Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (47 page)

It was equally debatable whether television had “declined” all that much over time: Since the 1950s it had hardly been a significant source of cultural uplift. Consumers of high culture recalled nostalgically that CBS had earlier set aside television time for Sunday afternoon concerts featuring Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Those days, to be sure, had passed, overtaken by professional football and other offerings on Sunday afternoons. But Americans who imagined that television and film had been much more edifying in the past might have done well to remember that shots of thigh and cleavage had always enjoyed great popular appeal: A common motto of television producers in the 1960s, when shows such as
The Beverly Hillbillies
had earned top ratings, had been “bosoms, broads, and fun.”
⁸⁸
Movies in the 1970s, some observers argued, had been at least as graphic sexually as those in the 1990s.

Still, the crassness of TV and of other manifestations of American popular culture in the 1990s understandably distressed many people, who blamed it for a further commercialization and degradation of American civilization. Despite rising levels of educational experience, the percentage of American adults in the 1990s who were reading literary works—poems, plays, or fiction—may have been smaller than it had been in years past. So may have been the percentage of people, especially young people, who read any books at all. Competition from movies, and especially from television, was said to be a primary cause of this decline.
⁸⁹

Finally, there was no doubting that the display of sex in popular culture in the 1990s had become pervasive and graphic, and that young children were often exposed to it, especially on television. Whether such presentations profoundly affected behavior was regularly disputed—after all, teenage pregnancy declined in the 1990s. Moreover, the sexual focus of many sitcoms—such as the
Seinfeld
episode featuring masturbation—was hardly subversive. Still, sex did seem to be virtually ever-present on the tube. Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a non-profit research group, expressed a historically accurate judgment in 1998: “People used to think that television was aimed at the mind of a 12-year-old. Now it seems aimed at the hormones of a 14-year-old.”
⁹⁰

P
OLLS IN THE MID-1990s
suggested that most Americans considered themselves fortunate to live in the United States, which they perceived as a dynamic, forward-looking, and efficient society. In 1994, a poll asked: “Earlier in American history, many people thought the U.S. was the best place in the world to live. Do you still think it is, or not?” Eighty percent of respondents—including nearly identical percentages of college graduates, high school graduates, and those who had not finished high school—answered yes. Alan Wolfe, a careful scholar who employed both polls and interviews to assess American attitudes, reported similar findings in 1998. For the middle classes, he wrote, “the idea of living in any other nation of the world is barely conceivable.”
⁹¹

On the other hand, polls at the time also exposed an underlying popular edginess that may have helped in the early and mid-1990s to make many Americans perceive both “decline” and the intensification of “culture wars.” Notable was a Gallup survey in 1995 that indicated bits of good news: As earlier, most people were content in their personal lives. This was hardly surprising, for the United States, having helped to win the Cold War, was a giant on the world stage. More important, the economy was rapidly improving. But the poll also revealed an interesting pattern—one that in fact had often seemed to characterize popular attitudes throughout the expectant, restless, rights-conscious years since the 1960s: Americans continued to desire more in the way of entitlements and protections, and they wondered uneasily whether the world would get better, or worse, in the future.

It is obviously risky to conclude that polls or interviews such as these represented a last word. Still, the attitudes revealed by such surveys suggested a trend that, while visible in the 1980s, seemed fairly strong by the mid-1990s: In many ways the majority of Americans were doing better—in terms of real incomes, possessions, health, and comforts—and they were pleased about that. They were not so confident, however, about what lay ahead for the culture at large. A perceptive writer had a label for these feelings: “I’m OK—They’re Not.”
⁹²
Only 35 percent of Americans in the 1995 Gallup poll believed that the world had become better than it had been in their parents’ time. (Three percent had no opinion, and 52 percent thought it was worse.) Only 23 percent believed that the “next generation of children” would live in a better world.”
⁹³

Polls such as this suggested that “decline” was less a reality of American life in the 1990s than a perception among people, especially among the mostly middle-class white populace that was generally living more comfortably than in the past but that had developed large expectations about rights and gratifications and that was living in a society that in some ways—witness the shoddier manifestations of popular culture—seemed to be in decline. In a manner that they found difficult to define, these Americans were restless, both because they wanted more for themselves and because, still cherishing ideals, they hoped to make their nation a better place.

