace promised to “stand in the schoolhouse door” and go to jail before permitting integration. It was in Wallace’s state, in Alabama, that civil rights activists faced the most determined resistance. Birmingham had a long history of racial acrimony. Its people had decided to close its 38 public playgrounds, 8 swimming pools, and 4 golf courses rather than integrate them. King called Alabama “the most thoroughly segregated area in the United States.”

 

This was an area that Dr. King decided that he would march for the freedom and civil rights movement. It was a defining point in the 1960s and in US History. Day after day, well-dressed men, women, and children of white and black origins assembled in the city of Birmingham only to be jailed for demonstrating without a permit. On April 12, King himself was arrested; while in jail he wrote his now-famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” a scathing attack on a group of white clergymen who asked black Americans to wait patiently for equal rights. In early May 1961, more than a thousand of Birmingham’s black youth marched for equal rights. In response, Birmingham’s police chief, Eugene “Bull” Connor, unleashed police dogs on the children and sprayed them with fire hoses with 700 pounds of pressure. Watching the willful brutality on television, millions of Americans, white and black, were shocked by the face of segregation. More violence, unfortunately, would take place during the civil rights movement. In June 1963, an assassin killed a black activist named Medgar Evers: he was shot him in the back. A few months later, bombs destroyed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killing black girls and injuring 14 others.

 

The violence that erupted in Birmingham and elsewhere alarmed many veteran civil rights leaders. A peaceful show of massive strength could help to advance the cause of integration. This took place on August 28, 1963 when over 200,000 people gathered around the Washington Monument. The marchers carried placards reading: “Effective Civil Rights Laws–Now! Integrated Schools–Now! Decent Housing–Now!” and sang the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” The event’s highlight was an address by the Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the day he launched into his legendary closing words. “I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with people’s injustices, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” As his audience roared their approval, King continued: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

 

Women, too, knew great changes during the years that spanned the 1950s-1970s. Their roles changed in American society as they joined other non-white male colleagues in the public arena. An important figure to know from this story is Betty Friedan. A 1942 honors graduate of Smith College and former psychology Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, Friedan had quit graduate school, married, moved to the New York suburbs, and bore three children in rapid succession. American culture told her that husband, house, children, and electric appliances were true happiness. But Friedan was not happy. And she was not alone. In 1957, Friedan sent out questionnaires to fellow members of her college graduating class. The replies amazed her. Again and again, she found women suffering from “a sense of dissatisfaction.” Over the next five years, Friedan interviewed other women at PTA meetings and suburban cocktail parties, and she repeatedly found an unexplainable sense of melancholy and incompleteness. Friedan noted, “Sometimes a woman would say ‘I feel empty somehow … incomplete.’ Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.'” Friedan was not the only observer to detect a widespread sense of discontent among American women.

 

Doctors identified a new female malady, the housewife’s syndrome, characterized by a mixture of frustration and exhaustion. CBS broadcast a television documentary entitled “The Trapped Housewife.” Newsweek magazine noted that the nation’s supposedly happy housewife was “dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of. Her discontent is deep, pervasive, and impervious to the superficial remedies which are offered at every hand.” The New York Times editorialized, “Many young women … feel stifled in their homes.” Redbook magazine ran an article entitled “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped” and asked for examples of this problem. It received 24,000 replies. ”Why” Friedan asked, “were American women so discontented?” In 1963, she published the answer in her book, The Feminine Mystique. This book, one of the most influential books ever written by an American, helped to launch a new movement for women’s liberation. The book touched a nerve, but the origins of the movement lay in the role of females in American society.

 

During the 1960s, a new Chicano movement suddenly burst onto the national stage. Epic struggles arose across the Southwest to register voters, organize farm workers, and regain stolen lands. The Mexican American struggle for political and civil rights has received far less attention than the struggles of other minority groups for social justice, but it is, in fact, only the most recent expression of a long tradition of Mexican American labor and political activism.

