These Truths: A History of the United States

Since 1940, inequalities of wealth and income had been diminishing. The state’s growing power and a progressive income tax had “made possible unprecedented economic growth and a wide distribution of goods and opportunities” (591). By 1960, two-thirds of all Americans owned their own homes. Excepting civil rights, Americans generally agreed with each other about their system of government and shared a theory about politics. However, the general public knew little about politics, “resulting in a very loose and unconstrained attachment to any single set of political beliefs” (593). This lack of sophistication about politics resulted in a more moderate political ideology. Between 1968 and 1972, political polarization and economic inequality increased. By 1974, American liberalism began its long decline, while conservatism entered a long period of ascent. The nation, in subsequent decades, would become as divided and unequal as it had been in the years before the Civil War.

African Americans, meanwhile, continued to press for civil rights. In early 1960, four young college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in a Woolworth’s. By the end of the week, over 400 students were involved in the Greensboro sit-in. The nonviolent protest movement quickly spread throughout the South. The Black students’ stoicism in response to thuggish and violent white supremacists “even earned the admiration of some hardened pro-segregation southern newspaper editors” (595-96). In April, Ella Baker, acting director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), invited the student leaders to a meeting on Easter weekend. She balked, however, when the SCLC tried to get her to convince the students to join the organization as a junior chapter. She urged them, instead, to start their own organization. In response, they started the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker left the SCLC to join SNCC.

Later that year, when Eisenhower’s commission delivered its report, he called for federal action to support voting rights, urged the denial of federal funds to employers who discriminated on the basis of race, and insisted upon the urgency of ending segregation in education (597).

For the 1960 election, the Simulmatics Corporation continued the work of both UNIVAC and George Gallup. Simulmatics’s founder, Ithiel de Sola Pool, sought “to both advance and accelerate the measurement of public opinion and the forecasting of elections” by “sort[ing] voters into 480 possible types” (597). One key question Pool asked was, “Which party is better suited for people like you?” (598). The point of Simulmatics’s work was that, even if voters did not have core political ideologies, they could still be sorted into ideological categories based on their race, ethnicity, location, income, age, etc. The Democratic National Convention (DNC) found Simulmatics’s first report so helpful that they ordered three more reports on Kennedy’s public image, Nixon’s public image, and on foreign policy as a significant campaign issue. Simulmatics also analyzed how Kennedy should discuss his Catholicism. The corporation concluded that the presidential candidate should be open and straightforward about his religion. Kennedy then “gave a frank and direct speech in Houston on September 12, 1960,” in which he affirmed his belief in the separation of church and state” (599). Nixon, meanwhile, won the Republican nomination, despite having no support from Eisenhower.

Richard Nixon agreed to debate Kennedy on television. On September 26, 1960, the candidates met in a CBS TV studio in Chicago. There was no audience. The debate was broadcast by CBS, NBC, and ABC. By the time this debate aired, “nine in ten American households had a television set” (600). Nixon felt ill and had been hospitalized for nearly two weeks before the debate. He was both in pain and unprepared. Sixty-six million Americans ended up watching Nixon scowl and sweat on television. Two days after the candidates’ final debates, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta during a sit-in and “sentenced to four months of hard labor” (600). Robert F. Kennedy intervened and got King released. Nixon, who actually had a stronger record on civil rights than John Kennedy, was unresponsive. He later came to believe that his unwillingness to act cost him “one of the closest elections in American history” (600). Nixon also believed that the election may have been rigged. There was, indeed, evidence of voter fraud in both Illinois and Texas.

