What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s

How has political partisanship become part of the political landscape from the 1990s to present day? Why do you think that this has become part of national identity?

A full discussion response should be at least two to three paragraphs with examples

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

What forces drove the economic resurgence of the 1990s?

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

How did a divisive political partisanship affect the election of 2000?

Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001?

F R O M T R I U M P H T O T R A G E D Y

★ C H A P T E R 2 7 ★

1 9 8 9 – 2 0 0 1

The year 1989 was one of the most momentous of the twentieth century. In April, tens of thousands of student demonstrators occupied Tianan-men Square in the heart of Beijing, demanding greater democracy in China. Workers, teachers, and even some government officials joined them, until their numbers swelled to nearly 1 million. Both the reforms Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced in the Soviet Union and the example of American institutions inspired the protesters. The students erected a figure reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, calling it “The Goddess of Democracy and Freedom.” In June, Chinese troops crushed the protest, killing an unknown number of people, possibly thousands.

In the fall of 1989, pro- democracy demonstrations spread across eastern Europe. Gorbachev made it clear that unlike in the past, the Soviet Union

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would not intervene. The climactic event took place on November 9 when crowds breached the Berlin Wall, which since 1961 had stood as the Cold War’s most prominent symbol. One by one, the region’s communist govern- ments agreed to give up power. In 1990, a reunified German nation absorbed East Germany. The remarkably swift and almost entirely peaceful collapse of communism in eastern Europe became known as the “velvet revolution.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union itself slipped deeper and deeper into crisis. Gorbachev’s attempts at economic reform produced only chaos, and his policy of political openness allowed long- suppressed national and eth- nic tensions to rise to the surface. In August 1991, a group of military lead- ers attempted to seize power to over- turn the government’s plan to give greater autonomy to the various parts of the Soviet Union. Russian president Boris Yeltsin mobilized crowds in Mos- cow that restored Gorbachev to office. Gorbachev then resigned from the Communist Party, ending its eighty-

four- year rule. One after another, the republics of the Soviet Union declared themselves sovereign states. At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist; in its place were fifteen new independent nations.

The sudden and unexpected collapse of communism marked the end of the Cold War and a stunning triumph for the United States and its allies. For the first time since 1917, there existed a truly worldwide capitalist system. Even China, while remaining under Communist Party rule, had already embarked on market reforms and rushed to attract foreign investment. Other events sug- gested that the 1990s would also be a “decade of democracy.” In 1990, South Africa released Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress, from prison. Four years later, as a result of the first democratic elections in the coun- try’s history, Mandela became president, ending the system of state- sponsored racial inequality, known as “apartheid,” and white minority government.

The Goddess of Democracy and Freedom, a statue reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, was displayed by pro- democracy advocates during the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. After allowing it to continue for two months, the Chinese government sent troops to crush the peaceful occupation of the square.

THE POST– COLD WAR WORLD ★ 1073

Throughout Latin America and Africa, civil- ian governments replaced military rule.

The sudden shift from a bipolar world to one of unquestioned American predominance promised to redefine the country’s global role. President George H. W. Bush spoke of the com- ing of a new world order. But no one knew what its characteristics would be and what new challenges to American power might arise.

T H E P O S T– C O L D W A R W O R L D A New World Order?

Bush’s first major foreign policy action was a throwback to the days of American interven- tionism in the Western Hemisphere. At the end of 1989, he dispatched troops to Panama to overthrow the government of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, a former ally of the United States who had become involved in the international drug trade. The United States installed a new government and flew Noriega to Florida, where he was tried and convicted on drug charges.

The Gulf War

A far more serious crisis arose in 1990 when Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, an oil- rich sheikdom on the Persian Gulf. Fearing that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein might next attack Saudi Arabia, a longtime ally that supplied more oil to the United States than any other country, Bush rushed troops to defend Kuwait and warned Iraq to with- draw from the country or face war. His policy aroused intense debate in the United States. But the Iraqi invasion so flagrantly violated

1989 Communism falls in eastern Europe

U.S.-led Panamanian coup

1990 Americans with Disabilities Act

Germany reunifies

1991 Gulf War

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

1992 Los Angeles riots

Casey v. Planned Parent- hood of Pennsylvania

Clinton elected president

1993 Israel and Palestine Liber- ation Organization sign the Oslo Accords

North American Free Trade Agreement approved

1994 Republicans win Congress; Contract with America

Rwandan genocide

1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombed

1996 Clinton eliminates Aid to Families with Dependent Children

Defense of Marriage Act

1998– Clinton impeachment 1989 proceedings

Kosovo War

1999 Protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization

Glass- Steagall Act repealed

2000 Bush v. Gore

2001 9/11 attacks

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

1074 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

international law that Bush succeeded in building a forty- nation coalition com- mitted to restoring Kuwait’s independence, secured the support of the United Nations, and sent half a million American troops along with a naval armada to the region.

In February 1991, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm, which quickly drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Tens of thousands of Iraqis and 184 Americans died in the conflict. The United Nations ordered Iraq to disarm and imposed economic sanctions that produced widespread civilian suffering for the rest of the decade. But Hussein remained in place. So did a large American military establishment in Saudi Arabia, to the outrage of Islamic fundamental- ists who deemed its presence an affront to their faith.

The Gulf War was the first post– Cold War international crisis. Relying on high- tech weaponry like cruise missiles that reached Iraq from bases and aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away, the United States was able to prevail quickly and avoid the prolonged involvement and high casualties of Vietnam. The Soviet Union, in the process of disintegration, remained on the sidelines. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Bush’s public approval rating rose to an unprecedented 89 percent.

Visions of America’s Role

In a speech to Congress, President Bush identified the Gulf War as the first step in the struggle to create a world rooted in democracy and global free trade. But it remained unclear how this broad vision would be translated into policy. Soon after the end of the war, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Dick Cheney, the secretary of defense, outlined different visions of the future. Powell predicted that the post– Cold War world would be a dangerous environment with conflicts popping up in unexpected places. To avoid being drawn into an unending role as global policeman, he insisted, the United States should not commit its troops abroad without clear objectives and a timetable for withdrawal. Cheney argued that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States possessed the power to reshape the world and prevent hostile states from achieving regional power. It must be willing to use force, independently if necessary, to maintain its strategic dominance. For the rest of the 1990s, it was not certain which definition of the American role in the post– Cold War world would predominate.

The Election of Clinton

Had a presidential election been held in 1991, Bush would undoubtedly have been victorious. But in that year the economy slipped into recession. Despite

THE POST– COLD WAR WORLD ★ 1075

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BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA

MONTENEGRO SERBIA

ALBANIA MACEDONIA

GREECE TURKEY

ROMANIA

BULGARIA

MOLDOVA

UKRAINE

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RUS. LITHUANIA

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BELARUS

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E A S T E R N E U R O P E A F T E R T H E C O L D WA R

The end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia redrew the map of eastern Europe (compare this map with the map of Cold War Europe in Chapter 23). Two additional nations that emerged from the Soviet Union lie to the east and are not indicated here: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

victory in the Cold War and the Gulf, more and more Americans believed the country was on the wrong track. No one seized more effectively on the widespread sense of unease than Bill Clinton, a former governor of Arkansas. In 1992, Clinton won the Democratic nomination by combining social liberal- ism (he supported abortion rights, gay rights, and affirmative action for racial

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

1076 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

minorities) with elements of conservatism (he pledged to reduce government bureaucracy and, borrowing a page from Republicans, promised to “end wel- fare as we know it”). A charismatic campaigner, Clinton conveyed sincere con- cern for voters’ economic anxieties.

Bush, by contrast, seemed out of touch with the day- to- day lives of ordi- nary Americans. On the wall of Democratic headquarters, Clinton’s campaign director posted the slogan, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”—a reminder that the eco- nomic downturn was the Democrats’ strongest card. Bush was further weak- ened when conservative leader Pat Buchanan delivered a fiery televised speech at the Republican national convention that declared cultural war against gays, feminists, and supporters of abortion rights. This seemed to confirm the Demo- cratic portrait of Republicans as intolerant and divisive.

A third candidate, the eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot, also entered the fray. He attacked Bush and Clinton as lacking the economic know- how to deal with the recession and the ever- increasing national debt. That millions of Americans considered Perot a credible candidate— at one point, polls showed him leading both Clinton and Bush— testified to widespread dissatisfaction with the major parties. Perot’s support faded as election day approached, but he still received 19 percent of the popular vote, the best result for a third- party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Clinton won by a substan- tial margin, a humiliating outcome for Bush, given his earlier popularity.

Clinton in Office

In his first two years in office, Clinton turned away from some of the social and economic policies of the Reagan and Bush years. He appointed several blacks and women to his cabinet, including Janet Reno, the first female attorney gen- eral, and named two supporters of abortion rights, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, to the Supreme Court. He modified the military’s strict ban on gay soldiers, instituting a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy by which officers would not seek out gays for dismissal from the armed forces. His first budget raised taxes on the wealthy and significantly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—a cash payment for low- income workers begun during the Ford administration. The most effective antipoverty policy since the Great Society, the EITC raised more than 4 million Americans, half of them children, above the poverty line during Clinton’s presidency.

