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  • No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980
  • Steven Mintz
No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980. By Natasha Zaretsky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xi plus 320 pp. $59.95, cloth; $22.50, paper).

Richard Rovere, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, called the 1970s “a slum of a decade.” Even now, the decade is remembered for little more than polyester leisure suits, pet rocks, streaking, “The Brady Bunch,” “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and disco. Yet as Peter N. Carroll, David Frum, Bruce J. Schulman, and Beth L. Bailey have shown, this was a decade of wrenching social, political, economic, demographic, and cultural transformations. It was during the 1970s that Americans became conscious of the growing political power of evangelical Christianity, the shift in economic and political influence to the Sunbelt, and the globalization of the world economy. Indeed, many of the sweeping behavioral changes we associate with the 1960s—in sexuality, gender, drug use, and environmental consciousness—only became mass phenomena during the 1970s.

As important as the behavioral and political shifts of the 1970s were equally profound attitudinal shifts. Especially notable were eroding trust in authority figures, a fading away of utopian visions, and declining confidence in the future—trends rooted not only in the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair, but in such social developments as the decline of American cities, a surge in crime and illicit drug use, rising inflation, the growth of international terrorism, airline hijackings, and, above all, agonizing economic dislocations.

No Direction Home’s overarching argument is that during the 1970s a growing number of Americans interpreted the changes that were taking place in American society through a discourse of decline, paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s triumph in the 1980 presidential election. The very terms pundits used to describe the decade—“deindustrialization,” the “me decade,” “malaise,” and the “culture of narcissism”—betokened deterioration, even though, in retrospect, it seems clear that terms like “formative” and “transformational” may have been a more accurate label for the 1970s. The decade set the stage for developments that would characterize the United States in succeeding years, such as intensifying ethnic diversity, deregulation, increasingly diverse family patterns, the information revolution, and the growth of a “new” economy.

This book focuses on two sets of anxieties that dominated the 1970s: a perceived loss in the United States’ diplomatic, economic, and military power, and the purported breakdown of the family. The book stresses the way that these twin anxieties interacted, one intensifying the other. Thus, many political conservatives considered the family at once the source of many of America’s societal ills—producing a soft, self-indulgent generation, lacking in character—and the [End Page 1047] victim of an increasingly egocentric, hedonistic society, characterized by a sense of entitlement and the pursuit of immediate gratification.

Successive chapters look at the way that fears of national and familial decline ran through public discussions of American prisoners of war in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, flagging productivity, the United States’ bicentennial, and the claim that narcissism pervaded American culture. In each chapter, Zaretsky persuasively demonstrates a substantial gap between public discourse and social realities. Many leading political conservatives attributed America’s defeat in Vietnam to a collapse of national will, not to diplomatic, political, tactical, or strategic errors. Similarly, many influential observers ascribed the declining rate of productivity growth to a faltering work ethic, rather than to flagging investment in domestic industry or the rise of the service sector. Moralism supplanted reasoned analysis. Corporate advertisers, oil company spokespersons, and conservation advocates attributed America’s growing dependency on foreign oil primarily to Americans’ profligacy and appetite for high energy consumer durables.

Zaretsky’s discussion of the discourse surrounding POWs is especially interesting. She makes the fascinating argument that POWs became a “synechdoche” for broader cultural anxieties; not only about the apparent decline in American military power, but diminishing male authority within the family, excessive paternal disconnection from wives and children, and the rise of feminist sentiments among “ordinary” American women. She shows how military psychiatrists investigated the effects of male absence on...

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