When John F. Kennedy was inaugurated on January 21, 1961, he marshalled in a new era. Three days earlier, Eisenhower gave a farewell address in which he warned that the US-Soviet arms race could lead to the development of a military-industrial complex. However, few heeded his warning, particularly as Americans were alarmed by the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. The US, trying to flex its own influence in this region, had “redirected its foreign aid from Europe to Asia and Africa” (602). When French Indochina tried to overthrow its colonial rulers, the US supported France over the Vietnamese. This led to growing anti-Americanism. A treaty divided newly liberated Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party took power in the North, while Ngo Dinh Diem, an American-backed Catholic nationalist, led South Vietnam. The US engaged in state building in South Vietnam, training its civil servants and police force, and building the nation’s infrastructure. Some viewed this as a sign that the US wanted to place Vietnam under new colonial rule.

By the end of 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in an American-sanctioned coup three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Soon thereafter, 16,000 American troops were stationed in Vietnam. Not long before his death, the Kennedy administration nearly created a nuclear crisis during a confrontation with Cuba. In April 1961, Castro’s army had destroyed the American-backed Cuban exiles that attempted an invasion of Cuba in what became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. The following summer, American U2s flew over Cuba and observed ballistic missiles that had the capacity of reaching the US Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had sent them. Kennedy appeared on television on October 22, 1962, when he disclosed the “existence of the missiles and argued for action” (604). The American government responded by sending the navy to quarantine Cuba. Two days later, 16 Soviet ships went to confront the blockade before turning back. Khrushchev sent the White House two contradictory messages: The first promised that the Soviet Union would withdraw its missiles if the US would end the blockade; the other conveyed something stern, which Kennedy urged his advisers to ignore. Kennedy responded to the first message, and Khrushchev withdrew the missiles.

Meanwhile, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent 13 volunteers, both Black and white, to the Deep South on buses. Eight days later, white supremacists attacked a Greyhound bus on which the so-called Freedom Riders had been passengers. They shattered the windows, slashed the tires, and then set it on fire. The riders barely escaped. When the second bus arrived, the KKK were waiting at the train station in Birmingham. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered that the riders be evacuated. CORE sent in more riders from Nashville, who were met at the bus station and jailed by the troops of Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. Alabama dared the federal government to act. Robert Kennedy convinced his brother to call Alabama governor John Patterson, who had supported Kennedy’s campaign in 1960. Patterson, however, refused to take the president’s call. The governor did reluctantly agree “to provide a police escort for the [Freedom Riders’] bus on its trip from Birmingham to Montgomery” (605). However, when the bus reached the station, another white mob was waiting. They beat the riders. Still, the Freedom Riders and 1,500 other Black civil rights activists met at First Baptist Church to decide on their next strategy. Three thousand white vigilantes surrounded the church and were eventually dispersed by the Alabama National Guard. The Freedom Riders decided to ride all summer long.

In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a protest in Birmingham, which was “the most violent city in the South” (607). When fellow clergyman, all of whom were liberal and white, denounced him in the town’s newspaper and declared that the protests were “untimely,” King wrote what became a famous letter from a Birmingham jail, where he had been placed in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, George Wallace, who succeeded Patterson as governor, said that “if black students tried to enter the campus of the state university in Tuscaloosa, he’d block the door himself” (607). President Kennedy decided that it was time to address the public. He urged white Americans to sympathize with Black people who were denied “the full and free life” that everyone wants (608). He then talked about military service, and how Black citizens have always served loyally.

To mark the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin began organizing a march on Washington, scheduled to take place in August 1963. The Kennedy administration prepared for possible violence by arranging “for military troops to be kept on alert” (609). Three hundred thousand people gathered. It was the first time that most Americans, including Kennedy, had ever seen Dr. King deliver a speech. Three months later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Less than five years later, King, too, was assassinated in Memphis. Riots ensued that Easter Sunday in what came to be known as the Easter Riots.

The day after Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson, who had assumed the presidency, began to make it clear that he was not a conservative. On November 27, 1963, he encouraged Congress to act on civil rights. During his first State of the Union address in January, he also pledged an “unconditional war on poverty” (611). When Congress debated the civil rights bill, both Dr. King and Malcolm X traveled to Washington to witness the debates, which had split both parties. Eventually, the bill passed and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.