Clinton shared his predecessor’s passion for free trade. Despite strong oppo- sition from unions and environmentalists, he obtained congressional approval in 1993 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty nego- tiated by Bush that created a free- trade zone consisting of Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

THE POST– COLD WAR WORLD ★ 1077

The major policy initiative of Clinton’s first term was a plan devised by a panel headed by his wife, Hillary, a lawyer who had pursued an indepen- dent career after their marriage, to address the rising cost of health care and the increasing number of Americans who lacked health insurance. In Can- ada and western Europe, governments provided universal medical coverage. The United States had the world’s most advanced medical technology and a woefully incomplete system of health insurance. The Great Society had pro- vided coverage for the elderly and poor through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Many employers offered health insurance to their workers. But tens of millions of Americans lacked any coverage at all.

Announced with great fanfare by Hillary Rodham Clinton at congressio- nal hearings in 1993, Clinton’s plan would have provided universal cover- age through large groupings of medical care businesses. Doctors and health insurance and drug companies attacked it vehemently, fearing government regulations that would limit reimbursement for medical procedures and the price of drugs. Too complex to be easily understood by most voters, and vulner- able to criticism for further expanding the unpopular federal bureaucracy, the plan died in 1994.

The “Freedom Revolution”

With the economy recovering slowly from the recession and Clinton’s first two years in office seemingly lacking in significant accomplishments, voters in 1994 turned against the administration. For the first time since the 1950s, Republicans won control of both houses of Congress. They proclaimed their tri- umph the “Freedom Revolution.” Newt Gingrich, a conservative congressman from Georgia who became the new Speaker of the House, masterminded their campaign. Gingrich had devised a platform called the Contract with America, which promised to curtail the scope of government, cut back on taxes and eco- nomic and environmental regulations, overhaul the welfare system, and end affirmative action.

Viewing their electoral triumph as an endorsement of the contract, Repub- licans moved swiftly to implement its provisions. The House approved deep cuts in social, educational, and environmental programs, including the popular Medicare system. With the president and Congress unable to reach agreement on a budget, the government in December 1995 shut down all nonessential operations, including Washington, D.C., museums and national parks.

Gingrich had assumed that the public shared his intense ideological con- victions. He discovered that in 1994 they had voted against Clinton, not for the full implementation of the Contract with America. Most Americans blamed Congress for the impasse, and Congress soon retreated.

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

1078 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

Clinton’s Political Strategy

Like Truman after the Republican sweep of 1946, Clinton rebuilt his popularity by campaigning against a radical Congress. He opposed the most extreme parts of his opponents’ program, while adopting others. In his state of the union address of January 1996, he announced that “the era of big government is over,” in effect turning his back on the tradition of Democratic Party liberalism and embracing the antigovernment outlook associated with Republicans since the days of Barry Goldwater.

In 1996, ignoring the protests of most Democrats, Clinton signed into law a Republican bill that abolished the program of Aid to Families with Depen- dent Children (AFDC), commonly known as “welfare.” Grants of money to the states, with strict limits on how long recipients could receive payments, replaced it. At the time of its abolition, AFDC assisted 14 million individuals, 9 million of them children. Thanks to stringent new eligibility requirements imposed by the states and the economic boom of the late 1990s, welfare rolls plummeted. But the number of children living in poverty remained essentially unchanged. Nonetheless, Clinton had succeeded in one of his primary goals: by the late 1990s, welfare, a hotly contested issue for twenty years or more, had disappeared from political debate.

Commentators called Clinton’s political strategy “triangulation.” This meant embracing the most popular Republican policies, like welfare reform, while leaving his opponents with extreme positions unpopular among middle- class voters, such as hostility to abortion rights and environmental protection. Clinton’s strategy enabled him to neutralize Republican claims that Democrats were the party of high taxes and lavish spending on persons who preferred dependency to honest labor. Clinton’s passion for free trade alienated many working- class Democrats but convinced much of the middle class that the party was not beholden to the unions.

Clinton easily defeated Republican Bob Dole in the presidential contest of 1996, becoming the first Democrat elected to two terms since FDR. Clinton had accomplished for Reaganism what Eisenhower had done for the New Deal, and Nixon for the Great Society— consolidating a basic shift in American politics by accepting many of the premises of his opponents.

Clinton and World Affairs

Like Jimmy Carter before him, Clinton’s primary political interests concerned domestic, not international, affairs. But with the United States now indisput- ably the world’s dominant power, Clinton, like Carter, took steps to encour- age the settlement of long- standing international conflicts and tried to elevate

THE POST– COLD WAR WORLD ★ 1079

support for human rights to a central place in international relations. He achieved only mixed success.

Clinton strongly supported a 1993 agreement, negotiated at Oslo, Norway, in which Israel for the first time recognized the legitimacy of the Palestine Lib- eration Organization. The Oslo Accords seemed to outline a road to Mideast peace. But neither side proved willing to implement them fully. Israeli govern- ments continued to build Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank— a part of Jordan that Israel had occupied during the 1967 Six- Day War. The new Palestinian Authority, which shared in governing parts of the West Bank as a stepping- stone to full statehood, proved to be corrupt, powerless, and unable to curb the growth of groups bent on violence against Israel. At the end of his presidency, Clinton brought Israeli and Palestinian leaders to Camp David to try to work out a final peace treaty. But the meeting failed, and vio- lence soon resumed.

Like Carter, Clinton found it difficult to balance concern for human rights with strategic and economic interests and to formulate clear guidelines for humanitarian interventions overseas. For example, the United States did noth- ing in 1994 when tribal massacres racked Rwanda, in central Africa. More than 800,000 people were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and 2 million ref- ugees fled the country.

The Balkan Crisis

The most complex foreign policy crisis of the Clinton years arose from the dis- integration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic state in southeastern Europe that had been carved from the old Austro- Hungarian empire after World War I. As in the rest of eastern Europe, the communist government that had ruled Yugo- slavia since the 1940s collapsed in 1989. Within a few years, the country’s six provinces dissolved into five new states. Ethnic conflict plagued several of these new nations. Ethnic cleansing— a terrible new term meaning the forcible expulsion from an area of a particular ethnic group— now entered the inter- national vocabulary. By the end of 1993, more than 100,000 Bosnians, nearly all of them civilians, had perished in the Balkan crisis.

With the Cold War over, protec- tion of human rights in the Balkans gave NATO a new purpose. After

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

Serbian refugees fleeing a Croat offensive during the 1990s. By the fall of 1995, the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia and accom- panying “ethnic cleansing” had displaced over 3 million people.

1080 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

considerable indecision, NATO launched air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces, with American planes contributing. UN troops, including 20,000 Americans, arrived as peacekeepers. In 1998, ethnic cleansing again surfaced, this time by Yugoslavian troops and local Serbs against the Albanian population of Kosovo, a province of Serbia. More than 800,000 Albanians fled the region. To halt the bloodshed, NATO launched a two- month war in 1999 against Yugoslavia that led to the deployment of American and UN forces in Kosovo.

Human Rights

During Clinton’s presidency, human rights played an increasingly important role in international affairs. Hundreds of nongovernmental agencies through- out the world defined themselves as protectors of human rights. During the 1990s, the agenda of international human rights organizations expanded to include access to health care, women’s rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples like the Aborigines of Australia and the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Americas. Human rights emerged as a justification for inter- ventions in matters once considered to be the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The United States dispatched the military to distant parts of the world to assist in international missions to protect civilians.

New institutions emerged that sought to punish violations of human rights. The Rwandan genocide produced a UN- sponsored war crimes court that sentenced the country’s former prime minister to life in prison. An interna- tional tribunal put Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloševič on trial for sponsor- ing the massacre of civilians. It remained to be seen whether these initiatives would grow into an effective international system of protecting human rights across national boundaries. Despite adopting human rights as a slogan, many governments continued to violate them in practice.

G L O B A L I Z A T I O N A N D I T S D I S C O N T E N T S In December 1999, delegates from around the world gathered in Seattle for a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a 135-nation group created five years earlier to reduce barriers to international commerce and settle trade disputes. To the astonishment of residents of the city, more than 30,000 persons gathered to protest the meeting. Their marches and rallies brought together factory workers, who claimed that global free trade encouraged corporations to shift production to low- wage centers overseas, and “ tree- huggers,” as some reporters called environmentalists, who complained about the impact on the earth’s ecology of unregulated economic development.

Some of the latter dressed in costumes representing endangered species— monarch butterflies whose habitats were disappearing because of the widespread

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS ★ 1081

destruction of forests by lumber companies, and sea turtles threatened by unrestricted ocean fishing. Protesters drew attention to the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, which shields the earth from harmful solar radiation. The heightened use of aerosol sprays and refrigerants containing damaging chem- icals had caused a large hole in the ozone layer. A handful of self- proclaimed anarchists embarked on a window- breaking spree at local stores. The police sealed off the downtown and made hundreds of arrests, and the WTO gather- ing disbanded.

Once a center of labor radicalism, the Seattle area in 1999 was best known as the home of Microsoft, developer of the Windows operating system used in most of the world’s computers. The company’s worldwide reach symbolized globalization, the process by which people, investment, goods, information, and culture increasingly flowed across national boundaries. Globalization has been called “the concept of the 1990s.” During that decade, the media resounded with announcements that a new era in human history had opened, with a borderless economy and a “global civilization” that would soon replace traditional cultures.