 

At the beginning of the 20th century, between 380,000 and 560,000 U.S. and foreign-born Mexicans lived in the United States. Mexican Americans formed many organizations to address problems of poverty and discrimination. Among the earliest were self-help organizations known as “mutualistas,” which provided members with a broad range of benefits and services including credit, insurance, funeral and disability benefits, and often served as the basis for labor unions. During the 1920s, new kinds of organizations appeared which sought to assimilate Mexican Americans into the mainstream of American society and to combat discrimination in education, jobs, wages, and political representation. In 1929, these organizations united to form the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). During the 1940s and 1950s, LULAC organized voter registration drives and filed law suits to end school and job discrimination. World War II marked a major turning point in Mexican American history. More than 300,000 Mexican Americans served in the armed forces, earning more military honors proportionately than any other ethnic group. Veterans formed new activist organizations, like the American G.I. Forum and the Mexican American Political Association, to fight discrimination and end segregation.

 

During the 1960s, a new surge of Mexican American militancy arose. In 1962, Cesar Chavez began to organize California farm workers; three years later, in Delano, California, he led his first strike. At the same time that Chavez led the struggle for higher wages, enforcement of state labor laws, and recognition of the Farm Worker Union, Reies Lopez Tijerina fought to win compensation for the descendants of families whose lands had been seized illegally. In 1963, Tijerina founded the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants) in New Mexico to restore the legal rights of heirs to Spanish and Mexican land grants that had been guaranteed under the treaty ending the Mexican War.

Chapters of La Raza Unida, a political party centered on Chicano nationalism, arose in a number of small towns with large Mexican American populations. On college campuses across the Southwest, Mexican Americans formed political organizations. This new advocacy has strengthened the Mexican American community in the United States; Mexican Americans are more likely than any other immigrant group to have evolved a bilingual, bi-cultural identity that combines Mexican and American elements.

 

Perhaps the area that we best see changes to the US from 1950-1970s is in foreign policy. The containment and domino theories of the 1950s were applied directly during the 1960s and results caused people to wonder what the best role is for the US Army and its capabilities. Of course, I am making reference to the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. It was the first war to come into American living rooms nightly, and the only conflict that ended in defeat for American arms. The war caused turmoil on the home front, as anti-war protests became a feature of American life. Americans divided into two camps and the war really did leave a “bad taste” as America moved into the 1970s.

 

Numerous factors contributed to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam: the Cold War fears of communist domination of Indochina; a mistaken belief that North Vietnam was a pawn of Moscow; overconfidence in the ability of U.S. troops to prevent the communist takeover of an ally; and anxiety that withdrawal from Vietnam would result in domestic political criticism. So, too, did a series of events in 1961, including the disastrous attack on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the threat made by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to sponsor national liberation movements around the world.

 

The architects of the Vietnam War overestimated the political costs of allowing South Vietnam to fall to communism. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson feared that losing South Vietnam would damage their chances for re-election, weaken support for domestic social programs, and make Democrats vulnerable to the charge of being soft on communism. The North Vietnamese strategy was to drag out the war and make it increasingly costly to the United States. American leaders also grossly underestimated the tenacity of their North Vietnamese and Viet Cong foes. Misunderstanding the commitment of our adversaries, U.S. General William C. Westmoreland said that Asians “don’t think about death the way we do.” In fact, the Vietnamese Communists and Nationalists were willing to sustain extraordinarily high casualties in order to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. The United States intervened in Vietnam without appreciating the fact that the Vietnamese people had a strong nationalistic spirit rooted in centuries of resisting colonial powers. In a predominantly Buddhist country, the French-speaking Catholic leaders of South Vietnam were generally viewed as representatives of France, the former colonial power. Communists were able to capitalize on nationalistic, anti-Western sentiment.

 

The man most associated with the war is President Lyndon Johnson. He was the vice president who became president after Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, 1963. Johnson was reluctant to commit the United States to fight in South Vietnam. “I just don’t think it’s worth fighting for,” he told McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser. However, the president feared looking like a weakling if he backed down on the communist challenge in Asia. Johnson justified the use of ground forces by stating that it would be brief, just six months. But the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were able to match our troop build-up and neutralize the American soldiers. In North Vietnam, 200,000 young men came of draft age each year. It was very easy for our enemy to replenish its manpower. By April 1967, we had a force of 470,000 men in Vietnam. We were learning that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. It was just not possible for the U.S. to fight and win a land battle in SE Asia. It was too far away; they had too many people.