The fight for voting rights caused dissent within the Democratic Party. The party’s delegation at the nominating convention was all white. SNCC set up the alternative Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Ella Baker operated its Washington office and “delivered the keynote speech at its state nominating convention in Jackson” (621). At the convention in Atlantic City, “party leaders refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation” (621). This led Freedom Rider Stokely Carmichael to give up on party politics in favor of radicalism.

George Wallace’s bid the for the presidential nomination ended when Barry Goldwater entered the race. The Republican National Convention nominated him eleven days after the Civil Rights Act was signed. Conservative white women flocked to Goldwater’s campaign. The 1964 presidential race “was the first in which as many women voted as men” (616). Overall, women were likelier than men to vote against Goldwater.

After winning the presidential race, Johnson decided to use his huge popular vote win and his big Democratic majority in the House to move his anti-poverty agenda forward. According to Lepore, “no unified government in American history was as productive as LBJ’s” (617). He pushed Congress to pass an education act that largely benefited low-income students in both primary and secondary schools. He also established Medicare and Medicaid. He flew to Independence, Missouri, so that Harry Truman could witness him signing the nation’s first socialized health care legislation. Johnson also passed “the largest tax cut in American history,” believing that it would help to ease unemployment. Instead, he ended up with insufficient funding for his programs.

Initially, Johnson’s tax cut worked. People used what would have been tax payments to purchase goods. However, his economic reforms could not pay for both the Great Society and the war in Vietnam. After President Kennedy died, his brother Robert pressed Johnson to remain in Vietnam, which Johnson had initially been disinclined to do. By 1965, however, Johnson realized that he couldn’t withdraw without admitting defeat. He decided to conceal from the public his escalation of the war. By the end of the year, 184,000 troops were stationed in Vietnam, most of them people of color and poor white people. To pay for the war and avoid raising taxes, Johnson cut funding for his Great Society programs. His choices led to his becoming so unpopular that he publicly announced his decision not to run for a second term in 1968.

In 1965, Dr. King went to Selma, Alabama, “where demonstrators had pledged to march all the way to Montgomery” (621). The marchers walked through a county that was over 70% Black, though hardly any African Americans had attempted to vote since the rise of Jim Crow in the early part of the 20th century. Malcolm X flew to Selma and spoke in support of the protestors, despite the reservations of some SCLC members. On February 21, he was assassinated in Harlem. On March 7, 500 Alabama state troopers awaited the marchers “on the far side of [Edmund] Pettus Bridge, ordered by George Wallace to arrest anyone who tried to cross” (621). As marchers tried to cross the bridge, state troopers beat them. The spectacle was televised. Johnson addressed Congress on March 15, calling on them to pass the Voting Rights Act. A week earlier, Johnson sent Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which led to a war on crime that militarized the police. Money that had previously gone into anti-poverty efforts now went toward anti-crime efforts. As a result of Johnson’s war on crime, which would be expanded by his successors, “[m]ore Americans would be sent to prison in the twenty years after LBJ launched his war on crime than went to prison in the entire century before” (622). Black people and those of Latin descent would make up most of the prison population, and the US “incarceration rate would rise to five times that of any other industrial nation” (622-23).

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. Four days later, riots broke out in Watts, a neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. King flew to the city to preach nonviolence, though his entreaties fell on deaf ears. In the summer of 1967, riots began in Newark, New Jersey, sparked by an incident of police brutality. The riots, which were broadcast, appeared to some American viewers like scenes from Vietnam. Conservatives believed that the only response to the rioting was to “govern with a will of iron” (624). Ronald Reagan, who was running for governor of California, blamed the riots on overreliance on government. He particularly blamed college students for rousing discontent and criticized the University of California, Berkeley, for inviting Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael to speak. Reagan won the governor’s race in a landslide. He began to replace Goldwater as the star of the Republican Party. His agenda was to “[dismantle] the New Deal” (627).

