Part of the problem with coming to grips with any era of contemporary history is simply its recentness. Periodization tends to be convenient shorthand for historians, and little more. The past is broken up into manageable chunks in order to make it accessible to students and readers and in hopes of identifying certain trends. For more than a generation, historians in the United States have described the most recent decades of American history as simply the “post-1945” era, World War II representing about as clear a historical break as is possible. By the twenty-first century, it became clear that this postwar shorthand would not forever be sufficient. Consequently, in the American context, historians searching for a new end (or beginning) point for historical eras identified 1974: Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal, coupled with the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam just before the North Vietnamese descended on Saigon, provided a logical breaking point.
As if to validate this fast-emerging consensus, James Patterson’s first contribution to the epic “Oxford History of the United States” series, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945 to 1974, seemed to set that date in stone, especially after the book won the Bancroft Prize. Patterson further managed to give 1974 its imprimatur with his second contribution to the Oxford history, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. Patterson certainly was not the first to identify 1974 as a potential dividing point, but he as much as anyone etched it in the stone of historiography. Patterson takes the 1970s seriously as a historical period and hits on many of the themes that a recent generation of historians has embraced about the era: economic declension, the rise of conservatives, and a general sense of malaise—a word associated with a 1978 speech by President Jimmy Carter, despite the fact that he never used it.
Princeton University historian Daniel T. Rodgers, who has made a career out of writing ambitious syntheses of broad themes and eras in US (and global) history, has further placed the 1970s within their larger context in his book Age of Fracture. He compellingly argues that the last twenty-five or so years of the twentieth century saw Americans beginning to challenge bedrock values and ideas that had defined the post-World War II era, long characterized by a general consensus on a range of economic and political themes. In this telling, the 1970s mark the beginning of a serious fissure because of shifting sands in the marketplace of ideas. Perhaps most significantly, Rodgers barely addresses Watergate and Vietnam as central to these ongoing changes.
Joshua Freeman situates the 1970s (and, yes, 1974) as something of a fulcrum as well in his book American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000. For Freeman, the 1970s represent a tipping point between “the high tide of liberal democracy” and “the resurrection of corporate capitalism.”
In all of these books, however, the 1970s can come across as something of a staging ground for the 1980s (or as backwash from the 1960s, which have always tended to loom as a colossus over the years that followed them). The work of grand synthesis that best places the 1970s at the center of the story is Brown historian (and Patterson’s departmental colleague) Robert O. Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s. Taking his title from the zeitgeist-defining television sitcom of the era (although, perhaps strangely, not actually addressing the show, which could have helped him illustrate some of his largest arguments), Self takes the 1970s seriously on their own merits. All ambitious syntheses of recent history ask the same question: “How did we get where we are?” But Self lingers on the 1970s because he recognizes them as carrying so many of the currents that have defined the modern era.
Self emphasizes a number of topics that might today be defined as (and perhaps reduced to) the “culture wars,” unabashedly placing them at the center of his narrative. He sees a battle for what was once the liberal consensus as embodied in “breadwinner liberalism,” which firmly placed the family at the heart of liberal, not conservative, political dialogue. Yet surrounding these breadwinners was a cultural politics—of race and gender and sexuality—originating from the Left and finding backlash on the Right, with the “breadwinner liberals” finding themselves torn. Self effectively shows the trends among Left activists and how they fueled a conservative backlash, though he is better at depicting the former than the latter. Nonetheless, Self’s book is vitally important and does by far the best job of any of the syntheses of postwar American history in placing the 1970s at the epicenter of cultural shifts.
