Chapter 26 the triumph of conservatism 1969 1988

Lecture Slides Give Me Liberty! AN AMERICAN HISTORY FIFTH EDITION

By Eric Foner

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Chapter 26: The Triumph of Conservatism, 1969 to 1988

The 1960s saw contesting ideals of freedom, most notably between civil rights and the burgeoning conservative movement. Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency helped spread ideas that later defined conservatism, such as opposition to the welfare state and a reduction in taxes and government regulations. Goldwater showed that whenever liberals controlled Washington, conservatives could portray themselves as anti-government populists, broadening their base and ending their image as upper-class elitists.

The late 1960s and the 1970s saw developments that transformed American politics—the disintegration of the New Deal coalition forged by Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR); an economic crisis that liberal policies could not end; a shift of population and economic resources to conservative bastions in the South and West; the growth of an activist, conservative Christianity more and more aligned with the Republican Party; and a series of U.S. defeats overseas. Together, these events expanded the influence of conservatives’ ideas, including their definition of freedom.

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Reagan in 1984

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Ronald Reagan addresses the Republican convention of 1984, which nominated him for president.

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President Nixon

Vietnam and Watergate

The End of the Golden Age

The Rising Tide of Conservatism

The Reagan Revolution

The subtopics for this lecture are listed on the screen above.

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Focus Question: President Nixon

Focus Question:

What were the major policies of the Nixon administration on social and economic issues?

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The purpose of the focus questions is to help students find larger themes and structures to bring the historical evidence, events, and examples together for a connected thematic purpose.

As we go through each portion of this lecture, you may want to keep in mind how the information relates to this larger thematic question. Here are some suggestions: write the focus question in the left or right margin on your notes and as we go through, either mark areas of your notes for you to come back to later and think about the connection, OR as you review your notes later (to fill in anything else you remember from the lecture or your thoughts during the lecture or additional information from the readings), write small phrases from the lecture and readings that connect that information to each focus question AND/OR are examples that work together to answer the focus question.

Conservatism Reborn

Nixon’s Domestic Policies

In the post–World War II era, conservatism seemed marginal in a very liberal environment. Conservatism was seen as outdated and associated with conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and preferences for social hierarchy over equality. Liberals believed conservatives were simply alienated or psychologically disturbed. In the 1950s and 1960s, conservatism was reborn. In 1968, a backlash of formerly Democratic voters against black protest and the antiwar movement helped Richard Nixon win the White House. But conservatives were dissatisfied with Nixon. Nixon adopted conservative language but actually expanded the welfare state and improved relations with the Soviets and China.

Nixon, who won by a thin margin, moved to the center, trying to solidify Republican support and win disaffected Democrats. Mostly interested in foreign policy and wanting to avoid fights with the Democratic Congress over domestic policy, actually accepted and expanded much of the Great Society and welfare state. Nixon established new federal regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Transportation Safety Board, all of which limited entrepreneurial freedoms. Nixon spent liberally on social services and environmental initiatives. He abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity, which had coordinated the War on Poverty, but he also expanded food stamps and tied Social Security benefits to inflation. The Endangered Species and Clean Air acts regulated businesses in order to limit pollution and protect animals threatened with extinction.

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Domestic Reform

Nixon and Welfare

Nixon and Race

Nixon’s great surprise was his proposal for a Family Assistance Plan to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Under his plan, the federal government would guarantee a minimum income for all Americans. AFDC, known as “welfare,” gave aid, usually quite limited, to poor families who met local eligibility requirements. Originally a New Deal program that helped mostly the white poor, welfare came to be associated with blacks, who by 1970 comprised half of all welfare recipients. AFDC rolls expanded in the 1960s, partly because of relaxed federal eligibility standards. These relaxed standards stemmed from an increase in births to unmarried women, which produced a sharp rise in the number of poor female-headed households. Conservative politicians now attacked welfare recipients as people who wanted to live off honest taxpayers rather than work. But Nixon’s plan for a guaranteed annual income, too radical for conservatives and not enough for liberals, did not pass Congress.

Nixon’s racial policy was ambiguous. He nominated for the Supreme Court conservative southern jurists who favored segregation to win over the white South, but the Senate rejected them. The courts lost patience with southern delays in enforcing civil rights laws and finally forced southern schools to desegregate. Briefly, Nixon also embraced “affirmative action” programs to raise minority employment. Nixon expanded Johnson’s efforts to require federal contractors to hire minorities. But Nixon wanted the affirmative action program as a way to fight inflation by weakening the power of building trade unions (he believed their control over the labor market hiked wages to unreasonable levels and increased construction costs). He hoped the plan would cause tensions between blacks and labor unions and that Republicans would benefit. Indeed, this is what happened. Trade unions of skilled construction workers, with few black members, strongly opposed Nixon’s plan. Nixon hoped to win blue-collar workers over for the 1972 elections, and he quickly replaced his affirmative action plan with a program that did not require federal contractors to hire minorities.

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Center Of Population, 1790-2010

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Nixon and Wallace

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Richard Nixon (right) and former Alabama governor George Wallace

Nixon’s “southern strategy” sought to bring the South and its segregationists into the Republican Party.