In May 1967, while the California state legislature debated gun control, 30 Black Panthers, led by Bobby Seale, entered the California State House, carrying various firearms. Reagan who signed the measure the legislature voted into law, told the press that he saw no good reason why a citizen should ever carry loaded weapons around.

Johnson, meanwhile, organized a commission to investigate the riots. The resulting Kerner Commission, named for its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner, released a 426-page report that requested $30 billion in urban spending on public housing and jobs programs to ameliorate the conditions that had sparked the riots. It also called for the government to commit fully to the desegregation of public schools. Conservatives read the report as blaming white people for violence in Black communities. With the exception of a recommendation to expand policing, Johnson largely ignored the commission’s findings.

The escalation of the war in Vietnam “galvanized the New Left” and “[brought] together the free speech and civil rights movements” (628). Dr. King joined the antiwar movement in 1967, thereby severing his alliance with Johnson. That year, around 500,000 troops were stationed in Vietnam and 9,000 Americans died. The war had taken $25 billion out of the federal budget. In January 1968, during the Vietnamese new year known as Tet, the North Vietnamese raided South Vietnam, including the US embassy in Saigon, during what came to be known as the Tet Offensive.

Robert Kennedy entered the presidential race that year as a Democratic candidate. He had changed his position on Vietnam and now characterized it as “Johnson’s war.” George Wallace had entered the race, too. On March 31, Johnson announced that he would eschew another presidential run to focus on ending the war. Four days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on his hotel balcony in Memphis. Riots erupted in 130 cities. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was killed while leaving the ballroom of a Los Angeles hotel.

Kennedy’s death, as well as increasing national unrest, provided an opening for Nixon who ran on a platform of anti-liberalism and the restoration of law and order. He also ran a campaign based on a “southern strategy,” which involved abandoning civil rights in favor of winning Southern Democrats. Instead of speaking with overt racism like George Wallace, Nixon chose subtler language.

The 1968 Republican National Convention took place in Miami, while the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago, where antiwar protestors, including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), clashed with “12,000 Chicago police, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 6,000 army troops, and 1,000 undercover intelligence agents” (633). Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in a single primary, won the party’s nomination, “defeating Eugene McCarthy and arousing the ire of the party’s left flank” (633).

Election Day, Nixon defeated Humphrey by winning the votes of Americans who believed that his promise to restore law and order spoke directly to them. They became known as the “Silent Majority.” In 1960, around three out of five white, blue-collar voters had voted for Kennedy. By 1968, that ratio voting Democratic had dwindled to one in three.

Nixon’s 1968 campaign had been uniquely divisive. He also began to think of his reelection soon after he entered the White House. His chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, encouraged him to court ethnic white people—those of Polish, Italian, and Irish descent, but not Jewish voters. Haldeman also eschewed Black voters. Nixon criticized nonwhite people who voiced concern about social and economic inequities rooted in a legacy of racism. He accused them of wanting success handed to them instead of “start[ing] at the bottom of the ladder the way [white people] did” (637). He spoke directly and singularly to disaffected white voters. The GOP moved further to the right, “to capitalize on backlash against civil rights,” while the Democratic Party went further to the Left (637).

Aside from encouraging strife, Nixon had little interest in domestic policy. His main domestic initiative, announcing in the summer of 1969, was the Family Assistance Plan which aimed to eliminate the welfare system, social works, and many social programs in favor of cash payments dispensed to those below a certain income level.

Nixon became especially notorious for recording conversations in the Oval Office, though all previous presidents since Franklin Roosevelt had done the same. He also maintained tapes that he wanted to serve as a chronicle of his presidency. While Haldeman had Nixon’s new recording system installed, defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg tried to figure out how to release “a 7,000-page, 47-volume study of the war in Vietnam that had been commissioned by Robert McNamara in 1967,” shortly before his resignation (640). The report, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, chronicled the lies and errors of several administrations in pursuing the war in Vietnam. The New York Times began to publish excerpts on June 13, 1971. The Pentagon Papers, however, caused no harm to Nixon, as the report ended in 1968. Still, Nixon was paranoid that his own presidency would come under fire. He asked the Justice Department to forbid the Times from publishing any additional portions of the report. The Times took its case to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Washington Post continued publishing the report. The Supreme Court ruled that the publication of the Pentagon Papers could proceed.

