Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (116 page)

On top of these problems came yet another blow—one of the most traumatic to befall the United States in the postwar era. This was the "energy crisis." Some observers had earlier warned that the United States was vulnerable if oil prices increased, but neither Nixon nor Congress heeded them. The energy crisis then shook Americans following the "Yom Kippur War" between Israel and Arab enemies in October 1973. The war exposed the limitations of detente, for the United States and the Soviet Union, rallying to their allies, seemed ready to face off militarily in the Middle East. Kissinger, acting while Nixon was asleep, impetuously called a day-long, worldwide high alert of American forces, including the Strategic Air Command. While it lasted, the alert was profoundly unnerving. Elizabeth Drew of
New Yorker
called it "Strange-love Day."
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A more enduring consequence of the war was the impact that it had on Arab leaders. Upset by Nixon's devaluations of the dollar, the currency normally used to pay for oil, they had already raised their charges, helping to cause worldwide inflation. Arab leaders further resented the United States for its longtime support of Israel. Retaliating, they imposed an embargo on shipments of oil to the United States. Two months later, in December, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised its charges to $11.65 per barrel, a price that was 387 percent higher than before the Yom Kippur War.
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The effects of the embargo, which lasted until March 18, 1974, and of higher prices of oil thereafter, seriously upset hosts of people in the United States. Cheap oil had been a key to American prosperity and economic growth in the postwar era, enormously benefiting major industries such as automobiles and utility companies, accelerating large-scale social transformations such as the spread of suburbanization, and stimulating the consumerism that lay at the heart of postwar American culture.
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With 6 percent of the planet's population in 1973, the United States consumed a third of the oil produced in the world.

The postwar availability of cheap oil from abroad, especially the Middle East, had also led the United States to rely on overseas sources. In 1960, 19 percent of oil consumed in America had come from abroad; by 1972 the figure had risen to 30 percent. Then, and suddenly, a more complicated world had arrived. As demand in the United States out-stripped supplies, domestic oil prices (and profits for American producers) increased substantially. Still, shortages persisted. Desperate car owners waited hours for gasoline—lines in New Jersey were as long as four miles—sometimes fighting among themselves or attacking gas station attendants. By the time the embargo ended, prices for heating oil and gasoline had risen in places by as much as 33 percent.

In some ways the effects of the embargo were exaggerated; oil and gasoline costs in the United States still remained a good deal lower than they were in most industrialized nations. But they were nonetheless traumatic for many Americans, because the embargo reinforced the sense of national vulnerability that had already arisen amid the frustrations of the Vietnam War. First, the United States was humbled by North Vietnam, the land that Johnson had called a "piss-ant country." Now it was shaken by the actions of Arabs, some of whom (as the Saudis) were supposed to be allies. The wonderful American Century that Henry Luce had foreseen in 1941 seemed to be collapsing early. As one scholar put it, the embargo represented a "watershed, sharply dividing the second half of the twentieth century into two elongated quarter-centuries—the twenty-seven-year period extending from the end of World War Two to 1973 (the postwar quarter-century) and the other twenty-seven-year period extending from 1973 to the end of the century."
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The impact of the embargo and of other structural flaws in the economy touched off unsettled times that lasted until 1983.
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In 1974 alone retail prices increased by 11 percent and wholesale prices by 18 percent. Unemployment continued to rise, reaching a postwar high of 8.5 percent by 1975. Real gross national product fell more than 2 percent in 1974 and nearly 3 percent in 1975. By the end of the decade the United States was confronting a "stagflation" that featured double-digit inflation as well as double-digit unemployment.

The ill health of the American economy resisted whatever cures policymakers tried to prescribe, thereby further stimulating dissatisfaction with government and with "experts" in general. Nixon conceded as much, telling Americans that "we are heading toward the most acute shortage of energy since World War II." Desperate for quick fixes, Nixon, Congress, governors, and state legislators called for thermostats to be lowered, cut back air travel, dropped speed limits, and accelerated the licensing of nuclear power plants. Funding increased to promote exploration of energy sources at home. The private sector did its part: factories reduced hours to conserve fuel; colleges canceled mid-winter sessions; commuters formed car pools or tried mass transit. Nothing, however, seemed to make much difference. And the profits of oil companies continued to skyrocket, hastening the already considerable shift of national wealth and power to the Southwest, but otherwise intensifying class and regional antagonisms.
THINGS WILL GET WORSE
, a newspaper headline warned,
BEFORE THEY GET WORSE
.
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I
T IS CORRECTLY OBSERVED
that Americans have a special tendency to dissect their culture, as if uncertain that their great experiment in democracy can hold together. Many of the would-be Tocquevilles who searched for the essence of the United States in the mid-1970s—and later—were almost as pessimistic as the headline-writer above. Americans, they said, had become discontented, fractious, alienated, and divided into ever more self-conscious groups that identified themselves narrowly by region, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, and race. Pundits thought that people were abandoning social concerns and becoming less willing to defer gratification. Tom Wolfe said in 1976, the bicentennial of the United States, that the seventies were the "Me Decade" in America. Christopher Lasch wrote a little later that the United States had become a "culture of narcissism."
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Jeremiads such as these left the false impression that American society and culture were suddenly falling apart. On the contrary, many features of American life in the post-World War II years persisted after 1974. As before, the United States remained one of the most stable societies in the world. Most Americans still held strongly to long-established values, including commitment to the Constitution, respect for the law, belief in the necessity of equal opportunity, and confidence in the utility of hard work. No Western culture was more religious. Not even the travail of Vietnam dimmed the certainty of Americans that Communism must be contained and the Cold War carried on, in Asia as well as elsewhere. These were among the many attitudes and values that flourished from 1945 to 1974 and that remained alive and well thereafter.

It was also wrong to assume, as some pessimistic liberals did, that Americans were ready to jettison the progressive social policies that had gained ground since 1945, especially in the 1960s. Racial tensions notwithstanding, the majority of people remained committed after 1974 to the civil rights statutes that had dramatically transformed the legal status of minorities since 1945. These were the most significant legislative accomplishments of the era. Americans also continued to support higher levels of domestic spending for health, education, and Social Security—in real dollars per capita and as a percentage of GNP—than they had in the 1940s and the 1950s. The rise of big government and of an expanded welfare state were major legacies of the period: social insurance payments for the elderly and disabled mushroomed after 1975.
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A third liberal legacy of the postwar era, advances in civil liberties, also survived the 1970s. Americans who had fought McCarthyism were highly pleased by what the Warren Court and political activists had done to breathe life into Bill of Rights freedoms of press, speech, and religion.

Some manifestations of postwar rights-consciousness, to be sure, had taken hold less firmly between 1945 and 1974, and they encountered damaging backlash thereafter. Advocates of women's rights, for instance, had done much before 1974 to change the nature of thinking about gender relations: henceforth, discussions of "sexism" remained at the center of public debates.
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But feminism lost some of its drive thereafter: ERA, which had seemed certain of ratification in 1973, failed in the next decade.
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And many minority groups, while enjoying larger legal rights than earlier, continued to face widespread discrimination, especially in jobs, schooling, and housing. They also suffered disproportionally from poverty, as well as from levels of violent crime and drug usage that escalated frighteningly in the 1970s and 1980s.

Nonetheless, many goals of postwar American liberalism, notably the dismantling of Jim Crow and the rise of federal standards in social policy, especially for the disabled and the elderly, were far closer to realization in 1974 than they had been in 1945, and they endured thereafter in a political culture that, while more conservative than it had been in the mid-1960s, continued to support social programs. These standards were considerably more generous than people in the 1940s and 1950s might have imagined possible. Backlash did not kill everything.

Another goal of many Americans in the postwar era, greater personal choice, also advanced with special speed between 1945 and 1974, especially amid the fantastic affluence of the 1960s. Age-old stigmas seemed to collapse. By the early 1970s people had much more freedom to dress, to wear their hair, and to socialize as they pleased. They traveled about much more widely and were exposed to a considerably broader world. They had far greater choice of film, television, and music, not to mention the means to exercise it. The variety of paperbacks and of magazines that was available after 1974 would have been unimaginable in 1945. These were not trivial matters. Thanks in part to the Pill—and, more important, to the rise of permissive attitudes in the culture at large—women had much greater sexual freedom. After 1973 they had a constitutional right to an abortion. Whether all these developments were "good" or "bad" obviously depended on the perspective of the viewer.
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Still, liberating forces in personal life had been rapid and dramatic, more so than in most eras of comparable length. These, too, survived very well after 1974.

Doomsayers after 1974, preoccupied with stagflation, sometimes tended to overlook the continuing strength of these important postwar developments and to focus instead on contemporary problems. Like many other Americans, they also grew corrosively critical of "experts"—whether in government, medicine, law, or business—whose "answers" to the problems had been oversold. The media, much more suspicious than earlier, exacerbated these popular concerns. Polls in the unsettled mid-1970s, however, suggested that Americans were about as content with their daily lives in the present, including the quality of their work, as they had been in the "nifty fifties" or in the booming sixties. They continued to derive special satisfaction from their roles as spouses and parents. As in most eras of human history, these things changed slowly if at all.

Still, the sputtering performance of the economy understandably alarmed people. As stagflation persisted, Americans expressed more and more open doubts about their ability to get ahead and about the chances that their children would do as well as or better than they had. Faith in upward social mobility—so central to the American dream—seemed to weaken. Some of the special vibrancy and energy of postwar American culture—qualities that had often astonished and delighted newcomers to the United States—seemed in decline.
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These economic difficulties were more damaging to the fuller realization of the still grand expectations of Americans than the Vietnam war or Watergate, important though those had been.
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For economic progress had been a tonic for millions of people between 1945 and the early 1970s. Gains in science and technology had helped to promote impressive advances in productivity, as well as a phenomenal spread of home-ownership, great access to higher education, and widespread enjoyment of consumer goods. These were goals that had only been glimmering in 1945. For all its vulgarity, the consumer culture that exploded in the postwar era greatly improved comfort for the majority of Americans. In so doing it partially obscured persistent inequalities of race, class, region, and gender.
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The vibrancy of the economy in the postwar era had indeed stimulated unprecedented and, by the late 1960s, near-fantastic expectations about the Good Life. These expectations, in turn, had combined with the civil rights revolution—a moral cause of transcendent power—to accelerate a rights-consciousness that had always been inherent in American democratic culture. When economic growth declined, especially after 1974, it did not kill these expectations or destroy the quest for rights: individuals and groups, having been empowered in a rights-conscious culture, continued to demand a wide range of freedoms, entitlements, and gratifications. But the sluggishness of the economy widened the gulf between grand expectations and the real limits of progress, undercutting the all-important sense that the country had the means to do almost anything, and exacerbating the contentiousness that had been rending American society since the late 1960s. This was the final irony of the exciting and extraordinarily expectant thirty years following World War II.