 

Despite the presence of 549,000 American troops, the United States had failed to cut supply lines from the North along the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran along the border through Laos and Cambodia. By 1967, the U.S. goal was less about saving South Vietnam and more about avoiding a humiliating defeat. In 1968, a year during which protests against the war took place daily in cities across the U.S., our Vietnamese enemy launched something the Tet Offensive. Communist guerrillas and North Vietnamese army regulars blew up a Saigon radio station and attacked the American Embassy, the presidential palace, police stations, and army barracks. Tet, in which more than 100 cities and villages in the South were overrun, convinced many US policymakers that the cost of winning the war, if it could be won at all, was out of proportion to U.S. national interests. The war was tearing the country apart and was not even winnable.

 

The Vietnam War left a deep impact on the US culture. No American conflict in the 20th century so tore this nation apart, so scarred its social psyche, so embedded itself in its collective memory, and so altered the public view of institutions, government, the military, and the media. More than 750 novels, 250 films, 100 short-story collections, and 1,400 personal narratives have been published about the war in Vietnam. During the war, popular culture tended to deal with the war indirectly. Such novels as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and such films as Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H, and Little Big Man were ostensibly about other subjects, but clearly reflected the issues raised by the Vietnam War. Movies like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, or Platoon created a swampy, fiery hell peopled by psychopaths. As one character in Apocalypse Now puts it, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Many of these Vietnam War films featured a scene modeled on the My Lai massacre of 1968, when American troops killed at least 347 unarmed civilians in a South Vietnamese hamlet. What emerged from these cultural artifacts are images of the “Vietnam vet” who is a troubled and neglected victim–a scraggly and deranged outcast scarred by unspeakable horrors. This of course does not speak to the truth, as so many Vietnam Veterans returned to their families, jobs, and communities, but it does hint at a new wrinkle that emerged in American society as the unpopular, costly, and failed war ground down to a halt in the mid-1970s.

 

Nothing, perhaps, captured the tumult of the period as does the Watergate scandal. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested after breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee located in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The burglars were not ordinary thieves. They carried wiretaps to install on telephones. They carried cameras to photograph documents. Four of the five criminals were anti-Castro Cubans who had been previously hired by the CIA. The fifth was James McCord, the security adviser for Nixon’s campaign staff known as the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP. Although the incident failed to make the front pages of the major newspapers, it would soon become the most notorious political scandal in American history.

 

In the heated climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon believed strongly that a war was being fought between “us” and “them.” To Nixon, “us” meant the conservative, middle- and working-class, church-going Americans, who believed the United States was in danger of crumbling. “Them” meant the young, defiant, free love, antiwar, liberal counterculture figures who sought to transform American values.

 

Nixon would stop at nothing to win this war of hearts and minds, even if it meant breaking the law. In 1971, a White House group known as the “Plumbers” was established to eliminate administration leaks to the press. Their first target was Daniel Ellsberg who had worked on the Pentagon Papers, a highly critical study of America’s Vietnam policy. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers — intended to be used internally by the government — to the New York Times. The Plumbers vandalized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, hoping to find discrediting information on Ellsberg to release to the public. Later that year, Attorney General John Mitchell resigned to head CREEP. The campaign raised millions of dollars in illegal contributions and laundered several hundred thousand for plumbing activities. A White House adviser named G. Gordon Liddy suggested that the Democratic headquarters be bugged and that other funds should be used to bribe, threaten, or smear Nixon’s opponents. After the arrest of the burglars, Nixon suggested the payments of hush money to avoid a connection between Watergate and the White House. He suggested that the FBI cease any investigation of the break-in. He recommended that staffers perjure themselves if subpoenaed in court. The Watergate cover-up was initially successful. Despite a headline story in The Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein suggesting White House involvement, Nixon went on to win 49 of 50 states in the November 1972 Presidential election against George McGovern.