Globalization, of course, was hardly a new phenomenon. The internation- alization of commerce and culture and the reshuffling of the world’s peoples had been going on since the explorations of the fifteenth century. But the scale and scope of late- twentieth- century globalization was unprecedented. Thanks to satellites and the Internet, information and popular culture flowed instanta- neously to every corner of the world. Manufacturers and financial institutions scoured the world for profitable investment opportunities.

Perhaps most important, the collapse of communism between 1989 and 1991 opened the entire world to the spread of market capitalism and to the idea that government should interfere as little as possible with economic activity. Amer- ican politicians and social commentators increasingly criticized the regulation of wages and working conditions, assistance to the less fortunate, and environ- mental protections as burdens on international competitiveness. During the 1990s, presidents Bush, a Republican, and Clinton, a Democrat, both spoke of an American mission to create a single global free market as the path to rising living standards, the spread of democracy, and greater worldwide freedom.

The media called the loose coalition of groups who organized the Seattle protests the “antiglobalization” movement. In fact, they challenged not glo- balization itself but its social consequences. Globalization, the demonstra- tors claimed, accelerated the worldwide creation of wealth but widened gaps between rich and poor countries and between haves and have- nots within societies. Decisions affecting the day- to- day lives of millions of people were made by institutions— the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and multinational corporations— that operated without any democratic input. Demonstrators demanded not an end to global trade and capital flows, but the establishment of international standards for wages,

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1082 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

labor conditions, and the environment, and greater investment in health and education in poor countries. The Battle of Seattle placed on the national and international agendas a question that promises to be among the most pressing concerns of the twenty- first century— the relationship between globalization, economic justice, and freedom.

The economy’s performance in the 1990s at first seemed to justify the claims of globalization’s advocates. After recovery from the recession of 1990–1991, economic expansion continued for the rest of the decade. By 2000, unemployment stood below 4 percent, a figure not seen since the 1960s. The boom became the longest uninterrupted period of economic expansion in the nation’s history. Because Reagan and Bush had left behind massive budget defi- cits, Clinton worked hard to balance the federal budget— a goal traditionally associated with fiscal conservatives. Since economic growth produced rising tax revenues, Clinton during his second term not only balanced the budget but actually produced budget surpluses.

The Computer Revolution

Many commentators spoke of the 1990s as the dawn of a “new economy,” in which computers and the Internet would produce vast new efficiencies and the production and sale of information would occupy the central place once held by the manufacture of goods. Computers had first been developed during and after World War II to solve scientific problems and do calculations involving enormous amounts of data. The early ones were extremely large, expensive, and, by modern standards, slow. Research for the space program of the 1960s spurred the development of improved computer technology, notably the min- iaturization of parts thanks to the development of the microchip on which cir- cuits could be imprinted.

Microchips made possible the development of entirely new consumer prod- ucts. Videocassette recorders, handheld video games, cellular phones, and dig- ital cameras were mass- produced at affordable prices during the 1990s, mostly in Asia and Latin America rather than the United States. But it was the com- puter that transformed American life. Beginning in the 1980s, companies like Apple and IBM marketed computers for business and home use. As computers became smaller, faster, and less expensive, they found a place in businesses of every kind. In occupations as diverse as clerical work, banking, architectural design, medical diagnosis, and even factory production, they transformed the American workplace. They also changed private life. By the year 2000, nearly half of all American households owned a personal computer, used for enter- tainment, shopping, and sending and receiving electronic mail. Centers of com- puter technology, such as Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, the Seattle and Austin metropolitan areas, and lower Manhattan, boomed during the 1990s.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS ★ 1083

The Internet, first developed as a high- speed military communications network, was simplified and opened to commercial and individual use through personal computers. The Internet expanded the flow of information and com- munications more radically than any invention since the printing press. At a time when the ownership of newspapers, television stations, and publishing houses was becoming concentrated in the hands of a few giant media con- glomerates, the fact that anyone with a computer could post his or her ideas for worldwide circulation led “netizens” (“citizens” of the Internet) to hail the advent of a new, democratic public sphere in cyberspace.

The Stock Market Boom and Bust

Economic growth and talk of a new economy sparked a frenzied boom in the stock market that was reminiscent of the 1920s. Investors, large and small, poured funds into stocks, spurred by the rise of discount and online firms that advertised aggressively and charged lower fees than traditional brokers. By 2000, a majority of American households owned stocks directly or through investment in mutual funds and pension and retirement accounts.

Investors were especially attracted to the new “dot coms”—companies that conducted business via the Internet and seemed to symbolize the promise of

Two architects of the computer revolution, Steve Jobs (on the left), the head of Apple Com- puter, and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, which makes the operating system used in most of the world’s computers.

What forces drove the economic resurgence of the 1990s?

1084 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

the new economy. The NASDAQ, a stock exchange dominated by new technol- ogy companies, rose more than 500 percent from 1998 to 1999. Many of these “ high- tech” companies never turned a profit. But economic journalists and stock brokers explained that the new economy had so revolutionized business that traditional methods of assessing a company’s value no longer applied.

Inevitably, the bubble burst. On April 14, 2000, stocks suffered their larg- est one- day point drop in history. For the first time since the Depression, stock prices declined for three successive years (2000–2002), wiping out billions of dollars in Americans’ net worth and pension funds. The value of NASDAQ stocks fell by nearly 80 percent between 2000 and 2002. By 2001, the American economy had fallen into a recession. Talk of a new economy, it appeared, had been premature.

The Enron Syndrome

Only after the market dropped did it become apparent that the stock boom of the 1990s had been fueled in part by fraud. For a time in 2001 and 2002, Ameri- cans were treated almost daily to revelations of incredible greed and corruption on the part of respected brokerage firms, accountants, and company executives. During the late 1990s, accounting firms like Arthur Andersen, giant banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, and corporate lawyers pocketed extravagant fees for devising complex schemes to help push up companies’ stock prices by hiding their true financial condition. Enron, a Houston- based energy company that epitomized the new economy— it bought and sold electricity rather than actually producing it— reported as profits billions of dollars in operating losses.

In the early twenty- first century, the bill came due for many corporate criminals. The founder of Adelphia Communications was convicted of misuse of company funds. A jury found the chairman of Tyco International guilty of looting the company of millions of dollars. A number of former chief execu- tives faced long prison terms. Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, chief officers of Enron, were convicted by a Texas jury of multiple counts of fraud.

Fruits of Deregulation

At the height of the 1990s boom, with globalization in full swing, stocks ris- ing, and the economy expanding, the economic model of free trade and dereg- ulation appeared unassailable. But the retreat from government economic regulation, a policy embraced by both the Republican Congress and President Clinton, left no one to represent the public interest.

The sectors of the economy most affected by the scandals— energy, telecom- munications, and stock trading— had all been subjects of deregulation. Enron could manipulate energy prices because Congress had granted it an exemption from laws regulating the price of natural gas and electricity.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS ★ 1085

Many stock frauds stemmed from the repeal in 1999 of the Glass- Steagall Act, a New Deal measure that separated commercial banks, which accept depos- its and make loans, from investment banks, which invest in stocks and real estate and take larger risks. The repeal made possible the emergence of “super- banks” that combined these two functions. Phil Gramm, the Texas congress- man who wrote the repeal bill, which Clinton signed, explained his thinking in this way: “ Glass- Steagall came at a time when the thinking was that govern- ment was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.”

But banks took their new freedom as an invitation to engage in all sorts of misdeeds, knowing that they had become so big that if anything happened, the federal government would have no choice but to rescue them. Banks poured money into risky mortgages. When the housing bubble collapsed in 2007–2008, the banks suffered losses that threatened to bring down the entire financial system. The Bush and Obama administrations felt they had no choice but to expend hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to save the banks from their own misconduct.

Rising Inequality

The boom that began in 1995 benefited nearly all Americans. For the first time since the early 1970s, average real wages and family incomes began to grow sig- nificantly. Economic expansion at a time of low unemployment brought rapid increases in wages for families at all income levels. It aided low- skilled work- ers, especially non- whites, who had been left out of previous periods of growth. Yet, despite these gains, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the poor and the middle class became worse off while the rich became significantly richer. The wealth of the richest Americans exploded during the 1990s. Sales of luxury goods like yachts and mansions boomed. Bill Gates, head of Microsoft and the country’s richest person, owned as much wealth as the bottom 40 per- cent of the American population put together.

Dot- com millionaires and well- paid computer designers and programmers received much publicity. But companies continued to shift manufacturing jobs overseas. Thanks to NAFTA, a thriving industrial zone emerged just across the southern border of the United States, where American manufacturers built plants to take advantage of cheap labor and weak environmental and safety regulations. Business, moreover, increasingly relied for profits on financial operations rather than making things. The financial sector of the economy accounted for around 10 percent of total profits in 1950; by 2000 the figure was up to 40 percent. Com- panies like Ford and General Electric made more money from interest on loans to customers and other financial operations than from selling their products.

What forces drove the economic resurgence of the 1990s?

