No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980

Introduction

1 Between 1968 and 1980, a succession of upheavals challenged a confident assumption of the previous two decades: that the United States possessed the political, military, economic, and moral resources to prevail in world affairs and provide for domestic prosperity. By 1968 the war in Vietnam had deeply wounded the moral authority of the United States. By 1973 American troops had withdrawn. By 1975 it was evident that the United States had failed to reach its political and strategic objectives there. The gradual recognition of military defeat was accompanied by other disruptions and revelations. In October 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) declared an oil embargo against the United States, revealing how dependent the nation had become on oil imports from the Middle East. At the same time, an economic recession challenged an earlier Keynesian order that had prevented inflation and unemployment from rising simultaneously. Meanwhile, Japan and West Germany threatened American dominance over the world economy. In August 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal. The resignation undermined the institution of the presidency, the very embodiment of national authority, and contributed to the sense that the country had lost its direction. Journalists, politicians, and policymakers began warning that the United States was going the way of imperial Rome, that what Henry Luce famously called the “American Century” was coming to a premature and ignoble end, and that the nation had entered an era of decline. I n t r o d u c t i o n i n t r o d u c t i o n 2 This was certainly not the first time that fears about American decline had come to the fore, even during the post–World War II period. In the late 1940s, policymakers insisted that the Communist threat could only be contained through extraordinary vigilance and the commitment of tremendous resources. In the late 1950s, after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration’s Gaither Commission warned that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the realms of science, military , and technology.1 But what set the late 1960s and early 1970s apart was the sheer number of crises that beset the country simultaneously: the failure of a costly military effort in Vietnam and the worldwide protests unleashed by the war; rising rates of inflation and unemployment and growing foreign competition; the revelation that the United States could no longer count on crucial commodities, especially oil; and the shock that even an institution as sacred as the presidency could be strained to the breaking point. Taken together, these developments not only undermined the postwar order. They also challenged the exceptionalism at the center of American identity—the idea that the United States did not lose wars, its natural resources were boundless, its leaders wise and secure, and its economy capable of infinite expansion. As policymakers contemplated the nation’s future, a second series of alarms was sounded, this time over the nuclear family. This alarm emerged out of the cultural and social ferment of the 1960s. In the latter part of the decade, new social movements surfaced that challenged the nuclear family ideal that had shaped postwar American culture. The women’s liberation movement contended that the family was a site of patriarchy and women’s subordination. Meanwhile, men and women in an increasingly visible gay liberation movement began elaborating models of love, sexuality, and kinship that could not be contained within the normative heterosexual family.2 Policymakers and social scientists claimed that the institution of the family was under unprecedented strain, and editorials began appearing in newspapers and magazines that asked whether the traditional family was permanently out of favor. In this context, the family became a lightning rod in American politics. After the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a profamily movement arose that perceived the family to be under attack by organized feminism, abortion rights, and gay liberation; its activists would soon become an influential force in the Republican Party. Noting these various upheavals, historians have argued that the early 1970s was a time of profound economic, social, and cultural dislocation, when anxieties about both national decline and family decline came to the i n t r o d u c t i o n 3 fore. But historical accounts of the 1970s have tended to treat these two sets of anxieties as...