 

This did not, however, end the story. A Senate committee was appointed to investigate, and Nixon succumbed to public pressure and appointed Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to scrutinize the matter. Complicitous in the cover-up, many high-level White House officials resigned including Nixon’s Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, and his Adviser on Domestic Affairs, John Ehrlichman. Nixon’s own personal counsel, John Dean, agreed to cooperate with the Senate and testified about Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up. In a televised speech, Nixon assured told the American public “I am not a crook.” It seemed like a matter of Nixon’s word against Dean’s until a low-level aide told the committee that Nixon had been in the practice of taping every conversation held in the Oval Office. Nixon flatly refused to submit the tapes to the committee. When Archibald Cox demanded the surrender of the tapes, Nixon had him fired. Public outcry pressed Nixon to agree to release typewritten transcripts of his tapes, but Americans were not satisfied. The tape transcripts further damaged Nixon. On the tapes he swore like a sailor and behaved like a bully. Then there was the matter of 17 crucial minutes missing from one of the tapes. Finally, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court declared that executive privilege did not apply in this case, and Nixon was ordered to give the evidence to the Congress.

 

By this time, the House Judiciary Committee had already drawn up articles of impeachment, and Nixon knew he did not have the votes in the Senate to save his Presidency. On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned the office, becoming the first President to do so. His successor, Gerald Ford, promptly awarded Nixon a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed while in office. The press and the public cried foul, but Ford defended his decision by insisting the nation was better served by ending the long, national nightmare. This was just another issue that had turned US History from a narrative of triumph in the 1950s, into a narrative of failure and miscalculations by the 1970s.

 

American History from Reagan to 9/11

 

By the late 1970s, the US was in turmoil. Following Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, proved incapable of restoring ordinary citizens’ faith in the government. The one-time Progressive idea that the US could improve the nation and world through a wise and honest government was severely damaged, and economic problems that were more damaging than current days racked the nation. By the late 1970s, unemployment was super high, the value of money was super low, and Americans did not feel great about the country. In 1979, when Iranian students took several dozen Americans hostage in Tehran, there was a feeling in the nation that the long nightmare that was the 1970s would never end.

 

This attitude was something that politicians discussed as the 1980 presidential elections rolled around. The man who emerged victorious was a grandfatherly figure who optimistically reassured Americans that the best days were still yet to come. Ronald Wilson Reagan understood the sprit of the times; his message, personality, and politics dominated the 1980s. Traditionally, working-class Americans, Southerners, Catholics, and urban dwellers had strong ties to the Democratic Party. The Republicans relied heavily on support from the rural Midwest, Protestant leaders, and wealthier voters. However, Ronald Reagan changed all that. He was able to build a new coalition of former Democratic voters and this is why his election is sometimes called the Reagan Revolution.

 

Economics and a fear that the country was falling apart pushed this movement. Working Americans were shocked to see unemployment rates nearing double digits. Inflation was pushing the middle class into tax brackets previously reserved for the affluent classes. Reagan promised to reduce their level of misery with sound fiscal policy. Southerners disgruntled by affirmative action and busing found friendly ears in the Reagan campaign. The endorsement of Reagan by the Protestant establishment did not deter devout Catholics from voting Republican, since Reagan promised to oppose abortion rights and promote family values.

 

Crime-plagued city denizens looked to Reagan for comfort as he portrayed himself as the law and order candidate. Americans across demographic lines were warmed by his promises for a stronger America domestically and overseas. Very quickly, these “Reagan Democrats” crumbled the old alignment. Jimmy Carter, his opponent in the 1980 election, never stood a chance. Reagan’s victory over the incumbent Carter was an electoral vote landslide. He tallied 489 votes to Carter’s 49. The Republicans also captured a majority of the Senate for the first time since 1954. The new President seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Within hours of his inauguration, Iran released the American hostages that had been held for 444 days. Dubbed “The Great Communicator,” Reagan had a smile and a confidence that comforted many. At the age of 69, he was the oldest President ever to take office, but he exuded a youthful vitality that obscured his years.

