Summary Of The 1970s By Shermann

“But hindsight, while not perfect, does reveal that the years between 1973 and 1979 witnessed a critical transition that made American society simultaneously more equal and less equal, and American culture still more individualistic, than they had been before” (Borstelmann, 18). In Thomas Borstelmann’s work, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality, he argues that previous scholarship and historians have looked at the 1970s as a decade of turmoil and uncertainty. While the 1960s and 1980s offered clear story lines and exciting social and political conflicts, the 1970s falls right in between two “real” decades when important movements and great events happened. Despite negative scholarship and popular memory
By examining economic insecurity, the rising tide of equality and democratic reform, the spread of market values, and the new hyper-individualism Borstelmann is able to pull together different arguments to demonstrate the overall thesis of his book. Borstelmann sets the scene for change in the decade by describing the 1970s as a time where big trouble splashed into the lives of most Americans. He says, “In the era of investigations of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and CIA efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, such concerns were more realistic than paranoid” (Borstelmann, 19). The backlash of these events led to distrust of government in American society, and the loss of confidence in public authority laid the foundation for deregulation and a turn toward the free
Borstelmann notes, “The gap between rich and poor grew wider, startlingly so at times, and the bulk of the vaunted American middle class saw its economic security begin to slip away” (Borstelmann, 306). With the U.S. economy during the time period placing a premium on education, college graduates and those with advanced degrees saw their income rise. At the same time, due to globalization, lower numbers of unionized workers, and higher divorce rates, workers with high school diplomas saw a drop in their income while political leaders sat by and did nothing to mitigate this growing trend toward inequality. The U.S. had the most uneven distribution of wealth of any industrialized nation, where poverty rates reached 15 percent in 1994 and remained at 13 percent in 2008. Borstelmann notes “the rate was 18 percent for minors; nearly one in five American children were growing up in poverty in the new millennium” (Borstelmann, 308). This helps us better our understanding of how the American economy had shifted following World War II. Following the war, we read from various sources on how the government continued the New Deal reforms stemming from the 1930s, and with legislation such as the GI Bill and an increase in white-collar jobs, middle class Americans enjoyed a period of affluence and liberation as seen in the flight to