In retrospect, however, it also seems accurate to conclude that the much-discussed culture wars of the decade were a little less divisive than they appeared to be, especially to polemicists like Bork, to political partisans, and to conspiracy-minded, sensation-seeking, and crisis-raising profit-seekers in the media. Perceptions of course matter in a society—culture wars did worry politically engaged Americans, especially at their peak during the early and mid-1990s.
Political
polarization remained sharp thereafter. Still, the United States maintained a large
cultural
center that was both more broad-minded and more easygoing than one might have imagined from focusing on the extremes that dominated headlines and that led off local newscasts on television.

9
Immigration, Multiculturalism, Race

In challenging George H. W. Bush for the GOP presidential nomination in 1992, Patrick Buchanan proclaimed that rising immigration was threatening to tear the United States apart. “Our own country,” he said, “is undergoing the greatest invasion in its history, a migration of millions of illegal aliens yearly from Mexico. . . . A nation that cannot control its own borders can scarcely call itself a state any longer.”
¹

Though Buchanan was an especially vocal opponent of large-scale immigration, he was by no means the only American to fret about the “Balkanization” of the nation, or about the surge of “multiculturalism,” as rising rights-consciousness by various minorities was dubbed at the time. Six years earlier, 73 percent of voters in California had approved Proposition 63, which amended the state constitution so as to establish English as the state’s “official language.” Seventeen other states followed California’s example in the late 1980s.
²
Though Proposition 63 was not implemented in California, its symbolic thrust—aimed in part against bilingual education programs—was clear. In California, as in Texas and other states where high numbers of immigrants had been arriving since the 1970s, ethnic tensions were rising.

The rush of immigration, however, was but one of a number of social and economic developments that seemed to be intensifying conflict in the United States at the time. As the Los Angeles riots demonstrated, racial confrontations seemed to be especially dangerous. Popular reactions to the sensationalized, long-drawn-out arrest and murder trial in 1994–95 of the black football hero O. J. Simpson, who had been arrested on charges of killing his former wife and a male friend of hers—both white—revealed extraordinary polarization by race. In 1998, three white racists in Jasper, Texas, tied James Byrd, a black man, to the back of a truck and dragged him to his death.

Class divisions, though less dramatic than these, also continued to trouble American society. As earlier, many blue-collar workers and labor union leaders protested against rising income inequality and against what they said was outrageous corporate arrogance and selfishness. The liberal economist and columnist Paul Krugman, a forceful critic of the rich and powerful, wrote that average salaries of corporate CEOs had risen from $1.3 million in 1970 to $37.5 million in 1998—or from thirty-nine times to more than a thousand times the average earnings of their workers. He was convinced that the United States had entered a “New Gilded Age.”
³

Like Americans who were then insisting that the nation was in “decline” and beset by “culture wars,” people who endorsed the arguments of partisans like Buchanan on the right and Krugman on the left maintained that a wide range of fights over rights and social justice was polarizing the United States. Media reports intensified such feelings. Politicians—more fiercely partisan and unforgiving in the Clinton years than at any other time since Watergate—added to a popular sense that Americans were at one another’s throats in the 1990s.

