Five Decades in American History, Research Paper Example

In this paper I will review each decade of American history from 1950 to 1990, and select one event or development per decade that I believe was the most significant. I will try to demonstrate a plausible unifying theme linking them all, and then conclude with a prediction of what the next ten years will bring.

The Fifties: What’s On?

I have selected President Harry S. Truman’s transcontinental television address to the U.N in 1951 as the most significant event of the 1950s. Forgotten today, it inaugurated the era and the future. Although primitive television technologies and broadcasts were available by the 1920s (Bellis, 2012), it wasn’t until after World War II that the medium could seriously compete with radio, which remained dominant throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. World War II stopped commercial production and development of television, but after 1950 quality rose, prices fell, sales skyrocketed, and transmission capacity expanded west. The public quickly demanded popular programming, and, after watching Truman, just as quickly got it.

Television probably changed America as fast as anything ever has, with the possible exception of cars, and it has only recently begun to face serious competition from the Internet. But it also did something sociologically new: it formed the national collective consciousness of what was already becoming known as the Baby Boomers (Puente, 2011). They grew up with TV as their parents had grown up with radio and silent movies. The foundational glue was its nearly overnight pervasiveness, exceeding even radio in its impact. As a result, the Boomers were the first TV generation, and were, in retrospect, a socially unified generation.

 The Sixties: The Battles Were Televised

I selected 1964’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as the central event of that decade. The Vietnam War, begun after World War II when the French sought to re-impose their rule after the departure of the defeated Japanese, simmered throughout the 50s from an American perspective. But with the failure of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (Pennington, 2006), America began to adopt the war as a proxy for its fight against communist China and Russia, an extension of its larger pursuit of “containment” as a foreign policy. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution began it all.

The war that followed was the first televised war, and so is a logical extension of my choice for the 1950s. TV brought Vietnam into America’s homes. Some have argued that is why we lost the war, as it showed civilians for the first time what war was actually like in near-real time and through the democratic phenomenon of reduced censorship, courtesy an increasingly adversarial corps of TV journalists and their editors. Its defensive popularity among parents fed the generational divide and student riots of the 1960s, which led to President Johnson retiring from politics. And Nixon’s own failure can be attributed, at least in part, to his expansion of the war into Cambodia (Brigham, n.d.) also partially televised.

Very broadly, Vietnam united the Boomers as it divided them from their parents. And the glue and the fence was TV. TV didn’t give birth to the war, but it eventually made it untenable. I suspect that both generations were just getting used to seeing TV tell the truth. They just reacted differently to it. Boomers were collectively turned off by what they watched in Vietnam. Their parents were shocked by what they watched on campus. But the parents voted.

The Seventies: Take a Number

In my view, the 1973 OPEC embargo defined the 1970s. That and its echo, the 1979 oil crisis, bookend the decade. (Krugman, 2002). In contrast to the divisive 60s, Americans tended to be unified (or at least less divided) by what became known as the “energy crisis”, because it put so many of them in gasoline lines and created a common uncertainty about their future supply. The lines were the result of governmental control of the price of oil, and then-president Jimmy Carter was slow to relinquish that control, and this, probably at least as much as the Iranian hostage-crisis, lost him his reelection. Americans don’t like waiting in lines and don’t feel they should have to. Waiting in line was a Soviet heritage. Even World War II didn’t put American civilians in line like the ‘70s did.

The oil crisis was the result of inflation, technically enabled by America’s going off the gold standard for purposes of international trade during the Nixon Administration. But one of the principal reasons for doing so was the Vietnam War and its costs. Oil prices were pegged to the dollar, but it had been losing value due to inflationary spending (the printing of money). It was artificially pegged at a certain amount by the Bretton-Woods agreements of 1944 (Stephey, 2008), but when Nixon unilaterally “closed the gold window”, the true depleted value of the now floating dollar was revealed. To recoup their lost earnings, the OPEC nations increased the price of oil.

The gas lines were one way the Vietnam War was paid for. It didn’t have to be that way. Instead, the price of oil could and arguably should have been deregulated by Jimmy Carter’s stroke of a pen. But at the time, there was a political sense that higher gasoline prices would upset the American electorate even more than gas lines. But what got lost in the equation was the value of the time spent in lines waiting, as well as the uncertainty over gasoline’s future availability. In the end, it was more efficient to simply pay the true dollar price, and that was what Americans finally did. However, they did it during the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan. Carter, a one-term president, had become another presidential casualty of the 1960s defining event in the Tonkin Gulf. Carter was preceded in failure by Gerald Ford and his uninspired Whip Inflation Now campaign (but who is popularly supposed to have lost because of his pardoning of Nixon for any crimes committed during the Watergate scandal).

The Eighties: Culture-War Continuum

The election of Ronald Reagan as President was the most important event of the 1980s. First, it conveniently happened at the start of the decade and so defines it chronologically. But more importantly, although Reagan reaffirmed Carter’s policy of governmental deregulation, he was also a photogenic expression of the power of TV. Reagan first earned national TV exposure in 1954 (and became wealthy), as host of General Electric Theater, and again in 1964 as host of Death Valley Days (Wiggins, 2012). As a consequence of these shows, he traveled around the country making hundreds of speeches, gaining further exposure and increasingly espousing a conservative political view (in contrast to his younger days, when he was a liberal Democrat and admirer of President Roosevelt). This exposure led to his being elected Governor of California in 1967 over the liberal Pat Brown at a critical point in California and the nation’s history. Reagan earned great political credibility with his hard-line positions regarding student protesters during this period, particularly on the Berkeley campus, and the voters didn’t forget it. The battle lines were drawn on Vietnam. The students went left, and Reagan went right, as indeed did most of the American electorate. So the long arm of 50s and 60s TV was back as a driver of cultural change, or in Reagan’s case, a perceived resistance to change. TV had made its first political star, yet he became that star by opposing the Boomer generation that had grown up watching him. It was the Boomers’ parents’ vote he was after, and he got it nationally as he had in California and for essentially the same reason: he was seen as tough when the voting public wanted tough. Pat Brown and Jimmy Carter didn’t act tough.