On Saturday, June 17, 1972, G. Gordon Liddy, a former aide of Nixon’s White House counsel John Ehrlichman, “directed five men to break into the offices of Lawrence O’Brien, the DNC chairman, at the Watergate Hotel” to steal documents and restore phone wiretaps (641). After completing those tasks, the men were to go to George McGovern’s campaign headquarters and do much of the same. They never got there, however, because they were arrested at the Watergate. Nixon had not known about the burglary plans, but he had found out about it several days later and “was captured on tape discussing a cover-up with Haldeman” (641). On Election Day in 1972, Nixon won 61% of the vote and 49 states—the first presidential candidate ever to do so.

In January 1973, he announced that he would end the war in Vietnam. The following month, the Senate voted to organize a special committee to investigate the Watergate break-in. Nixon was soon forced to turn over 1,200 pages of transcripts to 46 of his tapes. The public soon discovered the nature of his character. Nixon tried to withhold transcripts in which he discussed the Watergate break-in. The case that ensued against him went to the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon. The Supreme Court ordered the White House to release the tapes. To avoid inevitable impeachment after the content of the tapes was released on August 6, 1974, Nixon resigned two days later.

In the years after the Second World War, the US endured a moral reckoning for its inaction on civil rights and its hubristic, paranoid pursuit of anti-communism during the Cold War. The nation did, however, enjoy an era of political consensus—that is, politics mattered little in daily life for average Americans who identified less with a particular party than with an individual candidate. This absence of party stratification, which has characterized politics in the late 20th and early 21st century, may have contributed to the sense of relative peace, among white people anyway, during the 1950s.

There was a marked division, however, between how white and Black people lived. Lepore focuses less on how other groups were affected by mid-century segregationist policies in favor of focusing on those who were targeted by the legislation. Middle-class white people lived in comfortable suburbs that Black people were often forbidden to move into due to restrictive covenants. This contributed to the rise of impoverished ghettos. White people’s preoccupation with consumerism contrasted, particularly in regard to its frivolity, with Black people’s efforts toward resisting Jim Crow and pursuing civil rights. The great irony of the US fighting ardently for democracy abroad, as Lepore noted in Chapter 12, was that it failed to live according to its own values at home. The threat of communism was rooted in the sense that increasing interest in it would diminish American values—that is, eliminate the nation’s legacy of white, patriarchal supremacy and its emphasis on Christian faith.

Lepore reminds readers that John F. Kennedy, who has been touted in public historical memory as attentive to civil rights, did not see the urgency of the matter until the end of his presidency. Like Nixon, he led a presidency that concerned itself primarily with foreign policy, though Kennedy managed this less successfully than Nixon. Meanwhile, Johnson’s Great Society continued the New Deal’s legacy of building the nation’s social safety net. Unlike the New Deal, it was marred by bad fiscal policy. Johnson, likely increasingly concerned about domestic discord and a worsening war in Vietnam, wanted to placate the public with tax breaks, at the expense of his most promising and important programs. Worse, he redirected the money into anti-crime efforts, which would have been less necessary if the president had remained faithful to his Great Society programs, particularly those, such as Head Start, which funded child care.

Both the Vietnam War and the Black nationalist movement that grew out of the civil rights era galvanized the New Left and the New Right. Robert Kennedy, despite his past as a McCarthyist and his efforts to convince Johnson to stay the course in Vietnam, associated himself with the New Left. Johnson’s newly militarized police force clashed with New Left antiwar protestors and further enraged the New Right, or Silent Majority, that later delivered Nixon the presidency. Nixon capitalized on the rancor expressed by middle-aged white voters who were both concerned about violent national unrest and likely longed for the peace and sterility of the 1950s. However, Nixon’s air of paternal authoritarianism, which appealed to those white voters, coincided with a controlling and paranoid personality. Nixon’s legacy has been obscured by these revelations of his character, as well as the Watergate scandal. Part of this legacy, as Lepore notes, relates to his advances in foreign policy. There are, too, his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his support of Title X as part of his Public Health Service Act (1970), which guarantees access to family-planning services, particularly to low-income people.

