Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (87 page)

1
. Cartoonist, Scott Stantis, Oct. 6, 1996.

2
. Michael Willard, “Cutback: Skate and Punk at the Far End of the American Century,” in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds.,
America in the Seventies
(Lawrence, Kans.), 181–207.

3
. William Graebner, “America’s Poseidon Adventure: A Nation in Existential Despair,” ibid., 157–80.

4
. By Peter Carroll (New York, 1982). Its subtitle was
The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s
.

5
. Bruce Schulman,
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
(New York, 2001). Another useful survey of the 1970s is David Frum,
How We Got Here: The ’70s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse)
(New York, 2000). Milken was a notorious economic buccaneer who was convicted in the late 1980s of securities fraud.

6
. DuBois,
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903).

7
. As late as 1964, only 1 percent of southern black children attended schools with white children.

8
. For the development of affirmative action, see Steven Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do”: Reform and Its Unanticipated Consequences in Twentieth-Century America
(New York, 2000), 120–62; Hugh Davis Graham, “Legacies of the 1960s: The American ‘Rights Revolution’ in an Era of Divided Governance,”
Journal of Policy History
10, no. 3 (1998), 267–88; and Graham, “Unintended Consequences: The Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy,”
American Behavioral Scientist
41 (April 1998), 898–912.

9
. The percentage of black males employed in white-collar jobs rose from 12 in 1960 to 30 in 1990, compared to percentages of 36 and 47 for white males in those years. Percentages for black females rose during the same years from 18 to 58, compared to percentages for white females of 58 and 73. Andrew Hacker,
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York, ed. 1995), 259.

10
. For an optimistic account of race relations in these years, see Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom,
America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible
(New York, 1997). A mixed interpretation concerning schools is James Patterson,
Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy
(New York, 2001).

11
. Christopher Capozolla, “‘It Makes You Want to Believe in the Country’: Celebrating the Bicentennial in an Age of Limits,” in Bailey and Farber, eds.,
America in the Seventies
, 29–49.

12
. Cited in Myron Marty,
Daily Life in the United States, 1960–1990: Decades of Discord
(Westport, Conn., 1997), 207. Haley, it turned out, relied more on his imagination—and on a novel,
The African
(1967), by Harold Courlander, a white author—than on solid historical research. Charged with wholesale plagiarism by Courlander, he later settled out of court by paying him $650,000. See Stanley Crouch,
Jewish World Review
, Jan. 18, 2002;
Washington Post
, Feb. 11, 1992.

13
. For example, see Godfrey Hodgson,
More Equal than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century
(Princeton, 2004), 173.

14
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 433.

15
. Ibid., 441.

16
. Ibid., 71, 78.

17
. Ibid., 139. By 2000, 85 percent of whites and 79 percent of blacks aged twenty-five or older had graduated from high school. In the same year, 26 percent of whites and 17 percent of blacks aged twenty-five or older had graduated from four-year colleges or universities. Ibid. See also Thernstrom and Thernstrom,
America in Black and White
, 179–80; Hacker,
Two Nations
, 73–80, 257.

18
. Patterson,
Brown v. Board of Education
, tables, 228–33. The percentage of black students who attended majority-white schools increased in the eleven states of the Confederate South from around 1 in 1964 to 37 in 1980 and to a high of approximately 43 in the mid- and late 1980s, whereupon a process of re-segregation began that reduced this percentage to around 30 by 2001. This was still a higher percentage than those in the Northeast and Midwest. See
chapter 9
.

19
. For racist activities of whites in northern and western cities in mid-twentieth-century America, see Thomas Sugrue,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton, 1996); and Robert Self,
American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
(Princeton, 2003).

20
.
Milliken v. Bradley
, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). The vote was five to four, with four of the five in the majority having been appointed by Nixon.

21
. See Schulman,
The Seventies
, 55–62, and Frum,
How We Got Here
, 256–63, for accounts of busing issues, including Boston. A gripping narrative of Boston’s struggles is J. Anthony Lukas,
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
(New York, 1986). See also Ronald Formisano,
Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s
(Chapel Hill, 1991).

22
.
U.S. News and World Report
, May 14, 1979, 51.

23
.
New Yorker
, July 26, 2004, 47.

24
. Hugh Davis Graham, “Civil Rights Policy in the Carter Presidency,” in Gary Fink and Graham, eds.,
The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post–New Deal Era
(Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 202–23.

