Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (8 page)

The historian, confronted with so many uncertainties, often falls back on a favorite tool, multiple causation, to fashion explanations for the scourge of crime that frightened Americans in the 1970s and later. One important cause, it seems clear, was demographic: the coming of age of millions of males who were among the 75 million people who had been born in the baby boom years between 1946 and 1964. In 1950, there had been 24 million people in America who were aged fourteen to twenty-four; by the mid-1970s, there were 44 million.
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Men in their teens and twenties are far more likely to engage in crime than are women or older men. Similarly high rates of increase in violent crime occurred in some other industrialized nations, notably Japan and Britain, in these years—in part, it was believed, for similar demographic reasons.

A related cause was racial in nature. Millions of African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s were growing up in unstable families and in crowded, poverty-stricken, central-city neighborhoods. Angry about white privilege and discrimination, and anticipating futures of futility, thousands of these young people—mostly young black men—found a niche in gangs or turned to crime. The rates of arrests and incarcerations of black males far exceeded those of white males and continued to be higher throughout the century. Black males were six times more likely than white males to commit murder. Most of these murders were black-on-black, indicating that interracial hostility was not normally or directly involved. These caused homicide to become the leading cause of death of black men. (Among Americans overall, it was the tenth leading cause.)
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Numbers such as these, highlighted in the media, made it very clear that racial issues were linked to violent crime in the United States. Widespread popular awareness of this connection contributed to a sense among millions of Americans in the troubled late 1970s that the country was badly divided along lines of race and social class and that it was plunging into decline.

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Sex, Families, Stagflation

Though racial tensions and rising crime rates especially agitated Americans in the 1970s, related anxieties about “moral decline”—and about the “younger generation”—were almost as unsettling. Many older Americans complained that standards of behavior among young people in the huge baby boom cohort had been slipping since the subversive ’60s.
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A number of public school students seemed out of control. Many pupils apparently thought nothing of swearing in the classroom or within earshot of people on the street. Other young people sprayed graffiti on buildings, sidewalks, subway trains, and buses. Per capita consumption of wine and beer and use of cocaine and marijuana, much of it by young adults, soared to frightening highs in the 1970s.
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Then there was sex. Some manifestations of this eternally hot topic did not change appreciably in the 1970s. Informed discussion about a number of sexually related health matters, such as menopause, impotence, and venereal disease, was still difficult to discover in newspapers or on TV. It was even harder to find authoritative articles about homosexuality (which most Americans considered an abomination). Sex education (“health education”) in schools sparked inflammatory debates. Reporters were told not to use “vagina” or “penis” in their stories. It took the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s to push concerns like these a little more into the open.

But sex of a more titillating sort seemed to be advancing in the culture almost as rapidly as violence. Some central-city areas in the 1970s, notably New York City’s Times Square, became virtual Sodoms where massage parlors, live sex shows, porn theaters, and street prostitution literally confronted passersby.
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Commercialized, erotica sold briskly. Sexually graphic movies such as
Last Tango in Paris
(1973), starring Marlon Brando, left little to the imagination.
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Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying: A Novel
(1973) celebrated the “zipless fuck” and dwelt on scenes of meaningless sex between strangers. It sold 6 million copies in the United States alone.
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Sexual themes on TV, reaching families in the supposed sanctity of the home, became more explicit and widespread, in advertisements as well as in programs. In 1967, Ed Sullivan, emcee of the nation’s leading variety program, had told the Rolling Stones that they could not appear on his show unless they agreed to change the lyric, “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together.” Thereafter, standards changed with startling speed. In a scene on the popular
Mary Tyler Moore Show,
which started in 1970, Mary’s mother reminds her father, “Don’t forget to take your pill.” Mary, thinking that her mother is talking to her, replies, “I won’t.” At that time, this was thought to be a daring conversation. By 1976, the widely watched show
Charlie’s Angels,
which featured sexy young women chasing bouncily after villains, struck one critic as “an excuse to show sixty minutes of suggestive poses by walking, talking pinup girls.” Another critic quipped that the show was a “massage parlor in the living room.”
Three’s Company
, a sitcom that began a long and successful run in 1977, followed the romantic adventures of a young man and his two often scantily clad female roommates. Critics labeled it “Jigglevision.”
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Television hits like these reflected a sexualizing of the culture at large in the 1970s—the decade when the long-emerging sexual revolution that had surged speedily ahead in the 1960s shot still farther forward to become a mainstream phenomenon in the United States. This was in many ways a generational phenomenon that especially affected young people; many older Americans were appalled by the goings-on. Wider availability (by prescription) of birth control pills, which had been legalized in 1960, and of other methods of contraception helped to drive the changes. So did the rise of women’s liberation, which advanced in the late 1960s and 1970s. An especially powerful force propelling these trends, as it did so many of the cultural changes that affected the United States in these and later years, was the greater emphasis that millions of people—especially young people—were placing on personal choice and freedom.

