Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore
By James T. Patterson
Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $35
With so little chronological distance separating the present from the recent past, how can historians make sense of the people, programs and policies of the decades immediately preceding our own? The challenges include the unavailability of archival materials that are still classified or otherwise off-limits and the fact that political passions that must necessarily be the object of historical scrutiny still burn intensely, inevitably casting a distorting light on narrative and analysis. If that doesn’t create enough problems, the secondary scholarship that historians rely upon is in much shorter supply than it is on such well-trodden subjects as the Civil War or the Great Depression.
James T. Patterson, a Bancroft Prize-winning scholar of modern American history, has taken up the challenge in “Restless Giant,” the latest volume of the prestigious “Oxford History of the United States” series. (He also wrote the volume immediately preceding this one, “Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974.”) In the Oxford series, titles reveal a lot about an author’s perspectives. If Americans demanded a great deal in the post-World War II decades, disquietude and disappointment, it seems, could not be far off once the going got rough. Postwar “optimistic Americans had developed higher expectations” about the economy, their jobs, their health and their children’s future, Patterson concludes. “Like Adam and Eve, they were restless in their new paradise, and they yearned for more.”
Even when they got more, it wasn’t enough. For Patterson, the post-Watergate years reveal a restlessness born from hopes outpacing reality for some, and a queasy sense of disquietude or even horror at the relentless pace of social change for others. Even the cornucopia of consumer goods generated anxiety: People consumed more but wanted more, and the “gap . . . between the comforts that people enjoyed and their still higher expectations about the Good Life” fueled a “popular restlessness” by the 20th Century’s end. We do better, but we “feel worse.”
Although that assumption informs much of “Restless Giant,” the book should not be reduced solely to that punch line. Its contents are far richer and more complex than that formulation allows. Indeed, Patterson combines a straightforward, old-fashioned, chronological narrative based on the ups and downs of various presidential administrations with more thematic breakaway chapters exploring families, sex, the Cold War, immigration and multiculturalism. In so doing, he is duplicating–though in vastly greater detail–newer American history textbooks that recognize that the past can’t be squeezed narrowly into the successive-presidents pattern but can’t quite bring themselves to break fully with that time-honored custom.
Striving to convey the mood of the years he examines, Patterson is at his best in recreating the spirit and feel of presidential elections and the legislative and diplomatic achievements–as well as the scandals–of our nation’s chief executives.
He begins his story in 1974, which saw President Richard Nixon’s resignation and President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of him. Patterson skillfully reconstructs the political disillusionment and economic crisis that accompanied Watergate, the oil embargo and the end of the Vietnam War. He also calls attention to the material world around us: The same year Nixon resigned, Patterson reminds us, also saw the advent of microwave ovens, programmable pocket calculators, the first bar codes on store products, automatic refrigerator icemakers and the first issue of People magazine, to be followed a year later by the introduction of VCRs and light beer.
With the stagflation of the 1970s as his initial economic backdrop, Patterson moves us from the malaise of the Carter administration to the buoyant optimism of the New Right in the 1980s. He packs it all in, and more: the Iranian hostage crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s anti-communism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the first Persian Gulf War and the invasion of Panama, President Bill Clinton’s triumphs and travails in the 1990s, Monica Lewinsky and a booming late-20th Century economy that lifted many boats but quelled few cultural or economic anxieties. Along the way he weaves in lengthy and informative analyses of family and gender-role trends, campaign financing and the culture wars.
As impressive as Patterson’s achievement is, he does some things considerably better than others. He is stronger on describing what happened than in explaining why things happened, sharper on recounting political programs than in explaining why politicians embraced them. The wave of economic deregulation that began in the late 1970s–no small phenomenon–is a case in point: How and why the Carter administration, and a sufficient number of liberal Democrats, embraced deregulation is barely examined.
Then there is the matter of coverage: Readers learn more about TV programs such as “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties” than about how and why the Reagan administration became obsessed with radicalism in Central America, or what (beyond the ensuing arms-for-hostages scandal) the impact of those policies were, especially on Central Americans themselves. To his credit, Patterson does not shoehorn all politics into the presidential administration framework. But in examining longer-term ideological trends, he has more to say about the rise of the New Right and the cultural anxieties that fueled its success than he does about the emaciation of American liberalism in the same period.
