How Pivotal Were the Seventies?

Once dismissed as the backwash of the tumultuous 1960s, an era of kitsch, self-indulgence, and cultural "malaise," the 1970s have undergone a dramatic reassessment. Sparked by Bruce Schulman's cheekily revisionist The Seventies, numerous journalists and academics have explored its political, social, and cultural history. The portrait that has emerged from this work has recast our understanding of the period, illuminating not only its links to the 1960s but its role as perhaps the "pivotal" decade of the entire post-1945 era. Like a swelling chorus, these writers have provided Schulman with extensive support for his claim that the 1970s were "the most significant watershed of modern US history, the beginning of our own time."¹

Much of the recent work done on the 1970s has been in political history and has focused on the rise of conservatism. However, scholars have approached that subject from a variety of interesting perspectives, and some have ventured more widely, examining a number of the fascinating cross-currents that make the decade difficult to characterize.² One area that has begun to attract more attention is the economy and, in particular, the vexing economic problems that confronted the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. This is something that is mentioned—at least in passing—in virtually all works on the decade; only now, however, has it become the focal point of research. The books under review here are prime examples of this new line of inquiry, and they suggest that the economic changes the U.S. went through in the 1970s might have been the most important ones of all. For it was in the 1970s that the U.S. assumed a new role in the global economy, a development that had a decisive and largely baleful effect on the majority of its citizens and paved the way for a new "age of inequality" that has persisted to this day.

Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade is advertised as a revisionist account of the 1970s that challenges the "backlash" thesis that informs so many other books. And, indeed, it dutifully avoids the social and cultural battles that roiled the era. Instead Stein focuses on economic policy, expanding on themes that she discussed in her earlier book, Running Steel, Running America. This is a useful lens with which to examine the 1970s and makes Pivotal Decade an important addition to the literature. But it is not quite the breakthrough suggested by the blurbs on the dust jacket. While opening up our understanding of the decade, it neglects crucial parts of the story and leaves us with a portrait that is compelling but ultimately incomplete.

Stein begins by reviewing the policies that made possible what economists now call "the Great Compression," when economic growth, progressive taxation, and Keynesian management of the economy produced rising living standards, and the gap between the rich and poor markedly decreased. Beginning in World War II, this economic "golden age" lasted until the early 1970s and indelibly shaped the attitudes and expectations of both policymakers and the public. It was during this period that Americans of virtually all political persuasions came to worship at the altar of "growth," and the Democratic Party committed itself to what Robert M. Collins has called "growth liberalism." This influential variant of modern liberalism, which Stein ignores, offered Democrats the best of both worlds. It allowed them to hitch their wagon to economic growth and legitimized policies that, at the time, were virtually certain to stimulate investment, production, and new job creation. Meanwhile, by producing high rates of growth, it held out the prospect of increasing tax revenues that might be used for public investment and the redistributionist policies of the Great Society—and, not incidentally, the high rates of military spending necessary...