 

How popular was Regan in the US during the 1980s? Even an assassination attempt worked in his favor. When John Hinckley put a .22 caliber bullet in Reagan’s chest within two months of his inauguration, he took it all in stride. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he quipped to the physicians that greeted him at the hospital. His popularity soared. While he did have his share of critics, nasty charges that he had little control over his staff and a less than functional understanding of many matters of policy fell mostly on deaf ears. He earned a reputation as the “Teflon President” since no scandal could stick to him. In 1984, Reagan won a smashing re-election campaign over Walter Mondale. Democrat Mondale, running with the first woman nominee for Vice-President, Geraldine Ferraro, won only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. A 1984 Reagan campaign as declared proudly, “It’s morning in America.” Whether the claim was fact or fiction, American voters accepted Reagan’s assurances and enthusiastically cried for a second term.

 

Culture and society also changed a great deal during the 1980s. One major transformation was the new, expanded role of television. Cable television, although available in the 1970s, became standard for most American households. This change ushered in a whole host of new programming. Sports-minded Americans could watch the ESPN network 24 hours a day. Nickelodeon catered to the children of the baby boomers with youth-centered daily programming, and to the boomers themselves by broadcasting reruns of classic sitcoms at night. Americans could catch up with the news at any time by watching CNN. MTV, or Music Television, brought a revolution to the recording industry. MTV broadcast music video interpretations of popular songs. Beginning in 1981 with the prophetic Buggles tune “Video Killed the Radio Star,” MTV redefined popular music. Stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson were much more able to convey an image as well as music. Madonna’s “Material Girl” message typified the values of an increasingly materialistic decade. The videocassette recorder (VCR) allowed Americans to record television shows and watch them according to their own schedule and view feature films in the privacy of their own homes.

 

Perhaps the product that introduced the greatest change in American lifestyles of the 1980s was the personal computer. Introduced by Apple in 1977, the personal computer allowed management of personal finances, quick word-processing, and desktop publishing from the home. Businesses could manage payroll, mailing lists, and inventories from one small machine. Gone were the ledgers of the past. The Silicon Valley of California, which was the home to many of the firms that produced the processors that made these computers run, became the symbolic heart of the American technological economy. With the growing economy, many middle-class Americans rushed to invest in the bullish stock market and to flaunt their newly acquired wealth.

 

Young Urban Professionals, or yuppies, replaced the socially conscious hippie of the previous generation of youth. Yuppies sought executive track jobs in large corporations and spent their money on upscale consumer products like Ray-Ban sunglasses, Polo apparel, and Mercedes and BMW automobiles. The health and fitness industry exploded as many yuppies engaged in regular fitness routines. The hedonism of the 1970s was being re-evaluated. Many drugs, which were considered recreational in the ’70s, were revealed as addictive, deadly substances. As reports of celebrities entering rehabilitation centers and the horrors of drug-ridden inner cities became widely known, First Lady Nancy Reagan’s message to “Just Say No” to drugs became more powerful. Regardless, newer and more dangerous substances like crack cocaine exacerbated the nation’s drug problem. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was rocked by the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. Sexual contact and the sharing of intravenous needles most commonly communicated this deadly disease. With the risks of promiscuous behavior rising to a mortal level, monogamy and “safe sex” with condoms were practiced more regularly.

 

In foreign policy, the Reagan years saw the end to the Cold War. The unraveling of the Soviet Bloc began in Poland in June 1989. Like dominoes, Eastern European communist dictatorships fell one by one. By the fall of 1989, East and West Germans were tearing down the Berlin Wall with pickaxes. Communist regimes were ousted in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On Christmas Day, the brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were summarily executed on live television. Yugoslavia threw off the yoke of communism only to dissolve quickly into a violent civil war. Demands for freedom soon spread to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence. Talks of similar sentiments were heard in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Central Asian states. Americans were pleasantly shocked, but shocked nonetheless at the turn of events in the Soviet bloc. No serious discourse on any diplomatic levels in the USSR addressed the likelihood of a Soviet collapse. Republicans were quick to claim credit for winning the Cold War. They believed the military spending policies of the Reagan-Bush years forced the Soviets to the brink of economic collapse. Democrats argued that containment of communism was a bipartisan policy for 45 years begun by the Democrat Harry Truman.

 

Most Americans found it difficult to get used to the idea of no Cold War. Since 1945, Americans were born into a Cold War culture that featured McCarthyist witchhunts, backyard bomb shelters, a space race, a missile crisis, détente, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Star Wars defense proposal. Now the enemy was beaten, but the world remained unsafe. In many ways, facing one superpower was simpler than challenging dozens of rogue states and renegade groups sponsoring global terrorism. Americans hoped against hope that the new world order of the 1990s would be marked with the security and prosperity to which they had become accustomed.