The public, from the 1960s to the 1980s, was divided over many issues concerning women. However, those divisions, during those decades “did not fall along party lines,” though Republicans had historically been more likely to support equal rights and family planning than Democrats (647). Barry Goldwater and his wife had even served on the board of Planned Parenthood in Phoenix. Only in 1980 did both Democrats and Republicans put abortion on their platforms and demonstrate their starkly oppositional positions. By the nineties, abortion had become a major partisan issue. Additionally, gun ownership and gun safety were not partisan issues before the 1970s either (647). Bill Clinton, during his 1992 presidential run, tried to bridge the “guns-and-abortion-divide” by running a campaign solely on economic issues. This proved to be impossible.

It was political strategists and consultants who sowed the division between constituencies, largely with the help of computers. Strategists figured out that, the more emotional the political issue was, the likelier voters were to show up to polls. Abortion and guns turned out to be the most emotional issues.

In 1958, Alan Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai Hospital, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University, and a member of Planned Parenthood’s medical advisory board, encouraged New York municipal hospitals “to reverse an institutional policy that forbade doctors from giving out contraceptives or contraceptive information” (649). Efforts to legalize abortion were initiated by the doctors, attorneys, and clergymen who first operated Planned Parenthood. In 1962, Guttmacher ascended to the presidency of Planned Parenthood. During his tenure, he started a campaign to get the poor access to family planning programs, “to overturn bans on contraception, and to liberalize abortion law” (649).

In 1969, President Nixon asked Congress to provide additional funding for family planning. It was George H. W. Bush, a young Republican representative from Texas, who pushed for the legislation. This pressure encouraged legislators in 16 states, including California, where Ronald Reagan was governor, to lift restrictions on abortion. In 1970, Nixon signed Title X, federal family planning legislation, “which included a provision under which doctors on military bases could perform abortions” (650).

Meanwhile, women had become divided over many matters, and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s had divided into three movements: liberal feminism, radical feminism, and conservative antifeminism. In the Black nationalist movement, there was also controversy over the position of women. Stokely Carmichael once said that “[t]he only position for women in the movement is prone” (651). Despite Carmichael’s dismissal, radical feminists had been greatly influenced by the Black Power movement.

In 1971, journalist Gloria Steinem and New York congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm founded the National Women’s Political Caucus. The bipartisan organization sought to get more women elected to political office and succeeded, doubling the number of women in elected office between 1970 and 1975. With that momentum, more women’s rights bills were passed and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first introduced on the floor of Congress in 1923, passed the House in 1971 and the Senate the following year. When it first went to the states for ratification, it enjoyed enormous popularity, even in more conservative states, such as West Virginia. In the same year, law school professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg began to argue equal rights cases before the Supreme Court in 1971, “citing Pauli Murray’s strategy for using the Fourteenth Amendment to defeat discrimination by sex” (652). The following year, Ginsburg started the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.

Also in 1971, speechwriter Pat Buchanan told President Nixon that abortion was increasingly becoming an important issue, particularly to Catholics. He suggested that the president’s prospects for reelection would improve if he took a stand on abortion. Nixon followed the advice. He changed from having supported abortion to being a candidate who touted the sanctity of all human life, even that of the unborn. Privately, however, Nixon supported abortion in some instances. On tape, he expressed the belief that abortion was necessary in instances of rape and “in case of a pregnancy resulting from sex between ‘a black and a white’” (654).

In the mid-1970s, economic malaise set in. However, it first became noticeable to most Americans in 1973, during the OPEC oil embargo. Additionally, