Chapter Content
Alright, so, uh, this is, well, it's kind of a long one, but really interesting stuff. So, basically, back in the, uh, mid-sixties, even high-up folks in the CIA and the Defense Department, they were, like, already seeing the writing on the wall with the Vietnam War. You know? They knew that just bombing North Vietnam more wasn't gonna work, and that it would only make things worse with the American public.
Like, this McNaughton guy in the Defense Department, he was worried about, get this, mass starvation! He was thinking about destroying locks and dams, and, like, understood that would be totally awful, but, uh, he was also super concerned about people at home getting upset about the war. Like, you know, students, minorities, women, all that. He was afraid they'd, like, refuse to serve or cooperate, and that it would cause a "domestic crisis."
And it's so weird, because he even said that the U.S. couldn't just go around "killing or seriously injuring 1000 non-combatants a week" and expect to get away with it. He thought it would mess with America's "national consciousness." Which, uh, spoiler alert, it totally did.
Then, uh, later on, this General Westmoreland asked for, like, a ton more troops. And some Pentagon guys were like, "Whoa, hold on." They pointed out that more troops would just Americanize the war, not make the Saigon government any stronger. Plus, it would mean more taxes, more casualties, and, get this, "increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities." They saw the link between the war and problems at home, especially, uh, the Black uprisings.
So, the Pentagon Papers, they, uh, showed pretty clearly that the antiwar movement had a real impact. Johnson finally slowed down the escalation of the war because, well, people were making a ruckus!
Even Nixon, who pretended he didn't care about protests, flipped out when someone picketed the White House. His actions against dissidents show that the antiwar movement was, like, totally in the back of his mind.
And you could see the public changing, too. Juries started letting antiwar protesters off, and judges were giving them lighter sentences. This Camden 28 case? These people raided a draft board, which had happened before, and everyone got, you know, prison time. But this time, the jury acquitted them! One of the jurors, this Black army vet, even wrote them a letter saying they did the right thing, healing the "sick irresponsible men" in power.
Then Sulzberger, this New York Times guy, he, like, admitted that the U.S. lost the war because they couldn't get enough support at home. That it was "lost in the Mississippi valley, not the Mekong valley."
Nixon eventually admitted, in his memoirs, that the antiwar movement stopped him from escalating the war even more. It was a rare moment of a president admitting the power of protest.
And it wasn't just about the war anymore. The rebellion was spreading to, you know, lots of issues, like women's rights.
So, this part is about women's liberation, and it starts by pointing out that just getting the right to vote didn't magically fix everything. This advice columnist, Dorothy Dix, she was saying that a woman's job was to, like, make her husband look good, you know, join clubs, be interesting. It was all about helping his career. And this study in Muncie, Indiana, it showed that people thought women were, like, "purer" than men, but also "impractical" and "emotional."
And the beauty industry? Forget about it! This writer in the 30s was saying that women weren't spending *enough* money on cosmetics! He had this whole list of stuff they "needed" to do every year.
The text says that women seemed to make the most progress when their skills were *actually* needed, like in industry or war. Then they tried to push them back into the home, which led to more struggle for change.
Even by the sixties, when tons of women were working, they still faced huge problems. There weren't enough nursery schools, they were underpaid, and they held very few positions of power.
But the civil rights movement, that kind of sparked something. Women were on the front lines, but they were often stuck doing office work. Even Ella Baker, this amazing activist, she knew that being a woman meant she wouldn't get a leadership role.
But, women played, you know, critical roles, and they were admired for it. Then you had Betty Friedan coming out with "The Feminine Mystique." It, like, touched a nerve with so many women who felt empty and dissatisfied. Friedan argued that women needed "creative work of her own."
In 1964, women went on strike against the men in the Freedom House because they just wanted them to cook and clean. It was like, everywhere women were feeling this.
By 1969, women were a big part of the workforce, but they were mostly in low-paying jobs. And if they were housewives? Well, that work wasn't valued at all because it wasn't paid. And they were being told to get back to work, after they served their jobs! Some women started thinking of housewives as serfs or peasants, because they were outside the economic system.
And women in those "women's jobs"? They faced all kinds of crap, from sexist jokes to, like, being treated like sex objects. This one commercial even told business men exactly how fast they should expect their secretaries to move filing drawers. I know.
This one woman in a factory, she wrote about how she got suspended for taking time off when her kids were sick, and about how everyone had to take nerve pills just to get through the day. But she also said that times were changing, and people were gonna start speaking out.
