Nearly every book mentioned thus far has had somewhere at its center or periphery the Boston busing crisis that rocked the city and shocked the world in the mid-1970s. The searing images coming from what most thought of as “America’s Athens” reminded the world that racism in the United States was alive and well, and not simply a southern phenomenon. Conservative politicians, increasingly though not all Republicans, used Boston’s busing crisis as a way to stoke white ethnic working-class grievances, to make political gain, and ultimately to further draw those whites into the arms of conservative politicians who knew very well that busing was a liberal policy.
In 1985, J. Anthony Lukas published Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, which told the story of the Boston busing crisis and the context surrounding it, and which garnered Lukas the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It may well be the single best book written about the United States in the 1970s. In 1991, Ronald Formisano published Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, which was re-released with a new epilogue in 2004. Formisano builds on Lukas’s book and argues that a powerful mixture of racism, class and ethnic tensions, and the peculiar political grievances surrounding Boston neighborhoods fed the busing crisis. In 2008, historian Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America told the story of Stanley Forman’s famous (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) photograph of white teenager Joseph Rakes attacking respected Boston attorney Ted Landsmark on the plaza of Boston City Hall. All three of these books provide depth and complexity to an issue that helped propel white ethnics into the conservative camp.
The role of these white ethnics in shifting the political landscape is a vital theme in the 1970s. Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America provides a larger cultural history of the reemergence of white ethnic identity in the period after the 1960s, with the 1970s representing a crucial decade in this phenomenon that Jacobson identifies as “Ellis Island whiteness,” in which sometimes the emphasis is on whiteness (and the privilege inherent therein), and sometimes on “Ellis Island”—in other words, the ethnic identity that some will use to alleviate the privilege of whiteness.
Civil rights historians looking at the 1970s have also identified the ways in which the shift toward the Republican Party was motivated by race as well as by other issues. Kevin Kruse, in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, shows how whites moving to the suburbs certainly had a racial dynamic but also represented other important elements of the changing political dynamic in Atlanta (and by implication, elsewhere), such as calls for greater privatization of public services, vouchers, and other programs to challenge the public schools, demands for tax reforms, and a host of issues that increasingly characterized the New Right. Matthew D. Lassiter identifies similar phenomena across the Sun Belt in his The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Both of these authors show that suburbanization increasingly shaped the emerging conservative politics of the region’s increasingly suburban denizens.
Of course, there were always counter-movements to the politics of white grievance. Black power helped to shape liberalism. Even as some Democratic politicians tried to run headlong from the perceived radicalism of black power advocates, many liberals found that in the post–civil rights era, some of those demands were not actually all that radical. Devin Fergus shows how black power politics and liberalism confronted the conservative movement in his Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980.
Two new essay collections explore the rightward shift in American politics. One, editors Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer’s Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, consists of fourteen essays (plus an introduction and epilogue) exploring themes such as cultural politics, the rise of evangelicals, the youth embrace of business, gender, civil rights, unions, and foreign policy. The other, editors Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan’s Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Policy and American Politics, 1960-1980, investigates the long-range shift toward the GOP over a two-decade span, with the 1970s a vital period. Perhaps the book’s greatest contribution is that it moves away from the Reagan-centered narrative that has dominated discussions of the political shifts of that era. These collections serve as a reminder that even in the realm of politics and the move to the Right, there is much fruitful work to be done. Laura Kalman similarly looks at the politics of the Ford and Carter administrations, as well as the larger political culture of the era, in her Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980. As do many of the overviews of the seventies, her book identifies those years as crucial to forming the contemporary political landscape.
The most persistent of the chroniclers of America’s move to the Right has been the historian and journalist Rick Perlstein, who has explored in three massive tomes (thus far) the conservative ascendancy from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan. In writing that is engaging, sometimes thrilling, and with few pretensions of objectivity, Perlstein captures the era well, showing how conservatives went from the fringe of the liberal consensus to the mainstream in no small part due to the populist posturing that so many of the other scholars of the 1970s have emphasized. In Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Perlstein reveals the importance of Barry Goldwater to this cultural shift―an interpretation that places Perlstein firmly in the center of an emerging consensus about the rise of the Right. But Richard Nixon and especially Ronald Reagan were there at the birthing of what would become modern conservatism, and they are the two central pillars in Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. Perlstein is a savvy observer of what one might call political culture, as opposed to policy and politics per se. The author certainly can tell a good tale, but he oftentimes does not take the rise of either conservative ideas or their appeal to large numbers of Americans seriously enough. Furthermore, his well-publicized decision not to include notes in Invisible Bridge is problematic.
Certainly, the question of the rise of the Right will continue to draw historians of the 1970s. The question is not that it happened—that is quite obvious—but rather why it happened and what it meant.