1086 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

The outsourcing of jobs soon moved from manufacturing to other areas, including accounting, legal services, banking, and other skilled jobs where companies could employ workers overseas for a fraction of their cost in the United States. All this lowered prices for consumers, but also threw millions of American workers into competition with those around the globe, producing a relentless downward pressure on American wages.

Overall, between 1990 and 2008, companies that did business in global markets contributed almost nothing to job growth in the United States. Microsoft, symbol of the new economy, employed only 30,000 people. Apple, another highly success- ful company, whose computers, iPads, and iPhones were among the most ubiqui- tous consumer products of the early twenty- first century, in 2010 employed some 43,000 persons in the United States (the large majority a low- wage sales force in the company’s stores). Its contractors, who made these products, had more than 700,000 employees, almost all of them overseas. In 1970, General Motors had been the country’s largest corporate employer. In the early twenty- first century, it had been replaced by Wal- Mart, a giant discount retail chain that paid most of its 1.6 million workers slightly more than the minimum wage. Wal- Mart aggressively opposed efforts at collective bargaining. Not a single one of its employees belonged to a union. Thanks to NAFTA, which enabled American companies to expand their business in Mexico, by 2010 Wal- Mart was also the largest employer in that country.

C U L T U R E W A R S The end of the Cold War ushered in hopes for a new era of global harmony. Instead, what one observer called a “rebellion of particularisms”—renewed emphasis on group identity and insistent demands for group recognition and power— has racked the international arena. In the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries, socialism and nationalism had united people of different backgrounds in pursuit of common goals. Now, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe, the waning of movements based on socialism and the declining power of nation- states arising from globalization seemed to unleash long- simmering ethnic and religious antagonisms. Partly in reac- tion to the global spread of a secular culture based on consumption and mass entertainment, intense religious movements attracted increasing numbers of followers— Hindu nationalism in India, orthodox Judaism in Israel, Islamic fundamentalism in much of the Muslim world, and evangelical Christianity in the United States. Like other nations, although in a far less extreme way and with little accompanying violence, the United States has experienced divisions arising from the intensification of ethnic and racial identities and religious fundamentalism.

CULTURE WARS ★ 1087

The Newest Immigrants

Because of shifts in immigration, cul- tural and racial diversity have become increasingly visible in the United States. Until the immigration law of 1965, the vast majority of twentieth- century newcomers hailed from Europe. That measure, as noted in Chapter 25, sparked a wholesale shift in immigrants’ origins. Between 1965 and 2010, nearly 38 million immi- grants entered the United States, a number larger than the 27 million during the peak period of immigra- tion between 1880 and 1924. About 50 percent came from Latin America and the Caribbean, 35 percent from Asia, and smaller numbers from the Middle East and Africa. Only 10 per- cent arrived from Europe, mostly from the war- torn Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

In 2010, the number of foreign- born persons living in the United States stood at more than 40 million, or 13 percent of the population. Although less than the peak proportion of 14 percent in 1910, in absolute numbers this repre- sented the largest immigrant total in the nation’s history. The immigrant influx changed the country’s religious and racial map. By 2010, more than 4 million Muslims resided in the United States, and the combined population of Bud- dhists and Hindus exceeded 1 million.

As in the past, many immigrants became urban residents, with New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami the most common destinations. New eth- nic communities emerged, with homes, shops, restaurants, foreign- language newspapers, radio and television stations, and ethnic professionals like busi- nessmen and lawyers. Unlike in the past, rather than being concentrated in one or two parts of city centers, immigrants quickly moved into outlying neigh- borhoods and older suburbs. The immigrant influx revitalized neighborhoods like New York City’s Washington Heights (a Dominican enclave) and Flush- ing (a center for Asian newcomers). By the turn of the century, more than half of all Latinos lived in suburbs. Orange County, California, which had been a stronghold of suburban conservatism between 1960 and 1990, elected a Latina Democrat to Congress in the late 1990s. While most immigrants settled on the East and West Coasts, some moved to other parts of the country. They brought

Erected on U.S. 5, an interstate highway running from the Mexican to Canadian borders along the Pacific Coast, this sign warns motorists to be on the lookout for people (i.e., undocumented immigrant families) crossing the road on foot. The sign’s placement north of San Diego, about thirty miles north of Mexico, illustrates how the “bor- der” had become an entire region, not simply a geographical boundary.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M

1088 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

From Bill Clinton, Speech on Signing of NAFTA (1993)

The North American Free Trade Agreement was signed by President Bill Clinton early in his first term. It created a free- trade zone (an area where goods can travel freely without paying import duties) composed of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Clinton asked Americans to accept economic globalization as an inevitable form of progress and the path to future prosperity. “There will be no job loss,” he promised. Things did not entirely work out that way.

As President, it is my duty to speak frankly to the American people about the world in which we now live. Fifty years ago, at the end of World War II, an unchallenged America was protected by the oceans and by our technological superiority and, very frankly, by the economic devastation of the people who could otherwise have been our competi- tors. We chose then to try to help rebuild our former enemies and to create a world of free trade supported by institutions which would facilitate it. . . . As a result, jobs were created, and opportunity thrived all across the world. . . .

For the last 20 years, in all the wealthy countries of the world— because of changes in the global environment, because of the growth of technology, because of increasing competition— the middle class that was created and enlarged by the wise policies of expanding trade at the end of World War II has been under severe stress. Most Ameri- cans are working harder for less. They are vulnerable to the fear tactics and the averse- ness to change that are behind much of the opposition to NAFTA. But I want to say to my fellow Americans: When you live in a time of change, the only way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change— to embrace, to move forward. . . . The only way we can recover the fortunes of the middle class in this coun- try so that people who work harder and smarter can, at least, prosper more, the only way we can pass on the American dream of the last 40 years to our children and their children for the next 40, is to adapt to the changes which are occurring.

In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow or try to resist these changes, hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday. . . . I believe that NAFTA will create 1 million jobs in the first 5 years of its impact. . . . NAFTA will generate these jobs by fostering an export boom to Mexico by tearing down tariff walls. . . . There will be no job loss.

VOICES OF FREEDOM ★ 1089

From Global Exchange, Seattle, Declaration for Global Democracy

(December 1999)

The demonstrations that disrupted the December 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle brought to public attention a widespread dissatis- faction with the effects of economic “globalization.” In this declaration, organiz- ers of the protest offered their critique.

As citizens of global society, recognizing that the World Trade Organization is unjustly dominated by corporate interests and run for the enrichment of the few at the expense of all others, we demand:

Representatives from all sectors of society must be included in all levels of trade policy formulations. All global citizens must be democratically represented in the for- mulation, implementation, and evaluation of all global social and economic policies.

Global trade and investment must not be ends in themselves, but rather the instru- ments for achieving equitable and sustainable development including protection for workers and the environment.

Global trade agreements must not undermine the ability of each nation- state or local community to meet its cit- izens’ social, environmental, cultural or economic needs.

The World Trade Organization must be replaced by a democratic and trans- parent body accountable to citizens— not to corporations.

No globalization without repre- senta tion!

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Clinton feel that free trade is necessary to American prosperity?

2. Why do the Seattle protesters feel that the World Trade Organization is a threat to democracy?

3. How do these documents reflect contradic- tory arguments about the impact of global- ization in the United States?

1090 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

54

11

7

4

3

8

58

5

4 3

3

3

5

6

8

32

10

7

11

6

9

11 18

22 12 21

8 13

11 14

7 9 13 8

25

5

23

33

3 4 4

12 4 8153

10 3

3 4

Democrat Republican Independent

Party Clinton Bush Perot

Candidate Electoral Vote

(Share) 370 (69%) 168 (31%)

Popular Vote (Share)

44,908,254 (43%) 39,102,343 (38%) 19,741,065 (19%)

I M M I G R A N T P O P U L AT I O N S I N C I T I E S A N D S TAT E S , 1 9 0 0 A N D 2 0 1 0

Maps illustrating states’ foreign-born populations and the twenty metropolitan areas with the most immigrants in 1900 and 2010. In 1900 nearly all went to the Northeast and Upper Midwest, the heartland of the industrial economy. In 2010 the largest number headed for cities in the South and West, especially California, although major cities of the Northeast also attracted many newcomers.

CULTURE WARS ★ 1091

Table 27.1 Immigration to the United States, 1961–2010

Decade Total Europe Asia Western

Hemisphere Other Areas

1961–1970 3,321,584 1,123,492 427,642 1,716,374 54,076

1971–1980 4,493,302 800,368 1,588,178 1,982,735 122,021

1981–1990 7,336,940 761,550 2,738,157 3,615,225 222,008

1991–2000 9,042,999 1,359,737 2,795,672 4,486,806 400,784

2001–2010 14,974,975 1,165,176 4,088,455 8,582,601 1,138,743

cultural and racial diversity to once- homogeneous communities in the Amer- ican heartland.

Post- 1965 immigration formed part of the worldwide uprooting of labor arising from globalization. Those who migrated to the United States came from a wide variety of backgrounds. They included poor, illiterate refugees from places of economic and political crisis— Central Americans escaping the region’s civil wars and poverty, Haitians and Cambodians fleeing repressive governments. But many immigrants were well- educated professionals from countries like India and South Korea, where the availability of skilled jobs had not kept pace with the spread of higher education. In the year 2000, more than 40 percent of all immigrants to the United States had a college education.