And times *were* changing. Women started meeting as women, and, in 1968, hundreds of them carried torches and staged "The Burial of Traditional Womanhood." There was some disagreement about whether to focus on women's issues or just join general movements, but the idea of a feminist focus was definitely growing.
Then there was this group called Radical Women who protested the Miss America pageant, calling it "an image that oppresses women." They threw bras, girdles, and stuff into a "Freedom Trash Can." Some women formed WITCH, which stood for Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, and they'd, like, show up at the New York Stock Exchange dressed as witches.
Poor women, black women, they were also speaking out about their problems. This one black woman said that having a baby was the only time she felt really alive. Without even talking about women's issues, poor women were organizing in their communities to fight for justice. They set up thrift shops, nurseries, medical clinics.
This woman Patricia Robinson, she wrote a pamphlet connecting women's problems with the need for social change. Dorothy Bolden, this laundry worker, she started organizing women doing housework because she thought they deserved a voice.
Women tennis players organized, a woman became the first female jockey. And by 1974, there were women's studies programs everywhere. Women's magazines started popping up, and there were so many books on women's history that bookstores had special sections for them.
After pressure from women's groups, President Johnson signed an order banning sex discrimination, and women started suing companies for it.
Abortion rights became a huge issue. Before 1970, most abortions were illegal, and poor women were dying from complications. Court cases started challenging the laws, and public opinion shifted. In 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion legal.
Women also fought for child care centers. And they started talking openly about rape and organizing self-defense courses. This book by Susan Brownmiller, "Against Our Will," it was widely read, and it called for women to fight back.
Lots of women worked to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. But it seemed that even if it became law, it wouldn't be enough. Action was what really mattered.
The most important effect of the women's movement? It was called "consciousness raising." Women started rethinking their roles, rejecting inferiority, and finding strength in sisterhood.
For the first time, people talked openly about, you know, menstruation, masturbation, menopause, all that stuff that had been secret and shameful. This book, "Our Bodies, Ourselves," it was super influential, with tons of info on women's health and sexuality. It was liberating to talk about all this stuff, and to connect with other women.
Adrienne Rich said that women were "controlled by lashing us to our bodies." She wanted women to use their bodies "as a resource, rather than a destiny."
But for most women, it was about more immediate things: eliminating hunger, suffering, and humiliation. This one woman, Johnnie Tilmon, she said that welfare was like "a supersexist marriage." She organized other welfare mothers and demanded that women be paid for their work at home.
The author finishes this section by suggesting that the liberation of women could be a key to solving everyone's problems. If women freed themselves, and men and women started understanding each other, they could find the source of their common oppression. They could create "millions of pockets of insurrection."
And that leads to talking about what was happening in prisons. If there could be rebellion in families, then there could be rebellion in prisons, too.
So, prisons in the U.S., they started out as a Quaker reform to replace those brutal punishments. But prisoners went crazy and died in isolation. Then they switched to hard labor and all kinds of other punishments. And this warden in Ossining, New York, he was like, "In order to reform a criminal, you must first break his spirit."
These officials would meet and congratulate themselves on how great things were going. But this was happening *right* before a bunch of prison uprisings.
There had always been riots. The prisons were, like, a reflection of the American system itself: the huge differences between rich and poor, the racism. And, like, Dostoyevsky said, "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
It had always been true that poor people, especially poor Black people, were more likely to end up in jail. Not just because they committed more crimes, but because the rich could get away with stuff. And when the rich did commit crimes, they often got lighter sentences.
So, this psychiatrist, he had just interviewed these Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to register for the draft, and they all got two years. Then he interviewed this young Black man who also refused to cooperate with the draft, and he got *five* years. The psychiatrist asked him if his hair and clothes might have affected his sentence. The guy was like, "Of course! That's what it's all about! Am I free to have my style, am I free to have my hair, am I free to have my skin?"
There was this huge amount of discretion given to judges when handing out sentences. In one part of the country, the average sentence for all crimes was eleven months. In another part, it was seventy-eight months.
So, with all this power in the hands of the courts, the poor, the Black, the odd, the homosexual, the hippie, the radical, they were not likely to get equal treatment.
There were, like, a million and a half people affected by the criminal justice system, and a study showed that more than 900,000 young people under eighteen were jailed in a year.