G
IVEN THE RAPIDLY RISING NUMBERS OF IMMIGRANTS
to America since the 1970s, it was hardly surprising that alarmists such as Buchanan captured attention in the late 1980s and 1990s. These numbers were striking compared to those of the recent past. Between the early 1920s, when restrictive and racially discriminatory immigration laws had been enacted, and the late 1960s, when new, more liberal legislation of 1965 began to take effect, immigration to the United States had remained low. In the thirty-four years between 1931 and 1965, the total number of legal immigrants had averaged around 150,000 per year, or around 5 million in all. Thereafter, the numbers exploded in size, to 4.5 million during the 1970s, 7.3 million during the 1980s, and 9.1 million during the 1990s. Many millions more—guesses placed these numbers at between 250,000 and 350,000 per year in the 1980s and 1990s—entered illegally.
⁴
The total number of immigrants who came to the United States between 1970 and 2000 was therefore estimated to be slightly more than 28 million. Their arrival raised the percentage of Americans who were foreign-born from 4.7 in 1970 (an all-time twentieth-century low) to 10.4 in 2000, or 29.3 million people in a total population that had risen from 203.3 million in 1970 to 281.4 million thirty years later.
⁵

People who welcomed this influx urged activists like Buchanan to relax. They emphasized that high rates of immigration had once before, in the early years of the twentieth century, dramatically altered the ethnic mix of America without harming the nation. Between 1900 and 1910, immigration had accounted for nearly 40 percent of overall population growth in the United States—the largest percentage in the nation’s history.
⁶
The percentage of foreign-born in the population in 1910 had been 14.7—or more than 4 percent higher than it had become by 2000. Opponents of Buchanan in the 1990s insisted that the United States, a nation of immigrants, could comfortably accommodate its surge of newcomers.

Still, the influx of immigrants between 1970 and 2000 was large.
⁷
The
number
of Americans in 2000 who were foreign-born was roughly twice as large as the previous all-time high (14.2 million in 1930) in modern United States history. The total number of people (56 million) who were foreign-born or who had one foreign-born parent reached 20 percent of the population by 2000. Moreover, growth in immigration was concentrated in a relatively few states, such as California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, and New York. By 2000, California’s population had become 27 percent foreign-born. Though 800,000 residents, mostly whites, left the state between 1995 and 2000—many of them for the Mountain West—its population, driven upward by immigration, increased by 1.5 million during these five years.

The primary origins of these new arrivals—Latin America and East Asia—were strikingly different from those early in the century, when most immigrants had come from Eastern and Southern Europe. Between 1980 and 2000, only two million people arrived from Europe, most of them from Eastern Europe or from the Soviet Union and its successor states. Considerably more people, 5.7 million, came from Asia, and 6.8 million were natives of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. An additional million hailed from South America. Smaller numbers migrated from Africa (around 600,000) and from Canada (250,000). Some 4 million legal immigrants—nearly a fourth of the total of legal arrivals from all countries during these twenty years—came from Mexico alone.

If migrants from Asia and from south of the border were identified as “people of color”—as many were—the United States was experiencing something of a “complexion revolution” in these years. Nearly three-fourths of the newcomers were either Asian (26 percent of the total) or Latino (46 percent) by background. By 2002, the number of American people (immigrants and others) identified as Latinos (38.8 million, or 13.5 percent of the population) had surpassed the number who were African American (36.7 million, or 12.7 percent of the population). The number of Asian Americans, which had been tiny in 1970, had also become impressive: 13 million, or 4 percent of the population by 2002. As of 2000, more than half of California’s population was Asian, Latino, or black.
⁸

In 1965, when Congress passed its major reform of immigration law, it had almost no idea that the measure would have consequences such as these. Caught up in the civil rights revolution of the time, reformers on the Hill were focused on ending the racially discriminatory national origins quota system that for many decades had dominated American immigration procedures and that had damaged the country’s international image. That new law included provisions establishing a limit on immigration of 290,000 per year. Of this total, 120,000 might come from places in the western hemisphere, and 170,000 from the rest of the world. No nation from the Old World would be permitted to send more than 20,000 per year.
⁹

