Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (review)

At the end of the 1970s, a chorus of journalists and pundits cheered the decade’s end. Nothing had happened, they wrote, and these words turned into conventional wisdom. Some of us scratched our heads and wondered whether these critics had spent the decade soaking in hot tubs, high on drugs.

How could they dismiss Watergate, Vietnam, the oil embargo, and the emergence of the New Right? And what about the newly energized movements for greater rights for women, gays and lesbians, the disabled, as well as protection of the environment, that helped transform—and polarize—the nation’s popular and political culture?

Ever since 1979, historians have grappled with the “conventional wisdom” epitaph inscribed by journalists. In 1982, Peter Carroll published It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s, a challenging interpretative work that revealed the depths of cultural and social change that had transformed the United States during this very complicated decade. At the same time, he reminded us that these years offered “alternative” possibilities in which the country might proceed during succeeding decades.

More recently, the conservative writer David Frum, with the hindsight of decades and a strong ideological perspective, published How We Got Here: The 70’s (2000), which argued that the seventies, and not the sixties, had changed American political life. In terms of politics, he had a strong argument. Despite its right-wing bias, it helped readers understand how the growing religious and secular right-wing coalition of the 70s literally “got us” to the politicized religious political culture of the Bush years.

One year later, Bruce Schulman published The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Challenging the conventional wisdom that the seventies was simply an era of bad clothes, bad hair and bad music, Schulman judiciously and successfully analyzed the social and cultural shifts that had altered the nation during that decade.

Now comes Edward D. Berkowitz’s Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies, which I hoped would offer an a fresh and original interpretation of this important decade. Alas, the book is a great disappointment. Berkowitz says he wrote it for scholars and the general reader who didn’t live through these years, which is a worthy goal. Lacking a strong interpretation or thematic structure, however, the plodding chronology of Something Happened reads like a textbook, with short sections that inform the reader “and then this happened, and then this happened.” None of my students would really understand the meaning of the seventies after reading this book.

At his best, Berkowitz does a good job of explaining the causes and impact of the economic transformation that took place during the seventies. He also covers mainstream political history in a satisfactory, descriptive, if perfunctory, manner.

What’s missing in this “overview,” however, is the larger picture. In various sections, for example, he mentions the importance of the women’s movement, the rise of the two-income family and women’s growing numbers in the labor force. During what many have viewed as the preeminent “women’s decade,” however, Berkowitz ignores the feminist movement’s intellectual excavation and reinterpretation of such new “crimes” as rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, all of which changed everyone’s lives, both at work and at home. Most egregiously, he neglects the energetic feminist critiques of American culture that eventually challenged public policy, changed laws, and transformed our popular and political values. Instead, he summarizes Tom Wolfe’s and Christopher Lasch’s cultural criticisms of the “me” decade and its “narcissism,” even though he disagrees with both of them.

Although he includes scattered sections on the “rights revolution,” which includes women, gays and the disabled, Berkowitz ignores the growing impact of identity politics, as ethnic groups sought cultural recognition and political power. He writes, for example, two perfunctory paragraphs about the historic television series, “Roots.” From his words, however, no reader born after this decade...