25
.
U.S. News and World Report
, July 5, 1976, 18.

26
. Diane Ravitch, “The ‘White Flight’ Controversy,”
Public Interest
(Spring 1978), 135–49.

27
. Robert Carter, “A Reassessment of
Brown v. Board
,” in Derrick Bell, ed.,
Shades of Brown
(New York, 1980), 25.

28
.
New York Times
, May 17, 1979.

29
. Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do,”
137.

30
. Schulman,
The Seventies
, 75.

31
. David Hollinger,
Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism
(New York, 1995).

32
. John Skrentny,
The Minority Rights Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), vi.

33
. Dennis Deslippe, “‘Do Whites Have Rights?’: Detroit Policemen and ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Protests in the 1970s,”
Journal of American History
91 (Dec. 2004), 932-60.

34
. In 1910, 14.7 percent of Americans were foreign-born. This percentage had never been below 11.6 between 1860 and 1930.

35
. See
chapter 9
for the long-range consequences—most of them unintended—of the immigration law of 1965 (and of later immigration acts).

36
. Hugh Davis Graham,
Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America
(New York, 2002); David Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,”
American Historical Review
108 (Dec. 2003), 1363–90. The number of Americans in 2000 who had been born in Europe was 4.4 million, slightly below the number in 1970. The number in 2000 who had been born in Latin America was 14.4 million; the number born in Asia was 5 million. The figure of 80 million includes American-born descendants of Asians, Hispanics, and other minority groups (such as Aleuts and Pacific Islanders), some of which have benefited from affirmative action or minority set-aside procedures. In 1970, only 792,000 people told the Census that they were American Indians; rising ethnic consciousness, not substantial growth in the Indian population (Indian birth rates were very low), was primarily responsible for large increases (to 2,476,000 in 2000) of those who identified themselves as American Indians or Native Americans in later years. Andrew Hacker, ed.,
U/S: A Statistical Portrait of the American People
(New York, 1983), 34;
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 26.

37
.
Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
, 401 U.S. 424 (1971). The Court returned again and again in later years to complicated, racially charged employment issues, beginning most notably in
United Steelworkers of America v. Weber
, 443 U.S. 193 (1979), when it ruled that employers could voluntarily adopt affirmative action procedures in hiring plans. See
chapter 7
for some of these decisions.

38
. Graham, “Unintended Consequences.” For a history of affirmative action, see Terry Anderson,
The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action
(New York, 2004).

39
. Nelson Lichtenstein,
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
(Princeton, 2002), 204–6.

40
. Orlando Patterson,
The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis
(Washington, 1997), 9–11.

41
. Orlando Patterson, in
New York Times
, June 22, 2003, later estimated that affirmative action reduced the chances of white applicants getting into top colleges by only 1.5 percent. Polls, he added, indicated that only 7 percent of Americans with a European heritage ever complained that they had lost out from the programs. See also Anderson,
In Pursuit of Fairness
, 280–81.

42
. Skrentny,
Minority Rights Revolution
, 353.

43
. Anderson,
In Pursuit of Fairness
, 150–55.

44
.
University of California Regents v. Bakke,
438 U.S. 265 (1978).

45
. Ibid. See also Howard Ball,
The Bakke Case: Race, Education, and Affirmative Action
(Lawrence, Kans., 2000); and J. Harvie Wilkinson,
From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration: 1954–1978
(New York, 1979), 298–306.

46
.
Time
, July 10, 1978, 8.

47
. In 2003, the Court rejected an admissions program for University of Michigan undergraduates that employed a point system favoring minorities but approved a more flexible University of Michigan Law School plan. These cases were decided by margins of six to three and five to four. Like Justice Blackmun in 1978, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who came around to support flexible versions of affirmative action, made it clear that she hoped such measures would become unnecessary over time—perhaps in twenty-five years.
New York Times
, June 24, 2003.

48
. This is the conclusion of Jennifer Hochschild,
Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation
(Princeton, 1995), 94–98. A more optimistic view is Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza,
Black Pride and Black Prejudice
(Princeton, 2002), 124–32.

49
. Diane Ravitch,
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms
(New York, 2000), 408–15. The report (Washington, 1983) was prepared by the revealingly named National Commission on Excellence in Education.