This guy in Walpole prison, he wrote about how every program was used as a weapon against them. And another prisoner said that he hadn't eaten in the mess hall in four years because it was full of cockroaches and maggots.
Communication with the outside world was hard. Guards would tear up letters. And this one prisoner, he sent two letters complaining about a beating, and the prison authorities never sent them out.
The families suffered, too. One prisoner said that a guard threatened to end all visits if any child picked another flower in the yard.
The prison rebellions of the late sixties and early seventies, they were different than the earlier ones. The prisoners in the Queens House of Detention, they called themselves "revolutionaries." Prisoners were, like, totally affected by what was going on in the country, the Black revolt, the youth upsurge, the antiwar movement.
The greatest crimes, they knew, were being committed by the people running the prisons, by the government itself. The law was being broken daily by the President.
Books about the Black movement, books about the war, they started seeping into the prisons. And this gave example of defiance.
This Martin Sostre guy, he was sentenced to twenty-five to thirty years for allegedly selling $15 worth of heroin, and even when the informer recanted, they wouldn't let him out. He was beaten and put in solitary confinement, and, basically, decided that the only answer was rebellion.
A new kind of political prisoner appeared: the person convicted of an ordinary crime, who became politically awakened in prison. These prisoners started making connections between their personal ordeal and the social system. They cared for the rights and safety of others.
George Jackson was one of these new political prisoners. He was in Soledad prison, and he became a revolutionary. And because of that he was shot in the back by guards.
The most direct effect of George Jackson's murder was the rebellion at Attica prison in September 1971. There was a long list of deep grievances there: guards beat people, their mail was read. Most of the Attica prisoners were there because of plea bargaining. The average time of parole hearings there, was under six minutes.
On September 9, 1971, the prisoners took over one of the prison yards, and forty guards were taken as hostages. The prisoners set up this incredible community in the yard. There wasn't, the press said, there was no racism.
After five days, the state attacked the prison, and prison guards went in there guns firing. And the first stories given the press were lies, the nine guards that were held hostage, the administration said, had their throats slashed. When really they were dead in the same hail of bullets that killed the prisoners.
One prisoner at Norfolk prison, he talked about his friend that got his cell raided. And wrote, "Looking at those troops, with guns, and masks and clubs, with the moon shining off the helmets and the hate that you could see in their faces. Thinking that this is where these guys live."
Also happening was the organization of prisoners-the caring of prisoners for one another, the attempt to take the hatred and anger of individual rebellion and turn it into collective effort for change. What also happened was that outside, groups were organized to support the prison movement.
One Thanksgiving Day there, most of the prisoners refused to eat the special holiday meal, saying they wanted to bring attention to the hungry all over the United States.
Even where an occasional "victory" came in the courts it turned out, on close reading, to leave things not much different. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional certain mail censorship regulations. The decision allowed for censorship if the censorship could be said to "further an important or substantial government interest."
In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that the news media do not have guaranteed rights of access to jails and prisons. It ruled also that prison authorities could forbid inmates to speak to one another, assemble, or spread literature about the formation of a prisoners' union.
It became clear-and prisoners seemed to know this from the start- that their condition would not be changed by law, but by protest, organization, resistance, the creation of their own culture, their own literature, the building of links with people on the outside. In the mid-seventies, all this was beginning to happen.
It was a time of upsurge. Women, guarded in their very homes, rebelled. Prisoners, put out of sight and behind bars, rebelled. The greatest surprise was still to come.
It was thought that the Indians, once the only occupants of the continent, then pushed back and annihilated by the white invaders, would not be heard from again. The Indian tribes, attacked, subdued, starved out, had been divided up by putting them on reservations where they lived in poverty.
But then the population began to grow again, as if a plant left to the refused to do so, began to flourish.
As the civil rights and antiwar movements developed in the 1960s, Indians were already gathering their energy for resistance, thinking about how to change their situation, beginning to organize.
Around this time, Indians began to approach the United States government on treaties. President Lyndon Johnson talked about America's "commitments," and President Nixon talked about Russia's failure to respect treaties. He said: "Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these statements." The United States government had signed more than four hundred treaties with Indians and violated every single one.
Resistance was already taking shape in various parts of the country. In the state of Washington, there was an old treaty taking land from the Indians but leaving them fishing rights. This became unpopular as the white population grew and wanted the fishing areas exclusively for themselves. When state courts closed river areas to Indian fishermen, in 1964, Indians had "fish-ins."
Indians fought back not only with physical resistance, but also with the artifacts of white culture-books, words, newspapers.