The legislation, however, included provisions that favored “family reunification” over skills. Especially preferred were parents, spouses, and unmarried minor children of immigrants who had become United States citizens: All these relatives—“non-quota” immigrants—could come to America outside the overall numerical limits. Lesser preferences, in order, favored unmarried adult children of citizens, spouses and unmarried adult children of permanent resident aliens, and married children of United States citizens. Inasmuch as it continued to be relatively uncomplicated for legal immigrants to become naturalized American citizens—after five or more years of residence—millions of people did so in order to enable their family members to join them. When these relatives became citizens, many of
their
relatives could gain admittance. The numbers admitted via family unification thus exploded in ways that few legislators had anticipated in 1965. More than two-thirds of legal immigrants by the 1990s were entering the United States in this way.
¹⁰

In the early 1980s, by which time the rising tide of newcomers was prompting nervous debate over these policies, pressure arose for Congress to narrow the gates. Advocates of restriction advanced an array of arguments: Immigrants (who were entitled to education in the public schools and if necessary to free emergency health care) crowded America’s classrooms and hospitals and burdened state and local governments; many immigrants, working off the books, paid no taxes; some immigrants landed on the welfare rolls; illegal immigration, uncontrolled by understaffed federal officials, was way out of hand. African American advocates of restriction complained that low-wage immigrants were displacing them from the work force.
¹¹
Labor leaders charged that employers were exploiting the newcomers, driving down overall wage rates and exacerbating poverty and income inequality in the United States.
¹²

Advocates of restriction included environmentalists and others who worried about population growth. The Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded in 1978, took the lead in advancing this argument.
¹³
The rising tide of newcomers, they exclaimed, was mainly responsible for a swelling of America’s population growth, which in the 1990s grew by 32.7 million people—the highest number for any decade in the history of the nation.
¹⁴
Other advocates of immigration restriction insisted that the crush from newcomers ratcheted up the costs of bilingual education programs, which in turn (they charged) impeded the process of acculturation.

The surge from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean especially aroused advocates of greater restriction. Thanks in part to the ease of air travel, they complained, these and other “birds of passage” frequently returned to their homelands, thereby acculturating to American ways more slowly than immigrants had done in the past. Advances in global communication, notably satellite television and cell phones, further helped immigrants to maintain close ties—and loyalties—to their home countries. Moreover, many immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, like newcomers throughout American history, congregated in neighborhood enclaves. For all these reasons, worried Americans feared that the United States would soon find itself confronted with a large underclass of resentful, poorly assimilated people—like Turkish “guest workers” in Germany—who would undermine national harmony.

When substantial numbers of Latinos joined the rioters in Los Angeles in 1992, proponents of immigration restriction became especially clamorous. Calls for curbs intensified. Other voices, echoing the cries of restrictionists early in the century, called for stronger programs of “Americanization” in the schools and for the abolition of bilingual education programs. Still others filled the media with essentially racist scenarios that foresaw the United States becoming less than half “white” within four or five decades.

Americans alarmed by the influx from abroad soon took action to cut the costs of immigration. In 1994, 60 percent of voters in California approved Proposition 187, which aimed to deny illegal immigrants access to public schools and various social services, including health care. When a federal judge ruled the measure unconstitutional, agitation for restriction increased in the state. In 1996, Congress approved a highly controversial welfare bill that denied to most
legal
immigrants federal money for a variety of social services—SSI, food stamps, and Medicaid—during their first five years in the country.
¹⁵

People who opposed greater restrictions fired back point-for-point at these arguments.
¹⁶
Many immigrants, they said, took jobs—as busboys, dishwashers, yard workers, day laborers, maids, child-care workers—that had become vital to the functioning of the nation’s service-based economy and that many other Americans, demanding higher wages, refused to accept. Supporters of immigration pointed out that though the use of public services by immigrants exacerbated budgetary problems in selected cities and states such as California, newcomers paid considerably more in sales and Social Security taxes (for retirement benefits that many of them would not be likely to receive) than they received from these services. They added that the contributions of immigrants—most of them young—to Social Security helped considerably to augment the funding of that all-important social entitlement. The majority of immigrants, they emphasized, were beyond school age, hardworking, and productive. The federal government, they said, should relieve overburdened local areas from some of their costs.