Mainly affecting the behavior of young women, whose sexual experiences until the late 1960s had generally been less extensive than those of men, the revolution offered a bonanza for males, who discovered that it was considerably easier than in the past to find willing sexual partners.
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For instance, the percentage of unmarried white girls aged nineteen who had engaged in sexual intercourse had been around 20 to 25 in the mid-1950s; by the mid-1970s, it was still lower than that of white men, but it was racing upward, reaching nearly 75 percent by 1990.
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The age-old double standard, which had restrained the sexual freedom of women, was collapsing. As the critic Tom Wolfe put it, the “uproars” of sexual experimentation that had created anxiety in the 1960s became by the 1970s “part of the background noise, like a new link of I-95 opening up.”
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The journalist David Frum later added, “The 1970s blew to smithereens an entire structure of sexual morality.”
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Reflecting these trends, the Supreme Court in 1972 voted, six to one, to advance the right of privacy, by branding a Massachusetts law that had barred the sale of contraceptives to single people an “unwarranted governmental intrusion.” “Everyone,” the Court added, “including unmarried minors, had a right to use contraception.”
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Millions of unmarried Americans, relying on condoms already, scarcely noticed. On a more exotic sexual front, the porn movie
Deep Throat
(1972) became a hit. (With later videocassette and DVD sales and rentals, it ultimately made more than $600 million, thereby becoming one of the most profitable films in history.)
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Linda Lovelace, the star of the film, was featured as a guest on the
Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. Even more successful was Dr. Alex Comfort’s illustrated
The Joy of Sex
, which also appeared in 1972. Appropriately subtitled
A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking
, the book was organized like a cookbook, with chapters such as “Starting,” “Main Courses,” and “Sauces and Pickles.” By the early 2000s, it had sold an estimated eight million copies.

The shift toward a freer, more open sexuality in the United States was part of a larger trend that affected the Western world.
Last Tango in Paris
was made in Paris and had an Italian director. Comfort was a British author, and his book was first published in Britain. Still, the changes in America were sharp and significant, indicating that sexually explicit material was attracting a large and mainstream audience that no longer worried about being seen as sexually venturesome. As Gay Talese, whose book
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
(1980) explored sexual behavior in the United States, later pointed out: “What was special about
Deep Throat
was that it required people to expose themselves, to go into a theater, to be seen walking in or walking out. That was a revolutionary act in the 1970s.”
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In the late 1970s, resurgent conservatives, allying with women’s groups opposed to pornography, struggled to stem the tide of sexual material in mass culture. But the onrush of more liberal sexual behavior in the 1970s, the last pre-AIDS era, seemed unstoppable. Even in the 1980s, a decade of growing conservative presence in politics, liberals gained ground in “culture wars” concerning sex. Some of the old ways seemed to weaken without a serious struggle. In 1970, 523,000 unmarried couples cohabited; in 1978, more than twice as many, 1,137,000, did. In 1979, a
New York Times
poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans—twice the percentage in 1969—saw nothing wrong with premarital sex. In the same year, 75 percent of people said that it was “morally acceptable” to be unmarried and to give birth to children. As Wolfe wrote, “The ancient wall about sexual promiscuity declined. And it fell like the walls of Jericho; it didn’t require a shove.”
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Increases in out-of-wedlock pregnancy—or illegitimacy, as it was generally called at the time—were striking. Between 1970 and 1980 the percentage of births delivered by unmarried mothers rose from 11 to 18—and to 28 by 1990. The statistics by race were shocking: In 1970, 38 percent of black babies were illegitimate, compared to 6 percent for whites. By 1990, 67 percent of black babies were illegitimate, as opposed to 17 percent for whites.
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African American families tended to be fragile: By 2000, 50 percent of black families with children under eighteen were headed by women—compared to a percentage for white families of this sort of 21.
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Developments such as these helped swell reliance on public assistance—or “welfare.” The number of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the means-tested, federal-state program that assisted such families, rose from 7.4 million in 1970 to 11.1 million in 1975, before leveling off at 10.6 million in 1980.
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Funding for the program increased in current dollars from $4.1 billion in 1970 to $8.4 billion in 1975 and to $12 billion in 1980. These increases did not occur because the incidence of poverty rose rapidly among single mothers; as measured by the government, this incidence—always very high—went up only slowly. Rather, AFDC expanded because the number of single mothers, driven up by increases in out-of-wedlock pregnancies and in divorces, kept rising, and because activists—some of them welfare mothers, some of them liberals who staffed legal aid and legal services programs—at last enabled poor single mothers to become aware of their eligibility. By the late 1960s, many more of these mothers were asserting their rights to aid, and receiving it.