In 1969, there took place a dramatic event which focused attention on Indian grievances as nothing else had. It burst through the invisibility of previous local Indian protests and declared to the entire world that the Indians still lived and would fight for their rights. On that day, seventy-eight Indians landed on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and occupied the island. The group called themselves "Indians of All Tribes" and issued a proclamation, "We Hold the Rock." In it they offered to buy Alcatraz in glass beads and red cloth, the price paid Indians for Manhattan Island over three hundred years earlier.
They also made it a center for Native American Studies for Ecology. In the months that followed, the government cut off telephones, electricity, and water to Alcatraz Island. Six months later, federal forces invaded the island and physically removed the Indians living there.
The Hopi Indians were also affected by the Peabody operations. They wrote to President Nixon in protest. One said, "Today the sacred lands where the Hopi live are being desecrated by men who seek coal and water from our soil that they may create more power for the whiteman's cities.The Great Spirit said not to take from the Earth-not to destroy living things. ."
A magazine called La Raza, one of the countless local publications coming out of the movements of those years, told about the Pit River Indians of northern California. Sixty Pit Indians occupied land they said belonged to them. To the federal marshals they asked the government by what treaty it claimed the land.
To us it was beautiful. It was the beginning of our school. The meeting place. Home for our homeless. A sanctuary for those needing rest. Our church. Our headquarters. Our business office. Our symbol of approaching freedom. And it still stands.
Indians who had been in the Vietnam war made connections. At the "Winter Soldier Investigations" in Detroit, an Oklahoma Indian named Evan Haney told about his experiences.
In 1969, at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars, Indians spoke indignantly of either the ignoring or the insulting of Indians in textbooks given to little children all over the United States. That year the Indian Historian Press was founded. It evaluated four hundred textbooks in elementary and secondary schools and found that not one of them gave an accurate depiction of the Indian.
On Thanksgiving Day 1970, the authorities decided to do something different: invite an Indian to make the celebratory speech. They found a Wampanoag Indian named Frank James and asked him to speak. But when they saw the speech he was about to deliver, they decided they did not want it.
In March of 1973 came a powerful affirmation that the Indians of North America were still alive. On the site of the 1890 massacre, on Pine Ridge reservation, several hundred Ogallala Sioux and friends returned to the village of Wounded Knee to occupy it as a symbol of the demand for Indian land, Indian rights. The history of that event, in the words of the participants, has been captured in a rare book published by Akwesasne Notes (Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973).
On February 27, 1973, about three hundred Ogallala Sioux, many of them members of the new militant organization called the American Indian Movement (AIM), entered the village of Wounded Knee and declared it liberated territory. Within hours, more than two hundred FBI agents, federal marshals, and police of the Bureau of Indian Affairs surrounded and blockaded the town.
Messages of support had come to Wounded Knee from Australia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, England. One message came from some of the Attica brothers, two of whom were Indians: "You fight for our Earth Mother and Her Children. Our spirits fight with you!" Wallace Black Elk replied: "Little Wounded Knee is turned into a giant world."
After Wounded Knee, in spite of the deaths, the trials, the use of the police and courts to try to break the movement, the Native American movement continued.
So, that bit shows how Indians were still fighting back, how they were occupying Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, and how they were using books and newspapers to tell their stories.
Alright, so then we get to the thing of the overall changes in the sixties and seventies. It was not just a women's movement, a prisoner's movement, an Indian movement. There was general revolt against oppressive, artificial, previously unquestioned ways of living. It touched every aspect of personal life.
Sexual behavior went through startling changes. Premarital sex was no longer a matter for silence. Men and women lived together outside of marriage, and struggled for words to describe the other person when introduced: "I want you to meet my . . . friend."
All this was connected with new living arrangements. Especially among young people, communal living arrangements flourished. The most important thing about dress in the cultural change of the sixties was the greater informality. There was a new popular music of protest.
The Catholic upsurge against the war was part of a general revolt inside the Catholic Church. There was a new suspicion of big business, of profiteering as the motive for ruining the environment. There was a reexamination of the "death industry," of moneymaking funerals and profitable tombstones.
With the loss of faith in big powers-business, government, religion-there arose a stronger belief in self, whether individual or collective. There was suspicion of the medical industry and campaigns against chemical preservatives, valueless foods, advertising. Traditional education began to be reexamined.