For the first time in American history, women made up the majority of new- comers, reflecting the decline of manufacturing jobs that had previously absorbed immigrant men, as well as the spread of employment opportunities in tradition- ally female fields like care of children and the elderly and retail sales. Thanks to cheap global communications and jet travel, modern- day immigrants retain strong ties with their countries of origin, frequently phoning and visiting home.

The New Diversity

Latinos formed the largest single immigrant group. This term was invented in the United States and includes people from quite different origins— Mexicans, Central and South Americans, and migrants from Spanish- speaking Carib- bean islands like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico (although the last group, of course, are American citizens, not immigrants). With 95 mil- lion people, Mexico in 2000 had become the world’s largest Spanish- speaking nation. Its poverty, high birthrate, and proximity to the United States made it a source of massive legal and illegal immigration. In 2000, Mexican- Americans made up a majority of the Hispanic population of the United States and nearly half the residents of Los Angeles. But almost every state witnessed an influx

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1092 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

of Mexican immigrants. In 1930, 90 percent of the Mexican population of the United States lived in states that had once been part of Mexico. Today, there is a significant Mexican- American presence in almost every state, including such places as Kansas, Minnesota, and Georgia, with very little experience, until recently, with ethnic diversity.

Numbering around 50 million in 2010, Latinos had become the largest minority group in the United States. Between 1990 and 2010, 30 million His- panics were added to the American population, half its total growth. Latinos were highly visible in entertainment, sports, and politics. Indeed, the Hispanic presence transformed American life. José was now the most common name for baby boys in Texas and the third most popular in California. Smith remained the most common American surname, but Garcia, Rodriguez, Gonzales, and other Hispanic names were all in the top fifty.

Latino communities remained far poorer than the rest of the country. A flourishing middle class developed in Los Angeles, Miami, and other cities with large Spanish- speaking populations. But most immigrants from Mexico and Central America competed at the lowest levels of the job market. The influx of legal and illegal immigrants swelled the ranks of low- wage urban workers and agricultural laborers. Latinos lagged far behind other Americans in edu- cation. In 2010, their poverty rate stood at nearly double the national figure of 15 percent. Living and working conditions among predominantly Latino farm workers in the West fell back to levels as dire as when César Chavez established the United Farm Workers union in the 1960s.

Asian- Americans also became increasingly visible. There had long been a small population of Asian ancestry in California and New York City, but only after 1965 did immigration from Asia assume large proportions. Like Latinos, Asian- Americans were a highly diverse population, including well- educated Koreans, Indians, and Japanese, as well as poor refugees from Cambodia, Viet- nam, and China. Growing up in tight- knit communities that placed great emphasis on education, young Asian- Americans poured into American colleges and universities. Once subjected to harsh discrimination, Asian- Americans now achieved remarkable success. White Americans hailed them as a “model minority.” By 2007, the median family income of Asian- Americans, $66,000, surpassed that of whites. But more than any other group, Asian- Americans clustered at opposite ends of the income spectrum. Large numbers earned either more than $75,000 per year (doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs) or under $5,000 (unskilled laborers in sweatshops and restaurants).

The United States, of course, had long been a multiracial society. But for centu- ries race relations had been shaped by the black- white divide and the experience of slavery and segregation. The growing visibility of Latinos and Asians suggested that a two- race system no longer adequately described American life. Multiracial

CULTURE WARS ★ 1093

O R I G I N O F L A R G E S T I M M I G R A N T P O P U L AT I O N S B Y S TAT E , 1 9 1 0 A N D 2 0 1 3

Pittsburgh

Rochester

Cincinnati Baltimore

New York

Minneapolis Worcester

New Haven

San Francisco

Springfield Scranton

Milwaukee Buffalo

Cleveland Philadelphia

St. Louis

Detroit Chicago

Boston

Providence

Gulf of Mexico

At lantic O cean

CANADA

MEXICO

Boston

Chicago

Las Vegas

San Francisco

Detroit

Riverside

Miami

San Jose

Tampa

Washington, D.C.

San Diego

Seattle

Phoenix

Dallas Atlanta

Sacramento Philadelphia New York

Houston

Los Angeles

Gulf of Mexico

At lantic O cean

CANADA

MEXICO

1900

2010

25.0 or higher 20.0 to 24.9 15.0 to 19.9 10.0 to 14.9 5.0 to 9.9 Less than 5.0

Percent foreign-born

25.0 or higher 20.0 to 24.9 15.0 to 19.9 10.0 to 14.9 5.0 to 9.9 Less than 5.0

Percent foreign-born

Maps depicting the birthplace of each state’s largest immigrant population in 1910 and 2013. A century ago, most immigrants hailed from Europe, and the leading country of origin varied among the states. Today, in almost every state outside the Northeast, those born in Mexico constitute the largest number of immigrants.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1094 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

imagery filled television, films, and advertising. Interracial marriage, at one time banned in forty- two states, became more common and acceptable. Among Asian- Americans, half of all marriages involved a non- Asian partner. The figure for Latinos was 30 percent. Some commentators spoke of the “end of racism” and the emergence of a truly color- blind society. Others argued that while Asians and some Latinos were being absorbed into an expanded category of “white” Ameri- cans, the black- white divide remained almost as impenetrable as ever.

One thing, however, seemed clear at the dawn of the twenty- first century: diversity was here to stay. Because the birthrate of racial minorities is higher than that of whites, the Census Bureau projected that by 2050, less than 50 per- cent of the American population would be white.

The Changing Face of Black America

Compared with the situation in 1900 or 1950, the most dramatic change in American life at the turn of the century was the absence of legal segregation and the presence of blacks in areas of American life from which they had once been almost entirely excluded. Thanks to the decline in overt discrimination and the effectiveness of many affirmative action programs, blacks now worked in unprecedented numbers alongside whites in corporate board rooms, offices, and factories. The number of black policemen, for example, rose from 24,000 to 65,000 between 1970 and 2000, and in the latter year, 37 percent of the black population reported having attended college. The economic boom of the late 1990s aided black Americans enormously; the average income of black families rose more rapidly than that of whites.

One major change in black life was the growing visibility of Africans among the nation’s immigrants. Between 1970 and 2010, more than twice as many Africans immigrated to the United States as had entered during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. For the first time, all the elements of the African diaspora— natives of Africa, Caribbeans, Central and South Amer- icans of African descent, Europeans with African roots— could be found in the United States alongside the descendants of American slaves.

Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia provided the largest number of African immi- grants, and they settled overwhelmingly in urban areas, primarily in New York, California, Texas, and the District of Columbia. Some were impoverished refu- gees fleeing civil wars in Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia, but many more were professionals— more than half the African newcomers had college educations, the highest percentage for any immigrant group. Indeed, some African coun- tries complained of a “brain drain” as physicians, teachers, and other highly skilled persons sought opportunities in the United States that did not exist in their own underdeveloped countries. While some prospered, others found it

CULTURE WARS ★ 1095

difficult to transfer their credentials to the United States and found jobs driv- ing taxis and selling African crafts at street fairs.

Most African- Americans, nonethe- less, remained in a more precarious situation than whites or many recent immigrants. In the early twenty- first century, the black unemployment rate remained double that of whites. Half of all black children lived in poverty, two- thirds were born out of wedlock, and in every index of social well- being from health to quality of housing, blacks continued to lag. Despite the continued expansion of the black middle class, a far lower per- centage of blacks than whites owned their homes or held professional and managerial jobs. Housing segregation remained pervasive. In 2010, more than one- third of the black population lived in suburbs, but mostly in predominantly black communities.

Despite the nation’s growing racial diversity, school segregation— now result- ing from housing patterns and the divide between urban and suburban school districts rather than laws requiring racial separation— was on the rise. Most city public school systems consisted overwhelmingly of minority students, large numbers of whom failed to receive an adequate education. The courts released more and more districts from desegregation orders. By 2000, the nation’s black and Latino students were more isolated from white pupils than in 1970. Nearly 80 percent of white students attended schools where they encountered few if any pupils of another race. Since school funding rested on property taxes, poor com- munities continued to have less to spend on education than wealthy ones.

The Spread of Imprisonment

During the 1960s, the nation’s prison population declined. But in the 1970s, with urban crime rates rising, politicians of both parties sought to convey the image of being “tough on crime.” They insisted that the judicial system should focus on locking up criminals for long periods rather than rehabilitating them. They treated drug addiction as a violation of the law rather than as a disease. State governments greatly increased the penalties for crime and reduced the possibility of parole. Successive presidents launched “wars” on the use of illegal

Despite the ups and downs of unemployment, the rate for non-whites remains persistently higher than that for whites.

F I G U R E 2 7 . 1 U N E M P L O Y M E N T R AT E B Y S E X A N D R A C E ,

1 9 5 4 – 2 0 0 0

White male

Non-white male

Non-white female

P er

ce nt

ag e

of p

op ul

at io

n

0

4

8

12

16

20

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 20001995

Year

White female

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1096 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

drugs. As a result, the number of Americans in prison rose dramatically, most of them incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses.

