A lost war, a discovery of limits—and good cause for optimism
The decade was erected upon the smoldering wreckage of the '60s. Now and then, someone's shovel blade would strike an unexploded bomb; mostly the air in the '70s was thick with a sense of aftermath, of public passions spent and consciences bewildered. The American gaze turned inward. It distracted itself with diversions trivial or squalid: primal screaming, disaster movies, jogging, disco, Perrier water, pornography. The U.S. lost a President and a war, and not only endured those unique humiliations with grace, but showed enough resilience to bring a Roman-candle burst of spirit to its Bicentennial celebrations.
Americans found it harder to live with the more profoundly threatening possibility that they might lose a way of life. From the Arab oil boycott of 1973 onward, the decade was bathed in a cold Spenglerian apprehension that the lights were about to go out, that history's astonishing material indulgence of the U.S. was about to end. Possibilities seemed to contract. Americans tutored in the gospels of progress began for the first time to peer at the future as a possible enemy. A few of them started waving pistols in the gas lines.
Gradually, the nation absorbed difficult lessons about the limits of its power and resources. The unprecedented defeat of American arms in Viet Nam coincided with other descending trends: the shrinking of the dollar (gold went from $36 per oz. in 1970 to a record high of nearly $520 per oz. last week), the nation's abject dependence on an imperious OPEC for two-thirds of its oil, a failure in the nerves and muscles that used to make friends and enemies docile.
Many of the themes of the decade were woven around the idea of diminution, of things running out. Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve Board, said last fall it was his view that the American standard of living would have to decline—a serious crack in traditional capitalist optimism. The '70s reverberated with dark prophecies. In 1972 the Club of Rome proclaimed "the limits to growth." Economist Robert Heilbroner preached the Hobbesian nightmare, hell on earth as resources vanish and social systems deteriorate. Another economist, Harvard's Wassily Leontief, gave the world only 20 years for a kind of last fling before its primary sources of energy are exhausted. That was the apocalyptic streak.
Yet, in a morally confusing contradiction to their mood, Americans for the moment never had it so good. Despite two recessions, their real disposable income rose 28.5% during the '70s (vs. only a little more, 30%, during the booming '60s). The wealth and variety of things they could and would buy were a wonderment: boats, Winnebagos, hair transplants, facelifts, sensitivity training, hot tubs, snowmobiles, automatic garage doors, video-tape recorders, sound systems, breast implants, tennis ball servers, openly sold pornography targeted to the most elaborate perversions. If an underclass was being left behind in the South Bronx (and the fire in the civil rights movement guttered out), most American consumers lived in a world of far greater opulence, variety and mobility than any generation in history. The economy, a $1.4 trillion-a-year wonder, pumped out enough goods to make the U.S. a seemingly endless bazaar.