Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (31 page)

These struggles over AIDS policies, among the bitterest battles in a host of contemporary cultural controversies involving sex and gender issues, were noteworthy as political phenomena.
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Later, in the early 1990s, they showed what a highly determined interest group—one that demanded action, and action now!—might ultimately accomplish if it besieged government, the ultimate dispenser of rights and entitlements. By 1992, lobbies like ACT-UP managed to secure from Congress $2 billion for AIDS research, prevention, and treatment. This was more than the government spent to fight cancer, which killed twenty-two times as many people.
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Still, popular American attitudes toward homosexuality remained predominantly cool during the early 1990s.

These attitudes did liberalize a little in the late 1990s, driven mainly by young people. Concerning homosexuality, as so many other controversies involving sex, gender, and race, the younger generations led the charges for change. The pace of movement quickened a little early in the new century. In 2003, the Supreme Court (in a six-to-three vote) reversed its decision of 1986 that had upheld the criminalizing of same-sex sodomy. In November of that year, the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided, by a vote of four to three, that it was a violation of the state constitution to deny same-sex couples access to marriage. The court set May 17, 2004—the fiftieth anniversary of
Brown v. Board of Education
—as the day when such marriages must be permitted. So it was that grass-roots activism, interest group politics, rights-consciousness, and rulings from America’s ever more influential courts came together, however slowly, to advance liberal goals in the nation’s sometimes tempestuous struggles over cultural issues.
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D
ESPITE THE RISE OF THE
AIDS
EPIDEMIC
, a number of advances in technology, basic science, and public health in the 1980s encouraged optimistic visions in America. In April 1981, the first reusable space shuttle, using the orbiter
Columbia
, shot into space.
⁹³
In 1988, scientists introduced genetic fingerprinting, and later improved genetic understanding of such ailments as schizophrenia and cystic fibrosis. Per capita cigarette smoking, which had declined only slightly during the 1970s, at last began to drop sharply—and continued to do so for the remainder of the century. By the late 1980s, cities and towns began banning smoking from public buildings and restaurants.
⁹⁴
Other social trends that had alarmed Americans in the 1970s—record or near-record-high rates of divorce and welfare take-up—remained worrisome but stabilized during the 1980s. For these and other reasons, popular alarm that the nation was in decline, which had been pervasive in the mid- and late 1970s, weakened after the mid-1980s.

Optimists derived further satisfaction from an event in 1982 that may have helped to ease angry feelings about the Vietnam War. This was the dedication of Maya Lin’s innovative, widely praised Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Many Vietnam vets marched in a cathartic “welcome home” parade on that occasion, pleased to participate in the first important public commemoration of their participation in the war. Thereafter, the “Wall,” though criticized by some veterans’ groups, became by far the most visited Washington site. Two years later, many Americans commemorated a very different military experience: D-Day. Led by a triumphant President Reagan in Normandy, they jubilantly celebrated the fortieth anniversary of that militarily huge event, thereby reaffirming widespread patriotic feelings.

Notwithstanding healing occasions such as these, many Americans during the Reagan years continued to bewail the sorrier sides of life in the United States. As earlier, liberals demanded reform of the nation’s health insurance system. A combination of forces—the aging of the population, the spread of high-tech and often life-saving medical procedures (an area of R&D in which the United States outpaced the rest of the world), escalating paperwork expense, and rising expectations about what it meant to be “healthy”—were jacking up the cost of medical care, which rose rapidly from the 1970s on (from 7 percent of GNP in 1970 to 14 percent by 2000). Thanks in part to the weakening of labor unions, corporate health benefits were also in danger. Though Medicare offered partial insurance coverage for most of the elderly, and Medicaid assisted many of the poor, large holes remained in the medical safety net. In the late 1980s some 14 percent of Americans lacked health insurance. Conservative interests, however, opposed major efforts to expand governmental involvement. For this and other reasons, the United States remained the only developed nation in the West without a system of universal health insurance coverage.

