American History: A Survey

Various youth-led activist movements emerged during the 1960s, many of which still exist today. The 1960s saw a rise in feminism and the growth of environmentalism. These issues had received some focus in past generations but never achieved the same level of engagement as they did in the 1960s. Revolutionary sentiment among Indigenous Americans, gay people, Latin Americans, and other smaller segments of the population carried out highly visible protests during the 1960s, such as the occupation of Wounded Knee (the site of a major 19th-century Indigenous American massacre) and the Stonewall Riots (named for a gay club raided by police in 1969). These protests helped shine a light on the struggles of groups that had long been ignored, but real change would not come for many groups until many years later. Some populations, like Indigenous Americans, are still fighting for many basic rights.

The feminist movement and the environmental movement, on the other hand, led to significant reforms during the 1960s. Antipollution legislation led to the restoration of environments that decades of industrial waste had devastated. The feminist movement brought change that many now take for granted, like the right for women to manage their own money, and aided in the passage of Roe v. Wade, which allowed abortion as a federal right. This decision in turn fueled the rise of right-wing antiabortion activism, a fight that has only accelerated in recent times.

Although most 1960s activism brought about only gradual change, a real fear emerged among conservative Americans that they were about to lose the country they knew. Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 helped assuage some of these fears, but the reality of his presidency was far from proving the superiority of conservative values. His first term was marked by the increasingly disastrous Vietnam War; thousands of drafted Americans were sent to the country to kill countless Vietnamese civilians and face brutal deaths themselves, with no clear path to victory and no clearly defined goal. Nixon attempted to broker a peace deal to gain support before the 1972 election, but by then the situation was completely out of control. The US finally withdrew from Vietnam in defeat in 1975. Vietnam was not Nixon’s only struggle. He chose to revoke many of the social reforms of the Kennedy and Johnson years just as the economy was beginning to lag. With the closure of many American factories, inequality began to grow again. Inflation rose, and although Nixon attempted to control it, his efforts were unsuccessful. The nail in the coffin of the Nixon years came in 1972, when the arrest of Nixon operatives attempting to steal documents from the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel became a national scandal, forcing his resignation in the face of impeachment in 1974. The Watergate crisis spelled not only the end of Nixon’s presidency but a profound loss of innocence for American politics, as government scandal became more commonplace in subsequent decades.

The 1976 election once again brought hope to the progressive movement, as Jimmy Carter won the victory. In many ways, he was a president before his time, and he failed in his most idealistic goals of sparking large-scale concern for the environment and reforming the American economy through egalitarian measures. Conservatives pinned Carter’s failures on lack of experience, painting him as a pessimist who blamed his struggles on the American people. In reality, Carter came into power at a time of complex international issues and achieved several important progressive goals, such as ceding control of the Panama Canal to Panama and overseeing a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, a rare moment of successful American intervention in the Middle East.

Carter’s successes were not enough, however, to prevent a resurgence of conservative sentiment. As has happened many times in American political history, a growth in Christian conservatism and resentment of taxation became the central forces that ushered in a new right-wing movement in which Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election.

In response to Carter, whom many saw as an unprepared country bumpkin who lacked faith in the future of the US, Reagan presented himself as a new type of American royalty. Polished, confident, and resoundingly patriotic, he catered to those who saw the US as the inherently rightful dominant world power. In many ways, he brought the US back to the time of Gilded Age economics. His fiscal policy focused primarily on aiding the wealthy and large businesses through massive tax cuts, which he thought would spark an economic rebound through increased investments. He oversaw a shrinking of governmental control across many sectors, especially in regulations focusing on environmental protections. Despite increasing the federal debt more than any other administration in history, Reagan’s plan appealed to many Americans, as it temporarily stalled inflation and lowered unemployment. He had won in a landslide in 1980, and in 1984 enjoyed an even bigger victory. In his second term, Reagan focused on dismantling the Soviet Union, which began its gradual decline in 1988. Although many conservatives gave Reagan credit for weakening Soviet power, the efforts of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce Soviet power may have caused the fall regardless of who held the American presidency.

Scandals within the Reagan government began to emerge near the end of his second term. The most damning was the Iran-Contra scandal, a complex series of negotiations in which the US sold weapons to Iran to fund anti-communist forces in Nicaragua. Although scandal threatened to erode Republican power in the 1988 election, Reagan had inspired a new, aggressive style of conservative political tactics that slandered the Democratic opposition and gave George H. W. Bush the presidency.

Like his son in later years, the first Bush presidency focused heavily on gaining influence in important oil-producing lands in the Middle East. Under the auspices of helping Kuwait defeat an invasion by Iraq, the US entered the first Gulf War. Although the US and its allies were ultimately victorious, many Middle Easterners were angry about US involvement in their regional conflict. The war helped spark the rise in Muslim extremism that greatly influenced US foreign policy for years to come.

By 1991, Reagan’s extreme conservative fiscal policy had finally come full circle, and the US entered an economic recession. Despite a spike in Bush’s popularity resulting from his Gulf War victory, his failure to adequately address the recession led to his defeat by Democrat Bill Clinton in the 1992 election.