Patterson is a careful historian. Bending over backward to offer his readers a range of perspectives on the phenomena he explores, he appears to be a genuinely fair and balanced scholar. Indeed, his work is relentlessly balanced, marked throughout by an on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand feel.
On the subject of race in America, for instance, Patterson rightly emphasizes the dramatic and positive transformation in the position of blacks over the past generation. At the same time he recognizes the persistence of real and often deep racial inequality. His conclusion that “one of the sadder legacies of the troubled 1970s” was that racial inequality led some to doubt the American Dream is an odd one to draw from his considerations. Though he usually steers a middle course and appropriately avoids going to interpretive extremes, at other times this balanced approach feels artificial. Is it really necessary for Patterson to juxtapose the phrase “Despite the rise of the AIDS epidemic” with the accompanying comment that “a number of advances in technology, basic science, and public health in the 1980s encouraged optimistic visions of America”?)
Patterson is not content to merely chronicle the history of recent decades. He also aims to drive home a simple message: that for all of their incessant complaining and their jeremiads against moral decay or national decline, Americans have it pretty good. They did back in the ’70s, and they still do. Our economy in 2001 promoted “considerably greater affluence, convenience, and comfort for most people,” he writes, and “the majority of Americans were . . . healthier, and assured of more rights than ever before.” The environment is generally cleaner, civil rights for women and minorities have expanded and “[t]oleration–of various religions, styles of life, and sexual practices–has widened.”
Mindful of the growing inequality in American society over the past generation, Patterson nonetheless offers an upbeat bottom line: “Most people of the affluent and enormously powerful United States, though often dissatisfied, had more blessings to cherish in early 2001 than they had had in 1974.” We even eat better, the spread of obesity notwithstanding: “No longer could it dismissively be said . . . that most American people soldiered on in a bland and unimaginative gastronomic culture of casseroles, turkey and stuffing, and . . . roast beef.” Now we have seasonal, ethnic and organic foods, imaginative appetizers and salads, and more fine wines. Good times indeed.
To his credit, Patterson gives the nation’s many pessimists, from right to left, their due. At times he even seems to appreciate many Americans’ discomfort with the growing raunchiness of TV and film, the power of big money in politics, and the like. But again and again, Patterson reveals that he is an optimist, not a “declinist.” He suggests that the multiple laments–against the loss of civic-mindedness, the degradation of culture, violence and crime, materialism, etc.–rest on a flimsier foundation than pessimists think. To the cultural pessimists of the 1970s who prophesied a “future of economic stagnation or decline” (this during a period of outrageously high inflation, interest rates and unemployment), Patterson retrospectively counters: It is “possible to look back” with “some satisfaction” on the passage of the Clean Air Act, the advance of rights consciousness and the indexing of Social Security to keep pace with inflation. Americans may have thought the chips were down, but we were still a nation of “abundant resources and a hard-working, resilient, and innovative population.” While some in the 1990s bemoaned the explosive growth of the adult- entertainment industry, “hyper-commercialization, consumerism, and materialism,” violent rap music and computer games, and Jerry Springer, Patterson takes solace in Ted Koppel and “The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” art cin-emas and the book sales of Toni Morrison and John Updike. (Not to mention James McPherson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War masterpiece, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which “enjoyed huge sales.” Never mind that that volume just happens to be in the same series as Patterson’s. Why this counts as a historical event worth recounting is not otherwise clear). What matters for Patterson is choice–Americans have it. Those Americans “looking for cultural edification . . . had wider choice than in the past.” That may not reverse the cultural backlash that fuels much conservative politics, but at least the educated elite can seek safe haven in Borders.
Unlike the Civil War, the Progressive era of reform during the early 20th Century, or the New Deal years of the Great Depression, the period 1974 to 2001 conjures up no easy characterization. Those 28 years and their six presidents cannot be reduced to a single theme or set of related themes. Restlessness and “popular edginess” don’t quite do justice to the dramatic political passions and programs that animated American politics and culture; nor does the theme of overall improvement, which optimistic Americans recognize and pessimists miss. For its thorough and reliable recounting of the period’s main developments, “Restless Giant” is well worth reading. The deeper, underlying themes of the past generation, however, remain elusive.