As in the 1970s, many Americans also worried about moral decline. Rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and teenage pregnancy continued to increase. In 1981, MTV arrived on the scene, highlighting sex to capture an audience, mostly of young viewers, that was estimated in 1984 to consist of 23 million people.
⁹⁵
Reagan seemed to oppose the excesses, as he saw them, of sex and violence on TV, which Americans on the average still watched for twenty-eight hours a week, but his support of deregulation extended to the policies of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward programming in the 1980s. Taking advantage of the obvious—sex sells—TV producers and Hollywood boldly featured sex and violence. The irresponsibility of TV producers at the peak of the AIDS crisis so angered the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1988 that it took out full-page ads in magazines and newspapers. Characters on TV, the ad said, “did it 20,000 times on television last year, but nobody used a condom.”
⁹⁶

Critics of Reagan emphasized above all that he set a poor example by delivering a crass and materialistic message to the nation. “What I want to see above all,” he said in 1983, “is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.”
⁹⁷
Critics who deplored this message asserted that while the culture of the 1970s, the Me Decade, had been greedy, the 1980s were worse. Thanks to Reagan’s message, they grumbled, “yuppies,” or young, upwardly mobile professionals, were becoming role models. Joining these supposedly avaricious college graduates, they added, were ever larger numbers of “buppies” (black urban professionals),“dinks” (dual-income couples with no kids), and “grumpies” (grim, ruthless, upwardly mobile young professionals). All these people, it seemed, could not wait to plunge their hands into the cornucopia of goods that had seduced the United States into becoming a nation of uninhibited, acquisitive consumers.
⁹⁸

A single-minded pursuit of wealth and possessions, these critics complained, was commercializing virtually all of American culture and creating a new Gilded Age. “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, who in 1972 had traveled to Vietnam to protest the war, was now making millions selling exercise videos and promoting physical fitness. (The money, she said, supported workers’ rights causes advanced by her politically left-wing husband, Tom Hayden.) Rennie Davis, a prominent radical from the 1960s, was working as a stockbroker. Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984, signed on after the election to do a Pepsi-Cola ad. Michael Jackson did the same, earning $1.5 million (and having his hair accidentally singed) in the process.

Foes of materialism bemoaned the fact that television shows such as
Dallas
and
Dynasty,
which featured the manipulations of the rich and powerful, were among the most popular programs on the air early in the decade. Later in the 1980s, a boastful, in-your-face autobiography of the hitherto uncelebrated Donald Trump, a real estate magnate, became a best-seller.
⁹⁹
Many observers were especially appalled by a widely circulated report that one-third of Yale graduates in 1985 were interviewing for jobs as financial analysts at First Boston Corporation.
¹⁰⁰
What a change from the socially conscious ’60s!

By mid-decade, the enemies of excessive materialism directed much of their firepower against large-scale corporate takeovers and mergers, which began to proliferate—as is often the case during economically prosperous periods—at the time. Conservatives tended to welcome mergers, perceiving them as helping the United States weed out its inefficient companies, invest in up-to-date technology, and outperform foreign competition. Other Americans, however, charged that the mergers were “downsizing” employment, wiping out well-managed small businesses, enriching CEOs, smashing labor unions, and hiking the cost of goods.
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Moreover, there was no hiding the crassness associated with some of the by-products of mergers. Vivid phrases—“junk bonds,” “leveraged buyouts,” “corporate raiders,” “golden parachutes,” “hostile takeovers”—entered everyday language. It was estimated that the average compensation of America’s highest-paid CEOs rose in constant 1980 dollars from $3 million a year in 1980 to more than $12 million in 1988. Strategically placed hustlers made a killing, sometimes illegally. One of the most flamboyant of these, Ivan Boesky, famously announced at a commencement ceremony in Berkeley in 1986, “Greed is healthy.” Another insider, “junk bond king” Michael Milken, raked in $550 million in 1987. Both men were later indicted, hit with whopping fines, and sent to jail.
¹⁰²