During the 1990s, thanks to the waning of the crack epidemic and more effective urban police tactics, crime rates dropped dramatically across the country. But because of the sentencing laws of the previous two decades, this did nothing to stem the increase of the prison population. In 2011, it reached 2.3 million, ten times the figure of 1970. Several million more individuals were on parole, on probation, or under some other kind of criminal supervision. These figures dwarfed those of every other Western society.

As the prison population grew, a “ prison- industrial complex” emerged. Struggling communities battered by deindustrialization saw prisons as a source of jobs and income. Between 1990 and 1995, the federal government and the states constructed more than 200 new prisons. In 2008, five states spent more money on their prison systems than on higher education. Convict labor, a practice the labor movement had managed to curtail in the late nineteenth century, revived in the late twentieth. Private companies in Oregon “leased” prisoners for three dollars per day. A call to Trans World Airlines for a flight reservation was likely to be answered by a California inmate.

The Burden of Imprisonment

Members of racial minorities experienced most strongly the paradox of grow- ing islands of unfreedom in a nation that prided itself on liberty. In 1950, whites accounted for 70 percent of the nation’s prison population and non- whites 30 percent. By 2010, these figures had been reversed. One reason was that severe penalties faced those convicted of using or selling crack, a particularly potent form of cocaine concentrated among the urban poor, while the use of powder cocaine, the drug of choice in suburban America, led to far lighter sentences.

The percentage of the black population in prison stood five times higher than the proportion for white Americans. More than one- quarter of all black men could expect to serve time in prison at some time during their lives. A crim- inal record made it very difficult for ex- prisoners to find jobs. Partly because so many young men were in prison, blacks had a significantly lower rate of mar- riage than other Americans. Their children became “prison orphans,” forced to live with relatives or in foster homes.

Blacks convicted of crimes were also more likely than whites to receive the death penalty. In 1972, the Supreme Court had temporarily suspended states’ use of this punishment. But the Court soon allowed it to resume, despite evidence of racial disparities in its application. Even as western Europe and other countries abolished the death penalty, the United States executed over 1,400 persons between 1977 and 2015. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had

CULTURE WARS ★ 1097

described executions as common in Europe but rare in America. By the early twenty- first century, the United States ranked with China, Iran, and Saudi Ara- bia as the nations that most often executed their citizens. The 2.2 million Amer- icans in prison in 2015 represented one- fifth of the entire world’s inmates and far exceeded the number in any other country.

The continuing frustration of urban blacks exploded in 1992 when an all- white suburban jury found four Los Angeles police officers not guilty in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, even though an onlooker had captured their assault on videotape. The deadliest urban uprising since the New York draft riots of 1863 followed. Some fifty- two people died, and property damage approached $1 billion. Many Latino youths, who shared blacks’ resentment over mistreatment by the police, joined in the violence. The uprising suggested that despite the civil rights revolution, the nation had failed to address the plight of the urban poor.

The Continuing Rights Revolution

Reflecting the continued power of the rights revolution, in 1990, newly orga- nized disabled Americans won passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This far- reaching measure prohibited discrimination in hiring and pro- motion against persons with disabilities and required that entrances to public buildings be redesigned so as to ensure access for the disabled.

Some movements that were descended from the late 1960s achieved great visibility in the 1990s. Prominent among these was the campaign for gay rights, which in the last two decades of the century increasingly turned its attention to combating acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a fatal disease spread by sexual contact, drug use, and transfusions of contaminated blood. AIDS first emerged in the early 1980s. It quickly became epidemic among homosexual men. The gay movement mobilized to promote “safe sex,” prevent discrimina- tion against people suffering from AIDS, and press the federal government to devote greater resources to fighting the disease. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis organized educational programs and assistance to those affected by the dis- ease, and demanded that drug companies put AZT, a drug with some success in treating AIDS, on the market. A more radical group, ACT UP, disrupted a mass at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest what it called the Catho- lic Church’s prejudices against gays. By 2000, even though more than 400,000 Americans had died of AIDS, its spread among gays had been sharply curtailed. But in other parts of the world, such as Africa, the AIDS epidemic remained out of control.

Gay groups also played an increasing role in politics. In cities with large gay populations, such as New York and San Francisco, politicians vied to attract their votes. Overall, the growth of public tolerance of homosexuality was

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1098 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

among the most striking changes in American social attitudes in the last two decades of the century. In the second decade of the twenty- first century, this would lead to the remarkably rapid acceptance of the right of gay Americans to form legal marriages.

Native Americans in the New Century

Another social movement spawned by the 1960s that continued to flourish was the American Indian movement. The Indian population reached over 5 million (including people choosing more than one race) in the 2010 census, a sign not only of population growth but also of a renewed sense of pride that led many Indians for the first time to identify themselves as such to census enumerators. Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Native American Rights Fund, estab- lished in 1971, some tribes embarked on a campaign for restitution for past injustices. In 2001, for example, a New York court awarded the Cayuga Nation $248 million for illegal land seizures two centuries earlier.

The legal position of Indians as American citizens who enjoy a kind of quasi- sovereignty still survives in some cases. Notable examples are the lucra- tive Indian casinos now operating in states that otherwise prohibit gambling. In 2011, Indian casinos took in over $27 billion, making some tribes very rich. One such group is the Pequot tribe of Connecticut. In 1637, as the result of a brief, bloody war, Puritan New Englanders exterminated or sold into slavery most of the tribe’s members. The treaty that restored peace decreed that the tribe’s name should be wiped from the historical record. Today, the few hun- dred members of the Pequot tribe operate Foxwoods, reputedly the world’s larg- est casino. However, because of the recession that began in 2007, Foxwoods’ receipts plummeted and its survival remains uncertain.

Half of today’s Indians live in five western states (California, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, and Washington). Although some tribes have reinvested casino profits in improved housing and health care and college scholarships for Native American students, most Indian casinos are marginal operations whose low- wage jobs as cashiers, waitresses, and the like have done little to relieve Indian poverty. Native Americans continue to occupy the lowest rung on the economic ladder. At least half of those living on reservations have incomes below the poverty line.

Multiculturalism

The new face of American society went hand in hand with one of the most striking developments of the 1990 s— the celebration of group difference and demands for group recognition. Multiculturalism became the term for a new awareness of the diversity of American society, past and present, and for

CULTURE WARS ★ 1099

vocal demands that jobs, education, and politics reflect that diversity. As the numbers of minority and female stu- dents at the nation’s colleges and uni- versities rose, these institutions moved aggressively to diversify their faculties and revise the traditional curriculum.

One sign of multiculturalism could be seen in the spread of academic pro- grams dealing with the experience of specific groups— Black Studies, Latino Studies, Women’s Studies, and the like. Literature departments added the writ- ings of female and minority authors to those of white men. Numerous scholars now taught and wrote history in ways that stressed the experiences of diverse groups of Americans, rather than a com- mon national narrative.

The Identity Debate

Among some Americans, the height- ened visibility of immigrants, racial minorities, and inheritors of the sexual revolution inspired not celebration of pluralism but alarm over perceived cultural fragmentation. Conservatives, and some traditional liberals as well, decried “identity politics” and multicultural- ism for undermining a common sense of nationhood.

Increased cultural diversity and changes in educational policy inspired harsh debates over whether immigrant children should be required to learn English and whether further immigration should be discouraged. These issues entered politics most dramatically in California, whose voters in 1994 approved Proposi- tion 187, which denied undocumented immigrants and their children access to welfare, education, and most health services. A federal judge soon barred imple- mentation of the measure on the grounds that control over immigration policy rests with the federal government. By 2000, twenty- three states had passed laws establishing English as their official language (similar to measures enacted in the aftermath of World War I). The 1996 law that abolished welfare also barred most immigrants who had not become citizens from receiving food stamps.

But efforts to appeal to prejudice for political gain often backfired. In Cali- fornia, Republicans’ anti- immigrant campaigns inspired minorities to mobilize

This work by the contemporary Eastern Band Cherokee artist Shan Goshorn, entitled Unin- tended Legacy, reproduces historical docu- ments that are woven into a basket (a traditional Native American craft) such as the names and images of Indian children and adults at a typical boarding school. That history, she suggests, still affects Indian life today.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1100 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

politically and offended many white Americans. In 2000, Republican presiden- tial candidate George W. Bush emphasized that his brand of conservatism was multicultural, not exclusionary.

Cultural Conservatism

Immigration occupied only one front in what came to be called the Culture Wars— battles over moral values that raged throughout the 1990s. The Chris- tian Coalition, founded by evangelical minister Pat Robertson, became a major force in Republican politics. It launched crusades against gay rights, abortion, secularism in public schools, and government aid to the arts. Pat Buchanan’s Republican convention speech of 1992 calling for a “religious war for the soul of America,” mentioned earlier, alarmed many voters. But cultural conserva- tives hailed it as their new rallying cry.