Reagan’s campus opposition to the Boomers didn’t stop with Vietnam. He also intensified Nixon’s “War on Drugs.” As the most-used banned drug was (and is) marijuana, and marijuana was the drug most used by Boomers, Reagan effectively declared war on the Boomer generation. But increasingly in practice (and perhaps in intent) it turned into a non-campus racial war, one now fully integrated into American society, with more black men in prison (most of them on drug charges) than were enslaved in the antebellum South (NPR, 2012). America now imprisons more of its citizens than any country on earth. Even many of the post 9-11 anti-terrorism laws are as a practical matter applied to drug defendants.

As California Governor, Reagan fought and won the campus wars of the 1960s and leveraged that political street-cred into the Presidency, where his popularity allowed Paul Volcker to fight and win the war against inflation. But Reagan’s 1980s federal War on Drugs lives on and shows no sign of calling for a cease-fire, state medical marijuana-laws to the contrary. Instead, it’s Reagan’s massive legacy of repression, a refutation of the conservative beliefs in the primacy of individual liberty that he outwardly stood for. Mass incarceration is an integral part of the American scene, a part of what it means to be an American today.

 The Nineties: Bubble Bath

I place the dot-com bubble as the most important event of the 90s. For one thing, it lasted about half as long as the decade itself, beginning (by some accounts) in 1994 (Timelines, 2012) and ending in March of 2000. And it enabled the Web itself, which started with the introduction of the Mosaic web-browser in 1993, by funding the globalization of broad-band infrastructure.

The dot-com bubble brought brief but unprecedented prosperity to America. Tax receipts soared, and there was even serious talk that the U.S. long-term bond market was going to dry up because the federal debt was so rapidly being paid off. But along with the receipts, government expenditures soared as well, along with legal commitments for future spending.

Then the bubble burst. Another bubble, in housing, far more significant to most Americans, has superseded it (Bernanke, 2010). But while it lasted, the dot-com bubble was an economic expression of the same optimistic revolutionary force exemplified by cars, interstate highways, aviation, space travel, satellite communication — and TV. But none those earlier innovations listed above resulted in speculative and destructive asset-bubbles. What happened this time?

Ten Years After

My ten-year forecast: the Federal Reserve will lose its statutory independence from Congress and the President.

The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates after the dot-com crash. This contributed to the later housing bubble. But it turns out that one of the primary sources of the dot-com bubble was the Federal Reserve’s earlier monetary policies, which resulted in excess cash and credit that sought its most profitable, speculative outlet. These policies were necessary to correct even earlier interest-rate changes needed to facilitate trade with Japan and Germany in a globalized world, which changes were needed to correct still earlier changes designed to do the same thing.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to prevent panics like the one that occurred in 1907, to increase control over the economy (History, n.d.). It had to be independent of populist and governmental pressure to do that. But in a democracy, nothing is independent of populist and governmental pressure for long. Since the dot-com bust, and now facing a populist president, the Fed is becoming increasingly politicized (The Economist, 2010), and so must increasingly act to serve the election-cycle. But the election cycle is global now. The Internet makes it so. And the Fed-made dot-com boom made the Internet what it is.

In the first stage of the postwar American rocket, TV created the Boomer generation, and TV fed the Boomers’ campus riots against Vietnam and in reaction elected a photogenic TV star as governor of the nation’s most powerful state. War and its inflation cleared the way for that governor to become a president. And that president won the inflation war and escalated another, creating his own legacy of a domestic Vietnam. In the second stage, a globalized Fed spawned the kind of boom-bust cycle that created the Fed in the first place. The Fed’s century is over.

References

Bellis, M. (2012.) Television History. Retrieved from http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/Television.htm

Bernanke, B. (2010.) Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble. Retrieved from http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20100103a.htm

Brigham, R. (n.d.). Battlefield Vietnam: A Brief History. “The Nixon Years.” Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/

The Economist. (2010.) Populists and Bankers. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/15393581

History of the Federal Reserve. (n.d.) 1907: A Very Bad Year. Retrieved from http://www.federalreserveeducation.org/about-the-fed/history/

Krugman, P. (2002.) The Third Oil Crisis. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/opinion/the-third-oil-crisis.html

NPR. (2012.) Author Interviews: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145175694/legal-scholar-jim-crow-still-exists-in-america

Pennington, D. (2006) Dien Bien Phu: A Battle Assessment. Retrieved from http://www.dienbienphu.org/english/index.htm

Puente, M. (2011.) Boomers rocked the culture, turning TV, pop music into art. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2010-12-30-boomerarts30_CV_N.htm

Stephey, M. (2008.) A Brief History of Bretton Woods System. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1852254,00.html

Timelines (2012). “Dot-Com Bubble.” Retrieved from http://timelines.com/topics/dot-com-bubble

Wiggins, J. (2012.) Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved from http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=reaganronal