Back to the bad days of the 70s.

A trip back to the cultural and political turmoil of the 1970’s does not sound like fun reading, but if you are interested in American history, and genuinely want to understand how we got to where we are, then MAD AS HELL: THE CRISIS OF THE 1970’S AND THE RISE OF RIGHT WING POPULISM (that’s a mouthful) by Dominic Sandbrook is a great place to start. Sandbrook is British, and he brings an outsider’s view to events and personalities that are by any measure, uniquely American. While the bulk of the book concerns the political arena, he does pause and highlight cultural trends – Charlie’s Angels, Bruce Springsteen, Disco music, the Dallas Cowboys – that were manifestations of how Americans reacted to changing and challenging times. Sandbrook adopts a ground level view of these tumultuous days, looking at them through the eyes of middle class Americans trying to make sense of epic political corruption in Washington, out of control inflation, declining economic growth, feminism, gay rights, military defeat in Vietnam, the rise of the Ayatollah, gasoline shortages, and a general sense that America was adrift, and in an irreversible decline.

The book begins on the day Richard Nixon resigns, and ends with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and the seeming triumph of a new American conservatism, one determined to repudiate and reverse the course of the decade just passed. If the 60’s had belonged to anti war protesters and civil rights marchers called to action by an unjust war and a racist society, then the 70’s would belong to a very different kind of activist, those who stepped in front of liberals and progressives and said no to the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, and the high taxes that funded government waste and welfare. Sandbrook takes the reader back to long forgotten controversies like the West Virginia citizen’s revolt against “permissive” school text books, Bob Jones University losing its tax exempt status because of discrimination, working class Boston rioting in the streets over court ordered school busing, and how they galvanized so many into action. Nixon’s Silent Majority was silent no more, and the author makes a good case that these events came together into a national movement that in time would embrace opposition to both the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, and would become a true political juggernaut despite never coming close to representing anything like a real majority in the country. At the same time, Sandbrook portrays a clueless liberalism, arrogant after banishing Nixon, increasingly elitist and enamored with identity politics, and losing its long affinity with the working class, who were being hammered by rising taxes, and vanishing jobs, not to mention resentful of hiring quotas for minorities. The book has some telling quotes from the likes of George McGovern, who dismiss the anti government rhetoric of the day, along with tax revolts, like California’s Proposition 13, as nothing more than racism. This was a long way from the stirring words of FDR and JFK, and working Americans took notice. Along the way we meet such names as Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Richard Viguerie, and Anita Bryant, and come to understand why their impact, though often overlooked and disdained by the larger media, was so meaningful. We also see how exploiting division became very good business for some.

What really impressed me about this book was the way Sandbrook was both fair, and very tough, on Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the two Presidents who presided over a very rough patch of history. Both men are portrayed as decent and hard working, willing to do the right thing even at a political cost to themselves, but Sandbrook does not shy away from their faults, and their failures of leadership, which in the case of Carter, are many. If you are an admirer of the 39th President, this book will make you wince, for few men were their own worst enemy more than Jimmy Carter. Dour, self-righteous, thin skinned, disdainful of those he considered morally lacking, and seemingly unable to communicate in a manner that could gain public support, Jimmy Carter and his Presidency were destined for trouble from the get go. But Sandbrook shies away from portraying Ronald Reagan as America’s savior the way many of his acolytes do, showing the man to be a far more compromising and pliable politician than even he would acknowledge. Perhaps Reagan’s best asset was his sunny optimism in America and Americans; Sandbrook makes the case that this, not his conservative philosophy, is what carried him to a landslide victory in 1980 over an exhausted looking Carter, beset by the Iranian hostage crisis and stagflation. When voters went to the polls that year, they were casting ballots against not just the failures of the late 1970’s, but against the endless parade of crisis and upheaval, along with the failure of leadership in Washington, that had gripped the nation ever since Kennedy’s assassination seventeen years before.

What impresses me the most about MAD AS HELL is how much it resonates today. Though the book was written nearly a decade ago, and the events it chronicles occurred more than 40 years ago, its portrait of a divided America, especially its alienated middle and working class, tells us that much has not changed in the decades since, if anything, the problem has gotten worse. Stagflation and the Soviet Union are gone, but the divisions and anxiety remain. Early in the book, there is a poignant quote by the old liberal, Hubert Humphrey, bemoaning the divisions of another time, reminding America that only a sense of “mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears” could overcome those same gnawing divisions. Today, in a country where divisions along race, culture, class, and gender are gleefully asserted and exploited daily, we are further from those sentiments than ever.

Once the 70’s were over, America moved on in a hurry, seldom looking back, and seldom with a good word for those times. But history that we’d rather forget often has the best lessons, and Dominic Sandbrook’s MAD AS HELL is a great text book for those who want to learn.

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