It sometimes appeared during the 1990s that the country was refighting old battles between traditional religion and modern secular culture. In an echo of the 1920s, a number of localities required the teaching of creationism, a religious alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The battles of the 1960s seemed to be forever unresolved. Many conservatives railed against the erosion of the nuclear family, the changing racial landscape produced by immigration, and what they considered a general decline of traditional values. Cultural conservatives were not satisfied with a few victories over what they considered immorality, such as the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which barred gay couples from spou- sal benefits provided by federal law. (The Supreme Court would declare the law unconstitutional in 2013.)

Family Values in Retreat

The censuses of 2000 and 2010 showed family values increasingly in disarray. Half of all marriages ended in divorce (70 percent on the West Coast). In 2010, more than 40 percent of births were to unmarried women, not only sexually active teenagers, but growing numbers of professional women in their thirties and forties as well. For the first time, fewer than half of all households consisted of married couples, and only one- fifth were “traditional” families— a wife, hus- band, and their children. More than half of all adults were single or divorced. Two- thirds of married women worked outside the home. The pay gap between men and women, although narrowing, persisted. In 2010, the weekly earn- ings of women with full- time jobs stood at 82 percent of those of men— up from 63 percent in 1980. In only two occupational categories did women earn more than men— postal service clerks and special education teachers.

Although dominated by conservatives, the Supreme Court, in Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania (1992), reaffirmed a woman’s right to

CULTURE WARS ★ 1101

terminate a pregnancy. The decision allowed states to enact mandatory waiting periods and anti- abortion counseling, but it overturned a requirement that the husband be given notification before the proce- dure was undertaken. “At the heart of liberty,” said the Court, “is the right to . . . make the most intimate and per- sonal choices” without outside inter- ference. In effect, Casey repudiated the centuries- old doctrine that a husband has a legal claim to control the body of his wife.

The Antigovernment Extreme

At the radical fringe of conservatism, the belief that the federal government posed a threat to American freedom led to the creation of private mili- tias who armed themselves to fend off oppressive authority. Groups like Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus, and other self- proclaimed “Christian patri- ots” spread a mixture of racist, anti- Semitic, and antigovernment ideas. Private armies, like the Militia of Montana, vowed to resist enforcement of fed- eral gun control laws. For millions of Americans, owning a gun became a prime symbol of liberty. “We’re here because we love freedom,” declared a participant in a 1995 Washington rally against proposed legislation banning semiauto- matic assault weapons.

Many militia groups employed the symbolism and language of the American Revolution, sprinkling their appeals with warnings about the dangers of government tyranny drawn from the writings of Thomas Jef- ferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. They warned that leaders of both major parties formed part of a conspiracy to surrender American sover- eignty to the United Nations, or to some shadowy international conspiracy. Although such organizations had been growing for years, they burst into the national spotlight in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh, a member of the militant

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What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1102 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

anti government movement, exploded a bomb at a federal office building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 persons, including numerous children at a day- care center. McVeigh was captured, convicted, and executed. The bombing alerted the nation to the danger of violent antigovernment right- wing groups.

I M P E A C H M E N T A N D T H E E L E C T I O N O F 2 0 0 0 The unusually intense partisanship of the 1990s seemed ironic, given Clinton’s move toward the political center. Republicans’ intense dislike of Clinton could only be explained by the fact that he seemed to symbolize everything conser- vatives hated about the 1960s. As a college student, the president had smoked marijuana and participated in antiwar demonstrations. He had married a fem- inist, made a point of leading a multicultural administration, and supported gay rights. Clinton’s popularity puzzled and frustrated conservatives, rein- forcing their conviction that something was deeply amiss in American life. From the very outset of his administration, Clinton’s political opponents and scandal- hungry media stood ready to pounce. Clinton himself provided the ammunition.

The Impeachment of Clinton

Sexual misconduct by public officials had a long history. But in the 1980s and 1990s, scrutiny of politicians’ private lives became far more intense than in the past. Gary Hart, as noted in the previous chapter, had been driven from the 1988 campaign because of an extramarital liaison. In 1991, Senate hearings on the nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, became embroiled in dramatic charges of sexual harassment leveled against Thomas by law professor Anita Hill. To the outrage of feminists, the Senate narrowly confirmed him. Nonetheless, because of her testimony, Americans became more aware of the problem of sexual harassment in and out of the workplace, and complaints shot up across the country.

From the day Clinton took office, charges of misconduct bedeviled him. In 1998, it became known that Clinton had carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Kenneth Starr, the special counsel who had been appointed to investigate a previous scandal, shifted his focus to Lewinsky. He issued a lengthy report containing almost pornographic details of Clinton’s sexual acts with the young woman and accused the president of lying when he denied the affair under oath. In December 1998, the Republican- controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction

IMPEACHMENT AND THE ELECTION OF 2000 ★ 1103

of justice. He became the second president to be tried before the Senate. Early in 1999, the vote took place. Neither charge mustered a simple majority, much less than the two- thirds required to remove Clinton from office.

Karl Marx once wrote that historical events occur twice— first as trag- edy, the second time as farce. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 had revolved around some of the most momentous questions in American history— the Reconstruction of the South, the rights of the former slaves, rela- tions between the federal government and the states. Clinton’s impeachment had to do with what many considered to be a juvenile escapade. Polls suggested that the obsession of Kenneth Starr and members of Congress with Clinton’s sexual acts appalled Americans far more than the president’s irresponsible behavior. Clinton’s continuing popularity throughout the impeachment con- troversy demonstrated how profoundly traditional attitudes toward sexual morality had changed.

The Disputed Election

Had Clinton been eligible to run for reelection in 2000, he would probably have won. But after the death of FDR, the Constitution had been amended to limit presidents to two terms in office. Democrats nominated Vice President Al Gore to succeed Clinton (pairing him with Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Jewish vice- presidential nominee). Republicans chose George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and son of Clinton’s predecessor, as their candidate, with former secretary of defense Dick Cheney as his running mate.

The election proved to be one of the closest in the nation’s history. The out- come remained uncertain until a month after the ballots had been cast. Gore won the popular vote by a tiny margin— 540,000 of 100 million cast, or one- half of 1 percent. Victory in the electoral college hinged on which candidate had carried Florida. There, amid widespread confusion at the polls and claims of irregularities in counting the ballots, Bush claimed a margin of a few hundred votes. In the days after the election, Democrats demanded a hand recount of the Florida ballots for which machines could not determine a voter’s intent. The Florida Supreme Court ordered the recount to proceed.

As in the disputed election that ended Reconstruction (a contest in which Florida had also played a crucial role), it fell to Supreme Court justices to decide the outcome. On December 12, 2000, by a 5-4 vote, the Court ordered a halt to the recounting of Florida ballots, allowing the state’s governor Jeb Bush (George W. Bush’s brother) to certify that the Republican candidate had carried the state and had therefore won the presidency.

The decision in Bush v. Gore was one of the oddest in Supreme Court his- tory. In the late 1990s, the Court had reasserted the powers of the states within

How did a divisive political partisanship affect the election of 2000?

1104 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

the federal system. Now, however, it overturned a decision of the Florida Supreme Court interpreting the state’s election laws. The majority justified their decision by insisting that the “equal protection” clause of the Four- teenth Amendment required that all ballots within a state be counted in accordance with a single standard, something impossible given the wide variety of machines and paper ballots used in Florida. Perhaps recognizing that this new constitutional princi- ple threatened to throw into question results throughout the country— since

many states had voting systems as complex as Florida’ s— the Court added that it applied only in this single case.

The most remarkable thing about the election of 2000 was not so much its controversial ending as the even division of the country it revealed. Bush and Gore each received essentially half of the popular vote. The final count in the electoral college stood at 271-266, the narrowest margin since 1876. The Senate ended up divided 50-50 between the two parties. But these figures concealed deep political and social fissures. Bush carried the entire South and nearly all the states of the trans- Mississippi farm belt and Rockies. Gore won almost all the states of the Northeast, Old Northwest, and West Coast. Res- idents of urban areas voted overwhelmingly for Gore. Rural areas went just as solidly for Bush. Members of racial minorities gave Gore large majorities, while white voters preferred Bush. The results also revealed a significant “gender gap.” Until the 1960s, women had tended to vote disproportionately Republi- can. In 2000, women favored Gore by 11 percent, while men preferred Bush by the same margin.

A Challenged Democracy

Coming at the end of the “decade of democracy,” the 2000 election revealed troubling features of the American political system at the close of the twenti- eth century. The electoral college, devised by the founders to enable the coun- try’s prominent men rather than ordinary voters to choose the president, gave the White House to a candidate who did not receive the most votes— an odd result in a political democracy. A country that prided itself on modern tech- nology had a voting system in which citizens’ choices could not be reliably

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THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11 ★ 1105

determined. Counting both congressional and presidential races, the campaign cost more than $1.5 billion, mostly raised from wealthy individuals and corpo- rate donors. This reinforced the widespread belief that money dominated the political system. The implications for democracy of the ever- closer connection between power in the economic marketplace and power in the marketplace of politics and ideas would be widely debated in the early twenty- first century.

