It was a time of big hair and bad taste, the end of the Beatles and the birth of disco, the era of Donny and Marie, Mork and Mindy, Tony Orlando and Dawn; a "kidney stone of a decade," in the words of a Doonesbury character, that's remembered now for pet rocks, shag rugs, mood rings, leisure suits, water beds, beanbag chairs, smiley faces, avocado-colored refri-gerators, mirrored sunglasses, black light posters, wide ties and even wider lapels.
Two new books look beyond the image of the 1970s promoted by That 70's Show and other exercises in nostalgia to focus on far darker undercurrents running beneath that decade's tacky, polyester surface.
In Decade of Nightmares, the scholar Philip Jenkins argues that the late 1970s ushered in an era in which the liberal and libertarian ideas of the 1960s were succeeded by "a more pessimistic, more threatening interpretation of human behavior" and "more sinister visions of the enemies facing Americans and their nation." He argues that economic woes, gas shortages, "steeply rising rates of violent crime" and sensationalistic reports of serial murders and cult atrocities contributed to a "sense of pervasive national malaise, decadence and social failure," which in turn created a reservoir of fear and anxiety that fed a conservative counter-revolution, even as the Iran hostage crisis and post-Vietnam worries about the US' declining status in the world were fueling calls for a more aggressive foreign policy.
The cultural historian Andreas Killen similarly argues in 1973 Nervous Breakdown that the 1970s have "entered the historical lexicon as a virtual synonym for weakness, confusion, and malaise," adding that by the end of 1973 (a year that witnessed the unraveling of the Watergate cover-up, the Arab oil embargo and the Paris Peace Accords, ending US involvement in Vietnam), "the institutional failures of American society routinely evoked expressions of systemic, perhaps irreparable crisis."
By the early 1970s, Killen goes on, "much of the New Left had either degenerated into self-parody" or turned to lifestyle experiments, and its critique of US society had given way, in the wake of Watergate, to conspiracy theory and "pop paranoia." In 1973, he writes, former US President Richard Nixon "began dismantling many of the social programs launched during the Johnson administration's War on Poverty," and "a new punitive, neoconservative mood descended over the country" with the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws and calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty by the Nixon administration.
Both of these books look at how many of the ideas and ideals of the 1960s petered out in the 1970s, and how a yearning for more traditional, moralistic values during that decade laid the groundwork for the election of former US President Ronald Reagan in 1980. The authors' approaches, however, could not be more different. Killen has focused less on politics per se than on pop culture reflections of the national zeitgeist, giving us an impression-istic volume that deconstructs leitmotifs from the year 1973: like the idea of parricide, which rippled beneath calls for the impeachment of Nixon and informed movies like Badlands; or the mood of paranoia, which wafted through the post-Watergate US and through Thomas Pynchon's classic novel, Gravity's Rainbow.
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