In the last decade and a half, a number of vitally important books on the 1970s have changed the understanding of that era. Indeed, several of the aforementioned syntheses owe their interpretive framework to some of these books and the ongoing work of their authors. The most significant early work, and one of the few early histories of the decade that holds up, is Peter N. Carroll’s It Seemed like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s, first published in 1982 and reissued in 1990 and again in 2000 (with a new preface). Carroll provides a comprehensive overview of the decade, working from the premise implicit in his title (and writing with little historical distance, critical or otherwise). The idea of the 1970s as a particularly bland, uneventful, or forgettable decade is in some ways the prevailing image against which historians of the period have been fighting for more than a generation, and Carroll shows that the image is false, if enduring. In his preface to the 2000 edition, Carroll argues that the 1970s suffer from “historical amnesia,” against which he fights.
It is perhaps no coincidence that right around the year 2000, the 1970s seemed to enjoy something of a revival among writers and analysts (and in popular culture, the sitcom That ’70s Show made its debut in 1998). In 2000, conservative journalist David Frum wrote a popular history, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), anticipating some of the trends to come by placing the 1970s firmly within the ambit of how the country got where it was in 2000. Frum anticipated the current generation of writers while at the same time revealing the view (“for better or worse”) that so many Americans held of that decade. Somewhat scattered in approach and more essay than history, How We Got Here nonetheless augured a more sophisticated approach to the decade of day-glo while levying a conservative critique of the decade’s cultural politics.
If Frum represents journalists turning their attention back to the 1970s, Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics marks a historiographical moment in which a professional historian provided his take on the decade with a trade press (Da Capo) in a wry revisiting of this terrain. For Schulman, however, the year that begins the break point in eras is not 1974 (a year that has often created a “long 1960s,” and therefore an unspoken “short 1970s” divide), but rather, the epochal year of 1968. This periodization takes from the 1960s what the 1960s (or at least the decade’s chroniclers) seem so often to have taken from the 1970s, and allows Schulman not only to show “how we got here,” but also to better place the 1970s within a historical context that sheds light on the years that preceded them. Carroll’s book (and others) notwithstanding, Schulman’s work occasionally reads like a first entry point in a historiography to come (a book on the 1970s that does not discuss the Iran hostage crisis cannot be the last word on the era), but it does reveal shifting historiographical terrain. Schulman was not quite a pioneer, but his book provided an entering wedge for much that would follow. His argument that the 1970s were not just important, but were the most important decade in determining what modern America would look like, represents a new beginning in studies of that oft-maligned decade.
Collections of scholarly essays often provide a representative sample of new directions in historical studies. Beth Bailey and David Farber (who also edited a well-received collection on the 1960s) edited America in the Seventies, a 2004 essay collection covering a range of themes, including historical memory, working-class politics, gender and sexuality (and their commodification), the decade’s sense of “despair,” punk and skate culture, and the intersections of culture and technology. As with many collections, the book is episodic, representing the interests of its contributors and forgoing narrative links, but it also represented work in progress and began filling in some of the decade’s gaps beyond the various syntheses that were emerging. In any given era, much of the emerging scholarship appears first in essay collections and journal articles, and America in the Seventies shows the ways that the decade had begun to capture a new wave of scholars.
Philip Jenkins in Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America takes a similar approach to Schulman, inasmuch as Jenkins sees the seed of the 1970s in the 1960s and thus rejects implicitly the “long 1960s” approach, seeing far more organic transitions in the era. He argues that ultimately, in the face of the complex and sometimes disturbing challenges that the 1970s presented, Americans opted for the sunny if simplistic optimism that Ronald Reagan offered.
Explicitly refuting the idea that “nothing happened” in the 1970s, Edward D. Berkowitz’s Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies is intended primarily as an introduction to the decade for those who did not live through it—presumably undergraduate students. He explores the “unraveling of the national consensus” that the 1970s represented through a crisply told story merging a traditional political narrative with cultural coverage, showing how Americans of the period tried to come to grips with the changes happening around them. Berkowitz believes this was more of an “informal era” beginning in 1973 and ending in 1981 than a “formal decade”—a distinction, perhaps, without a difference, except inasmuch as in the way that it places Berkowitz within a particular tradition.
Three recent books represent the apogee of this new wave of writing on the 1970s. Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies emphasizes the political economy of the era and explicates how transformational the changes occurring then proved to be. Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class looks less at political economy and more at socioeconomic trends that culminated in the years leading to Ronald Reagan’s election. And British academic and journalist Dominic Sandbrook’s Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right addresses some of the same themes as Stein and Cowie in order to identify how they led to the ascendancy of modern conservatism. In Cowie’s and Sandbrook’s books, the foundering 1970s economy, socioeconomic uncertainty, status anxiety, and cultural transformations merged to fuel a conservative backlash that manifested less in coherent economic plans to attack the era’s crises than in a politics of resentment. Stein pushes back against the “backlash” thesis in a work that is self-avowedly revisionist, and sticks most closely to economic matters.
Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive (complete with a back cover picture of John Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, from the film Saturday Night Fever) embodies the “long 1970s.” He breaks his book into two parts, from 1968 to 1974 and 1974 through 1982. At the heart of Cowie’s rollicking tale is the “working class,” an admittedly amorphous swath of the population. Cowie writes marvelously, weaving a tapestry that encompasses social, political, and cultural history. Readers get a kaleidoscopic view of the men and women who benefitted from the American economic engine’s growth after World War II, for which New Deal liberalism could least plausibly claim credit. But the social tumult of the 1960s that helped to fragment the New Deal coalition coupled with the economic precariousness of the 1970s meant that the white working class felt squeezed. It was this population to whom Ronald Reagan appealed, and which became the “Reagan Democrats” who have increasingly voted Republican, less because of economic merit than because conservative Republicans could speak a language that capitalized on their sense of being left behind.
Nearly as compelling, if less original, is Sandbrook’s Mad As Hell. Far more synthetic than Cowie’s and Stein’s books, Sandbrook’s sees in the 1970s the roots of the rise of the New Right. If this is not a particularly original argument, Sandbrook plumbs the secondary literature to concoct a generally graceful recounting of the ways in which conservatives capitalized on the growing discontent of the 1970s. He usually is quick with the compelling example and telling anecdote, and his title, drawn from the famous scene in the 1976 film Network, gets at his general tone. Americans in the 1970s were increasingly mad as hell, and the rise of the Right gave them an outlet that might allow them not to take it—the economic uncertainty, the sense of defeat, the distrust in their leaders—anymore.