Evidence abounded of a broad dis engagement from public life. As govern- ments at all levels competed to turn their activities over to private contractors, and millions of Americans walled themselves off from their fellow citizens by taking up residence in socially homogeneous gated communities, the very idea of a shared public sphere seemed to dissolve. Nearly half the eligible voters did not bother to go to the polls, and in state and local elections, turnouts typi- cally ranged between only 20 and 30 percent. More people watched the tele- vised Nixon- Kennedy debates of 1960 than the Bush- Gore debates of 2000, even though the population had risen by 100 million. Both candidates sought to occupy the political center and relied on public- opinion polls and media con- sultants to shape their messages. Major issues like health care, race relations, and economic inequality went virtually unmentioned during the campaign. And no one discussed the issue that would soon come to dominate Bush’s presidency— the threat of international terrorism.

T H E A T T A C K S O F S E P T E M B E R 1 1 September 11, 2001, a beautiful late- summer morning, began with the sun rising over the East Coast of the United States in a crystal- clear sky. But Septem- ber 11 soon became one of the most tragic dates in American history.

Around 8 AM, hijackers seized control of four jet airliners filled with passen- gers. They crashed two into the World Trade Center in New York City, igniting infernos that soon caused these buildings, which dominated the lower Manhat- tan skyline, to collapse. A third plane hit a wing of the Pentagon, the country’s military headquarters, in Washington, D.C. On the fourth aircraft, passengers who had learned of these events via their cell phones overpowered the hijack- ers. The plane crashed in a field near Pittsburgh, killing all aboard. Counting the nineteen hijackers, more than 200 passengers, pilots, and flight attendants, and victims on the ground, around 3,000 people died on September 11. The vic- tims included nearly 400 police and firefighters who had rushed to the World Trade Center in a rescue effort and perished when the “twin towers” collapsed. Relatives and friends desperately seeking information about the fate of those lost in the attacks printed thousands of “missing” posters. These remained in

Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001?

1106 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

public places in New York and Wash- ington for weeks, grim reminders of the lives extinguished on September 11.

The Bush administration quickly blamed Al Qaeda, a shadowy terror- ist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, for the attacks. A wealthy Islamic fundamentalist from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden had joined the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. He had developed a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and received American funds to help build his mountain bases. But after the Gulf War of 1991, his anger increasingly turned against the United States. Bin Laden was especially outraged by the presence of American military bases in Saudi Arabia and by American support for Israel in its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. More generally, bin Laden and his followers saw the United States, with its religious pluralism, consumer culture, and open sexual mores, as the antithesis of the rigid values in which they believed. He feared that American influence was corrupting Saudi Arabia,

Islam’s spiritual home, and helping to keep the Saudi royal family, which failed to oppose this development, in power.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, terrorist groups who held the United States and other Western countries responsible for the plight of the Palestinians had engaged in hijackings and murders. After the Gulf War, Osama bin Laden declared “war” on the United States. Terrorists associated with Al Qaeda exploded a truck- bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six per- sons, and set off blasts in 1998 at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which more than 200 persons, mostly African embassy workers, died. Thus, a ris- ing terrorist threat was visible before September 11. Nonetheless, the attack came as a complete surprise. With the end of the Cold War in 1991, most Americans felt more secure, especially within their own borders, than they had for decades.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, gave new prominence to ideas deeply embedded in the American past— that freedom was the central quality of

The twin towers of the World Trade Center after being struck by hijacked airplanes on Septem- ber 11, 2001. Shortly after this photograph was taken, the towers collapsed.

American life, and that the United States had a mission to spread freedom throughout the world and to fight those it saw as freedom’s enemies. The attacks and events that followed also lent new urgency to questions that had recurred many times in American history: Should the United States act in the world as a republic or an empire? What is the proper balance between liberty and security? Who deserves the full enjoyment of American freedom? None had an easy answer.

C H A P T E R R E V I E W

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why was the year 1989 one of the most momentous in the twentieth century?

2. Describe the different visions of the U.S. role in the post– Cold War world as identified by President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton.

3. Explain Clinton’s political strategy of combining social liberalism with conservative economic ideas.

4. What are the causes and consequences of the growing “ prison- industrial complex”?

5. Identify the factors that, in the midst of 1990s prosperity, increased the levels of inequality in the United States.

6. What are the similarities and differences between immigration patterns of the 1990s and earlier?

7. What main issues gave rise to the Culture Wars of the 1990s?

8. Assess the role of the Supreme Court in the presidential election of 2000.

9. What is globalization, and how did it affect the United States in the 1990s?

KEY TERMS

new world order (p. 1073)

Gulf War (p. 1074)

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” (p. 1076)

North American Free Trade Agreement (p. 1076)

Contract with America (p. 1077)

Oslo Accords (p. 1079)

Rwandan genocide (p. 1079)

ethnic cleansing (p. 1079)

Balkan crisis (p. 1079)

globalization (p. 1081)

Americans with Disabilities Act (p. 1097)

multiculturalism (p. 1098)

Culture Wars (p. 1100)

Defense of Marriage Act (p. 1100)

family values (p. 1100)

Bush v. Gore (p. 1103)

Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001?

CHAPTER REVIEW ★ 1107

1108 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

Go to QIJK To see what you know— and learn what you’ve missed— with personalized feedback along the way.

Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S What were the major policy elements of the war on terror in the wake of September 11, 2001?

How did the war in Iraq unfold in the wake of 9/11?

How did the war on terror affect the economy and American liberties?

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

What kinds of change did voters hope for when they elected Barack Obama?

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

What were the prevailing ideas of American freedom at the beginning of the 21st century?

A N E W C E N T U R Y A N D N E W C R I S E S

★ C H A P T E R 2 8 ★

The presidential election of 2008 produced not only a great political sur-prise but a historic moment in American history. Whatever one’s opin-ion of Barack Obama’s policies, there is no question that in view of the nation’s racial history, the election of the first African- American president was an enormously important symbolic turning point.

A little- known forty- seven- year- old senator from Illinois when the campaign began in 2007, Obama owed his success both to his own exceptional skills as a speaker and campaigner and to the evolution of American politics and society.

★ 1109

1110 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

Obama’s life story exemplified the enormous changes the United States had undergone since 1960. Without the civil rights movement, his election would have been inconceivable. He was the product of an interracial marriage, which ended in divorce when he was two years old, between a Kenyan immigrant and a white American woman. When Obama was born in 1961, their marriage was still illegal in many states. He attended Harvard Law School, and worked in Chicago as a community organizer before going into politics. He also wrote two best- selling books about his upbringing in Indonesia (where his mother worked as an anthropologist) and Hawaii (where his maternal grandparents helped to raise him) and his search for a sense of identity given his complex background. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and first gained national attention with an eloquent speech at the Democratic national con- vention that year. His early opposition to the Iraq War won the support of the Democratic Party’s large antiwar element; his race galvanized the support of black voters; and his youth and promise of change appealed to the young.

Obama recognized how the Internet had changed politics. He established an email list containing the names of millions of voters with whom he could communicate instantaneously, and used web- based networks to raise enor- mous sums of money in small donations. His campaign put out videos on popular Internet sites. With its widespread use of modern technology and mas- sive mobilization of new voters, Obama’s was the first political campaign of the twenty- first century. But his election also rested on the deep unpopularity of his predecessor, George W. Bush, because of the seemingly endless war he launched in Iraq and the collapse of the American economy in 2008.

T H E W A R O N T E R R O R Bush before September 11

Before becoming president, George W. Bush had been an executive in the oil industry and had served as governor of Texas. He had worked to dissociate the Republican Party from the harsh anti- immigrant rhetoric of the mid- 1990s and had proven himself an effective proponent of what he called “compassionate con- servatism.” Nonetheless, from the outset Bush pursued a strongly conservative agenda. In 2001, he persuaded Congress to enact the largest tax cut in American his- tory. With the economy slowing, he promoted the plan as a way of stimulating renewed growth. In keeping with the “ supply- side” economic outlook embraced twenty years earlier by Ronald Reagan, most of the tax cuts were directed toward the wealthiest Americans, on the assumption that they would invest the money they saved in taxes in economically productive activities.

THE WAR ON TERROR ★ 1111

In foreign policy, Bush emphasized American freedom of action, unrestrained by international treaties and institutions. To great controversy, the Bush administra- tion announced that it would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which sought to combat global warming— a slow rise in the earth’s temperature that scientists warned could have disastrous effects on the world’s climate. Global warming is caused when gases released by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil remain in the upper atmosphere, trapping heat reflected from the earth. Evi- dence of this development first surfaced in the 1990s, when scientists studying layers of ice in Greenland concluded that the earth’s temperature had risen significantly during the past century.

Today, most scientists consider global warming a serious situation. Climate change threatens to disrupt long- established patterns of agriculture, and the melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps because of rising tempera- tures may raise ocean levels and flood coastal cities. Since, at the time, the United States burned far more fossil fuel than any other nation, Bush’s repudiation of the treaty, on the grounds that it would weaken the Amer- ican economy, infuriated much of the world, as well as environmentalists at home.

“They Hate Freedom”

September 11 transformed the international situation, the domestic political environ- ment, and the Bush presidency. An outpour- ing of popular patriotism followed the attacks, all the more impressive because it was spontaneous, not orchestrated by the government or private organizations. Throughout the country, people demonstrated their sense of resolve and their sympathy for the victims by dis- playing the American flag. Public trust in government rose dramatically, and

2001 U.S. enters war in Afghanistan