Never in American history had more movements for change been concentrated in so short a span of years. But the system had learned a good deal about the control of people, by then.
In the seventies, the system seemed out of control-it could not hold the loyalty of the public. As early as 1970, "trust in government" was low in every section of the population. Political scientists noted "widespread, basic discontent and political alienation." More voters than ever before refused to identify themselves as either Democrats or Republicans.
The courts, the juries, and even judges were not behaving as usual. Juries were acquitting radicals: Angela Davis, an acknowledged Communist, was acquitted by an all-white jury on the West Coast.
Undoubtedly, much of this national mood of hostility to government and business came out of the Vietnam war. On top of this came the political disgrace of the Nixon administration in the scandals that came to be known by the one-word label "Watergate."
It began during the presidential campaign in June of 1972, when five burglars, carrying wiretapping and photo equipment, were caught in the act of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The Watergate scandal had linked important officials in Nixon's campaign committee, to the CIA, and to Nixon's Attorney General. Nixon denied any connection with the burglary.
What followed was that, one after another, lesser officials of the Nixon administration, fearing prosecution, began to talk. One scandal that followed another, for this Attorney General had controlled secret funds for things, this oil corporation donated to his campaign. There was no end in sight to scandals, the president had it all on tape, and the public was in uproar.
Out of this political corruption, Nixon resigned.
Gerald Ford, taking Nixon's office, said: "Our long national nightmare is over." Newspapers, whether they had been for or against Nixon, liberal or conservative, celebrated the successful, peaceful culmination of the Watergate crisis. "The system is working," said a long-time strong critic of the Vietnam war, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis.
But: "The elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal."
With Gerald Ford nominated for President, there was "an almost startling consensus of conciliation." The country was looking for the same, just less political scandal. The charges brought by the House Committee on Impeachment against Nixon, it seemed clear that the committee did not want to emphasize those elements in his behavior which were found in other Presidents and which might be repeated in the future.
The word was out: get rid of Nixon, but keep the system. Theodore Sorensen, who had been an adviser to President Kennedy, wrote: "The underlying causes of the gross misconduct in our law-enforcement system now being revealed are largely personal, not institutional. Save the barrel."
Indeed, the barrel was saved. And a Supreme Court decision in July 1974. The Court said Nixon had to turn over his White House tapes to the special Watergate prosecutor. But at the same time it affirmed "the confidentiality of Presidential communications."
After all these investigations and trials. the corporations got off easy. Also, the investigations themselves revealed the limits of government willingness to probe into such activities.
Thus, in 1974-1975, the system was acting to purge the country of its rascals and restore it to a healthy, or at least to an acceptable, state. The resignation of Nixon, the succession of Ford, the exposure of bad deeds by the FBI and CIA-all aimed to regain the badly damaged confidence of the American people. However, even with these strenuous efforts, there were still many signs in the American public of suspicion, even hostility, to the leaders of government, military, big business.
The problem, according to one analyst, was not the United States' behavior, but the way this behavior was presented to the world. There were signs that the military power could not be enforced anymore in a traditional way.
Then came the Mayaguez affair, where the American army bombed neutral ships with a neutral territory and killed many.
The answer to this came soon: It was necessary to show the world that giant America, defeated by tiny Vietnam, was still powerful and resolute.
What seemed to be happening was that the Establishment-Republicans, Democrats, newspapers, television-was closing ranks behind Ford and Kissinger, and behind the idea that American authority must be asserted everywhere in the world.
To show "that the U.S. had been seeking since the collapse of allied governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia." the Mayaguez affair.
The New York Times reported this incident as an indication of "admirable efficiency."
Congressmen, Democrats as well as Republicans, who had been critical of the Vietnam war now seemed anxious to pull things together in a unified show of strength to the rest of the world.
The investigations into crimes by the FBI, well, they also revealed the limits of government willingness to probe into such activities. The Church Committee, set up by the Senate, conducted its investigations with the cooperation of the agencies being investigated and, indeed, submitted its findings on the CIA to the CTA to see if there was material that the Agency wanted omitted.
The Pike Committee, set up in the House of Representatives, made no such agreement with the CIA or FBI, and when it issued its final report, the same House that had authorized its investigation voted to keep the report secret.
Again there was cooperation between the mass media and the government in instances of "national security."
By and large, there seemed to be an understanding that what was done in secret should still continue, if by other methods.
The Carter administration was attempting to make liberal foreign policies in order to hide something else.