 

The first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War presented itself in August 1990. Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, ordered his army across the border into tiny Kuwait. This was no ordinary act of aggression. Iraq’s army was well equipped. The United States had provided massive military aid to Iraq during their eight-year war with Iran, giving them the fourth largest army in the world.

 

Kuwait was a major supplier of oil to the United States. The Iraqi takeover posed an immediate threat to neighboring Saudi Arabia, another major exporter of oil. If Saudi Arabia fell to Saddam, Iraq would control one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. All eyes were on the White House, waiting for a response. President Bush, who succeeded President Reagan, stated simply: “This will not stand.”

 

In the last months of 1990, the United States participated in the defense of Saudi Arabia in a deployment known as Operation Desert Shield. Over 500,000 American troops were placed in Saudi Arabia in case of an Iraqi attack on the Saudis. The U.S. further sought multilateral support in the United Nations Security Council. Bush, remembering the lessons of Vietnam, sought public support as well. Although there were scant opponents of the conflict, the vast majority of Americans and a narrow majority of the Congress supported the President’s actions.

 

On February 24, the ground war began. This is when the operation’s named changed to Desert Storm. Although the bombing lasted for weeks, American ground troops declared Kuwait liberated just 100 hours after the ground attack was initiated. American foot soldiers moved through Kuwait and entered southern Iraq. This posed a dilemma for the United States. The military objectives were complete, but Saddam was still ruling Iraq. President Bush feared that the allies would not support the occupation of Baghdad. Concerns were raised that if Saddam’s regime were toppled, the entire nation could disintegrate into a civil war. Soon Iraq agreed to terms for a ceasefire, and the conflict subsided. This was the way thing stood for almost two decades more until 9/11 when the second Bush administration decided to topple Saddam’s regime unilaterally. No evidence ever connected Iraq with 9/11. This is something even GW Bush acknowledges. However, the idea that Saddam was a threat inherently and might think about hurting the US was cause for his removal under what became known as the Bush Doctrine. But that is the 2^nd Iraq war. Let us return to the first conflict in 1991.

 

Iraq’s military, under Hussein’s orders, plundered Kuwait As Iraq retreated; they detonated explosives at many of Kuwait’s oil wells. The cleanup and environmental costs were enormous. What were low, however, were American casualty rates: 148 Americans were killed in the battle. Interestingly, the 1^st Persian Gulf War was a major television event. CNN broadcast round-the-clock coverage of unfolding events. This was the place that newsman Wolf Blitzer got his big break. Americans saw footage from cameras placed on smart bombs as they struck Iraqi targets. The stealth fighter, designed to avoid radar detection was put into use for the first time. General Norman Schwarzkopf and General Colin Powell became household names as citizens watched their direction of the conflict.

 

The United States passed its first test of the post-Cold War world. Skillful diplomacy proved that the United Nations could be used as an instrument of force when necessary. Although Moscow did not contribute troops to the operation, they gave tacit approval for the attack. The potential for multinational cooperation was demonstrated. The largest American military operation since Vietnam was completed with smashing success. President Bush enjoyed an approval rating in March 1991 of 91 percent for his handling of Operation Desert Storm. As the Presidential race for 1992 began to unfold, many potential candidates were scared to challenge him and look to 1996 as a better opportunity. But once again, economic recessions reared their heads and battered the American economy. As growth remained low and unemployment persisted, some of the shine began to wear off the President. Not since James Monroe’s second term in 1820 had a sitting President been re-elected during an economic slump. And this was where Bill Clinton came along.

 

The two candidates could hardly have been more different. Bush was a hero of World War II and had extensive Washington experience, including heading the CIA, Ambassador to the United Nations, and eight years as Vice-President.

 

Clinton was born after World War II and did not fight in Vietnam, so he faced constant charges of dodging the draft. He had no experience on the federal level of government; he simply was the popular governor of Arkansas. Throughout the campaign, scandal after scandal hit Clinton. Charges of adultery were addressed on television. When accused of smoking marijuana in the 1960s, Clinton confessed — but added that he did not inhale. Rumors of a real estate scandal called Whitewater surfaced from time to time. Clinton was no “Teflon” candidate. Everything stuck to him, but none of it mattered in the end.