Americans who complained about the “explosion” of welfare claimed that the costs were becoming outrageous. Some critics of AFDC also emphasized that blacks, though a minority of the population (11.8 percent in 1980), outnumbered non-Hispanic whites who received benefits under the program.
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Mothers such as these, racists said, were lazy and irresponsible “brood mares.” These were exaggerated laments: Means-tested social benefits in the United States continued to be considerably less generous (as a percentage of GNP) than in most developed nations and remained far smaller than American social insurance programs (notably Social Security and Medicare) that benefited millions of middle-class people along with the poor. In the 1980s, moreover, conservatives fought against higher appropriations for AFDC, whose outlays per recipient failed to keep pace with inflation.
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But until 1996, when AFDC was dismantled, three forces prevented opponents from scuttling the program: the belief that the poor could not simply be abandoned; the power of rights consciousness, which was energizing the poor as well as the middle classes; and a gradual decline in the age-old stigma attached to bearing babies out of wedlock.

Whether the rise in illegitimacy was “bad” provoked rancorous debate. Many liberals, avoiding moralistic judgments, refused to agree that any one family form was necessarily preferable to another. Many single mothers, they pointed out, were better off without irresponsible or abusive mates. Struggling single women obviously faced obstacles in raising their children, however, and female-headed families suffered economically. The “feminization” of poverty, as scholars came to call it, was an abstract way of saying that families headed by women were three times as likely to be poor as those headed by married couples.
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Largely for this reason, the United States, where public assistance was relatively meager, had the highest child poverty rates in the developed world.
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A huge rise in divorce also affected family life in America. Divorce rates per 1,000 of population doubled—from 2.5 per 1,000 people in 1965 to a peak of between 5 and 5.3 per 1,000 between 1976 and 1985.
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During these years the number of divorces per marriage increased from one in four to one in two. Tom Wolfe called this the “Great Divorce Epidemic.” It was estimated at the time that 40 percent of children born in the 1970s would spend some of their youth in a single-parent household. After 1985, the divorce rate declined slightly, but in large part because cohabitation between never-married couples had increased. These couples, never having married, could separate without having to divorce.
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Why the rise in divorce? It was not because Americans disdained marriage. On the contrary, the ideal of marriage remained strong. Though people married later and had smaller families after the end of the baby boom, the vast majority of adults—90 percent—continued to say “I do” at some point in their lives.
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Most divorced people remarried and cherished hopes of a happy family life. A better explanation for the rise in divorce emphasized the implementation of more liberal “no-fault” state laws, which spread to virtually all states between 1969 and 1985, but these were less the cause of surging divorce rates than the result of larger trends in the culture. One of these trends, of course, was steady growth in female employment: Wives who worked often had greater economic autonomy than those who did not. As with rising rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, escalating divorce rates also reflected powerful cultural trends, notably the ever stronger attachment of Americans to personal freedom and to individual rights and entitlements. More and more, Americans came to believe that the right to divorce, like other rights that were becoming cherished in these and later years, could promote the acquisition of greater “self-realization” and liberating personal growth.
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