It was a time of turmoil for American society. Even with these efforts to put on a good image, there were still many signs in the American public of suspicion, even hostility, to the leaders of government, military, big business.
A New York Times survey showed "a substantial decline in optimism about the future." The public's confidence in the Government and in the country's economic future is lower than it has ever been.
Government statistics suggested the reasons.
In 1976, as a time of a presidential election approaching, there was worry in the Establishment about the public's faith in the system. "When "so much of the world is lurching towards socialism or totalitarianism," it was urgent to make the American business system understood, because "private enterprise is losing by default," so says that politician.
In the Trilateral Commission's report, there was a lot of concern. In it was said, "The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private." "Produced problems for the governability of democracy." In all of this, "Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President."
The President, to win the election, needed the support of a broad coalition of people. “What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions in a society and government."
In short, there had developed "an excess of democracy," and was suggested "desirable limits to the extension of political democracy."
As for tri-continental capitalism, what was needed was revolutionary movements in the Third World.
1976 was not only a presidential election year-it was the much-anticipated year of the bicentennial celebration. This may have been seen as a way of restoring American patriotism, invoking the symbols of history to unite people and government.
When the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party was celebrated in Boston, an enormous crowd turned out, not for the official celebration, but for the "People's Si-Centennial" counter celebration.
The result: there seemed to be limits to power in America.
So, to summarize this point, it was a general effort to create a new society in America. The public at the time was upset, and those in power sought to control it.
Alright, and then, the last bit is all about Carter, Reagan, and Bush, and this idea of a "bipartisan consensus."
Halfway through the twentieth century, the historian Richard Hofstadter, in his book The American Political Tradition, examined our important national leaders, from Jefferson and Jackson to Herbert Hoover and the two Roosevelts. Hofstadter concluded that "the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise."
The "American political tradition" held fast. In recognition of this, voters stayed away from the polls in large numbers, or voted without enthusiasm. More and more they declared, if only by nonparticipation, their alienation from the political system.
But to those who think there should be protest, those people are ignored by the leaders.
The presidency of Jimmy Carter, covering the years 1977 to 1980, seemed an attempt by one part of the Establishment, that represented in the Democratic party, to recapture a disillusioned citizenry.
"We give President Nixon our backing and support-whether or not we agree with specific decisions," said Jimmy Carter on the war. The American government declined to aid Vietnam after the damage the American army had caused it in war.
After all of this, it was a time in which American government was doing great evil to the world and not caring for those it was doing it to. This can be seen in places like El Salvador, where President Carter gave 5.7 million in credit for military purposes.
Carter made some efforts to hold onto social programs, but this was undermined by his very large military budgets. The anti-American feelings of the revolutionaries reached a high point after President Carter allowed the old king of Iran to live in America for medical reasons.
And the press played into this hysteria.
That fact, and the economic distress felt by many, were largely responsible for Carter's defeat.
That the Republican leadership took to power, with those like Ronald Reagan. With the likes of George Bush after Reagan. They would be more crass.
The dozen years of the Reagan-Bush presidency transformed the federal judiciary, never more than moderately liberal, into a predominantly conservative institution.
Justice William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall were the last of the Court's liberals, replaced by the Bush nomination of a black conservative, Clarence Thomas.
With conservative federal judges, with pro-business appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, judicial decisions and board findings weakened a labor movement already troubled by a decline in manufacturing. The corporate was the greatest beneficiary of the Reagan-Bush years.
President Reagan proposed to replace tough enforcement of environmental laws by a "voluntary" approach, leaving it to businesses to decide for themselves what they would do. George Bush presented himself as the "environmental president," but was weak in practice.
President Bush even feared that, by limiting "global warming" "that it would hurt the nation's economy in the short term for no demonstrable long-term climatic benefit." Scientific opinion was quite clear on the long-term benefit, but this was not as important as "the economy"-that is, the needs of corporations.
Reagan built up the military. The rich contributed money to the Redecorate the White House living quarters. It was a time the military was doing good for corporations.
Also in those times, poverty increased and a new series of actions caused pain to individuals. Many were denied benefits, and a culture of poverty increased. Welfare was attacked, and those who argued for aid were attacked.
All to say, those in power had the means to do evil to many who were innocent. The only true winners were the large corporations, and they saw fit to run the show.
In short, the political leadership was only serving the few, and it was not looking to help the lives of those many in America.
But whatever group took power, whether Democrat or Republican, they still only had the same limited view.