 

His campaign adviser posted a sign over his desk that read simply: “It’s the economy, stupid.” With a charismatic smile and a gentle, sincere voice, Clinton hammered away at the recession, and promised new ideas and a break with twelve years of Republicans in the White House. Additional problems beset President Bush in 1992. In April, the city of Los Angeles erupted into a five day looting and burning rampage that killed more than 50 people and claimed damages nearing $1 billion. The riot was touched off by the acquittal of five Los Angeles police officers for the beating of Rodney King during his arrest in 1991. A hidden camera showed the officers repeatedly beating King with nightsticks while he lay on the ground. Despite the video evidence, the jury found the police officers not guilty of using excessive force. The announcement of the verdict released years of pent-up rage many African Americans felt about the ongoing problem of police brutality.

 

All of these factors, the economic and social uncertainty, put in the air a mood of change. On Election Day, Bill Clinton beat President Bush handily in the electoral tally. Much of Clinton’s support came from baby boomers. Clinton’s victory marked an end to the domination of politics by the World War II generation. Americans who had come of age during the turbulent sixties and seventies now had a representative in the White House. It seemed like Bill Clinton had everything going for him. He had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate to work with him.

 

One of the first major initiatives he began was health care reform. Many Americans were concerned about spiraling medical costs. Medicare did not cover prescription drugs and only paid a portion of health care costs. Over 20 million Americans had no health insurance whatsoever. Clinton assembled a task force to study the problem and assigned his wife Hillary to head the committee. She became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. Powerful interest groups representing doctors and insurance companies opposed Clinton. Their proposal was defeated. This issue, however, would not go away. In 2010, President Obama succeeded in passing health care legislation that expanded upon the Clintons’ plan and modeled other public healthcare systems.

 

The Clinton presidency took an early hit with the healthcare defeat, but more pressing issues would come to the forefront. In January 1998, a scandal that nearly ended Clinton’s Presidency unfolded in the press. It was reported that Clinton engaged in a sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky during his first term. Although Clinton originally denied the charges, overwhelming evidence was presented that Clinton and Lewinsky engaged in repeated sexual contact, even in the Oval Office.

 

Republicans were outraged. An independent counsel named Kenneth Starr was appointed to gather evidence against Clinton. As the summer ended, Clinton admitted that many of the reports were true and that he was ashamed of his behavior. The House Judiciary Committee drew up articles of impeachment on four counts including abuse of power and obstruction of justice. Across the nation, Americans debated whether or not Clinton’s misbehavior constituted an impeachable offense. The House decided that two articles of impeachment were in order, and in December 1998, Clinton joined Andrew Johnson as the only Presidents to be impeached. In such proceedings, the Senate has the final word and acts as a judge and jury. Two-thirds of the Senators must vote guilty to remove a President from office. Clinton survived this final vote to impeach that unfolded along party lines.

 

As the year 2000 approached, partisan politics were as toxic as ever. Republicans claimed that they fixed the economy and Clinton got the credit. Regardless of who gets the credit or blame, the 1990s were a decade of very steady economic growth. The crippling budget deficits of the 1980s were finally brought under control, and Americans enjoyed low inflation, low unemployment, low interest rates and a booming stock market. This prosperity is the reason why many Americans do admire Bill Clinton’s leadership despite his moral flaws; the nasty economic atmosphere of current times reminds us of how difficult living in the US has been for the last forty years. What was once admired as an exceptional country, unique and alone, the U.S. has now become a global citizen in a world that it cannot control. The September 11^th attacks showed that things we do not understand could still hurt us. The country received a lesson in global geography, and learned that foreign enemies to the US are real and powerful. Whatever you feel about the war, the Bush administration tried to frame its argument in Progressive terms about making the world safe for democracy. They invoked the Roosevelt Corollary as well.  The war shows that the US is in a global playground and it needs to be aware that life is not always a fun thing like going to Starbucks and watching movies from Hollywood.