Excesses such as these sparked considerable cultural criticism, especially in mid- and late decade. In 1985, a team of social scientists headed by Robert Bellah of the University of California, Berkeley, published the results of their well-regarded surveys of American values in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Reflecting a growing consensus among liberals—and among critics of Reagan—they concluded that during these years “American individualism may have grown cancerous” and “may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.” Calling on people to develop more community spirit, the authors concluded, “The citizen has been swallowed up in economic man.”
¹⁰³

Filmmakers and writers joined this attack on materialism. In 1987, Oliver Stone, the son of a broker, directed
Wall Street
, in which a speculator, played by Michael Douglas, was portrayed as greed personified. Echoing Boesky, he proclaimed “Greed is good.” In the same year, Tom Wolfe’s novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities
received considerable critical acclaim. Highlighting the huge gulfs that divided rich from poor, black from white, the book portrayed New York City as a violent concrete jungle and satirized amoral bond traders and corporate lawyers as self-deluded “masters of the universe.” It sold millions of copies.

I
F
R
EAGAN WAS BOTHERED
by laments such as these, he did not say so. He had little reason to worry, for even the staggeringly huge S&L scandal of late decade did not seem to shake the majority of Americans from their faith in traditional values, including the acquisition of wealth. Far from resenting the rich, many people in the United States continued to admire those who had achieved the American Dream, which they tended to equate with the accumulation of personal wealth and property. Reagan, of course, was the most dramatic example of a small-town boy who had risen on his own merits to adulation and fame. Another was Lee Iacocca, who was extolled for leading the Chrysler Corporation out of corporate crisis (though aided by a government bailout) in the early 1980s, and who became a minor cultural hero. His 1984 autobiography, a formulaic rags-to-riches story that traced his ascent from boyhood as a son of Italian immigrants to the heights of corporate success, celebrated traditional American values. It was a best-seller for two years.
¹⁰⁴

Highly popular television shows of the mid- and late 1980s reinforced other traditionally heralded values, among them the virtues of the two-parent, upwardly mobile family. One such production was
The Cosby Show,
a sitcom that featured Bill Cosby as the upper-middle-class patriarch of a two-parent family of five well-behaved children. Family concerns that were then widespread in the United States—premarital sex, drug abuse, teen rebellion—received relatively little attention in the episodes. Cosby himself, playing an obstetrician, exuded a warm and fatherly image; his character’s wife was a successful lawyer.
The Cosby Show,
which first appeared in 1984, attracted some 63 million viewers a week and was the top-rated program for most of the late 1980s.

Another popular “warmedy” (warm family comedy) of the late 1980s was
Family Ties,
which starred Michael J. Fox as the eldest sibling in a close-knit family. As in
The Cosby Show,
there was little intergenerational tension in the series, save that which occasionally pitted the parents, described as “’60s Democrats,” against Fox, a loyal Republican. In one episode, Fox’s character carried a school lunchbox with a picture of Richard Nixon on its cover. Some critics likened the show to saccharine staples of the 1950s such as
Leave It to Beaver
and
Father Knows Best.

Programs such as these, reflecting the more conservative culture of the 1980s, differed considerably from post–Vietnam War shows such as
All in the Family,
the top-rated TV sitcom of the early and mid-1970s. The father in that show, a working-class bigot named Archie Bunker, was a great admirer of Nixon and other anti-liberal politicians. (The show’s theme song, “Those Were the Days,” included the line, “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”) His bluntly disrespectful, long-haired sonin-law, by contrast, ridiculed virtually all sources of authority. Archie called him “Meathead.” When Archie’s wife, Edith, appeared to side with the sonin-law, Bunker called her a “dingbat.”
All in the Family,
much more than highly rated sitcoms of the 1980s, sparked sharp political responses.