The Courts and Nixon

The Burger Court

The Court and Affirmative Action

When Earl Warren retired as chief justice in 1969, Nixon replaced him with Warren Burger, an opponent of the Warren Court’s “judicial activism.” Burger was expected to lead the Supreme Court in a conservative direction. But he surprised Nixon and others by initially expanding much of the Warren Court’s jurisprudence. In 1971, the Court approved plans to integrate southern schools through busing, in which students were transported to other schools to make an integrated student body. Judges everywhere began to order busing, angering many white parents who wanted to keep their children in majority-white neighborhood schools. Particularly bitter and violent protests broke out in Boston. In only a few years, the Court reversed itself, and abandoned efforts to wrest control of local schools or to bus students great distances to achieve integration. Rulings absolved suburban districts of the responsibility of enrolling non-white, and often poor, students from non-suburban neighborhoods. In 1973, the Court ruled in a case out of Texas, that public schools did not have to be equally funded, creating a disparity in school funding based on class and race. By the 1990s, northern public schools were more segregated than southern schools.

Efforts to gain more job opportunities for minorities also sparked bitter legal battles and white resentments. Many whites came to see affirmative action programs as “reverse discrimination” that violated the Fourteenth Amendment by giving non-whites special advantages over whites. As affirmative action spread from blacks to include women, Latinos, Asian- and Native Americans, conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court ban such programs. The Supreme Court refused but offered no consistent position. But the Court proved more and more hostile to government affirmative action programs. In 1978, the Court shot down a University of California admissions program that set aside a quota of places for non-white medical students. The majority rejected the ideas of quotas while ruling that race could be one factor among many in college admissions. The 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case is still the standard by which affirmative action programs are judged today.

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The Soiling of Old Glory

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Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soiling of Old Glory shows the violence occurring over busing to achieve integration.

Gender and Sexuality

The Continuing Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution became mainstream in the 1970s, which alarmed conservatives. Premarital sex was more widely accepted, the number of divorces and age at marriage rose, and by 1975, more divorces occurred than first-time marriages. The American birthrate dropped dramatically, the result of women’s changing lives and the availability of birth control and legal abortion.

In the Nixon years, sexual equality advanced in law and policy. In 1972, Congress approved Title IX, banning gender discrimination in higher education, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which required that married women have access to their own credit. Huge sexual discrimination suits against large employers worth millions of dollars were won in courts. The number of working women continued to rise. By 1980, 40 percent of women with children worked; in 1990, the number was 55 percent. Working women had various motivations, from being a professional in careers traditionally limited to men to bolstering family income as the economy faltered and fell into traditional, low-wage “pink collar” work.

The gay and lesbian movement also expanded in the 1970s. By 1979, there were thousands of local gay rights groups throughout the country. They elected officials, pressed states to decriminalize homosexuality, and passed antidiscrimination laws in major cities. They urged gay men and lesbians to “come out of the closet” and forced the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. By the 1970s, the counterculture’s emphasis on personal freedom and individuality had become mainstream. Americans became obsessed with self-improvement in fitness, diets, and psychological therapies.

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Median Age at First Marriage 1947-1981

Figure 26.1 Median Age at First Marriage, 1947–1981 Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

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Figure 26.1 Median Age at First Marriage, 1947–1981

Rate of Divorce: Divorces of Existing Marriages per 1,000 New Marriages, 1950-1980

Table 26.1 Rate of Divorce: Divorces of Existing Marriages per Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition

1,000 New Marriages, 1950–1980 Copyright © 2017 W. W. Norton & Company

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Daryl Koehn

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Daryl Koehn celebrating being chosen as one of the first group of women allowed to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar

Nixon and Foreign Policy

Nixon and Détente

Conservatives also believed Nixon was “soft” in foreign policy. Certainly, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, continued their predecessor’s policies of trying to undermine governments that seemed to endanger U.S. strategic or economic interests. Nixon sent arms to pro-American dictators in Iran, the Philippines, and South Africa. When Chileans elected the socialist Salvador Allende president, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped his domestic opponents launch a coup on September 11, 1973, that overthrew and killed Allende and installed a bloody regime ruled by General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of Allende’s supporters, including some Americans, were tortured and murdered, while others fled the country.

In relations with major communist countries, however, Nixon altered Cold War tensions. Nixon launched his political career as a militant anticommunist, but he and Kissinger were “realists.” They were more interested in power than ideology and preferred stability to endless conflict. Nixon hoped that better relations with the Soviets would pressure North Vietnam to end the Vietnam War on terms acceptable to America. Nixon also realized that China had its own interests, separate from those of the Soviets, and would soon be a major world power. In early 1972, Nixon made a highly publicized trip to Beijing, which led to China’s finally occupying its seat in the United Nations. Although full diplomatic relations with China were not established until 1979, Nixon’s visit sparked a vast trade increase between the United States and China. Three months after his China trip, Nixon became the first president to visit the Soviet Union, where he negotiated with the Soviet premier, Leonid Brezhnev. The talks led to increased trade and two landmark arms control treaties: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which capped each country’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned the development of systems for intercepting income missiles. Nixon and Brezhnev declared a new age of “peaceful coexistence” in which “détente” (cooperation) would replace Cold War hostility.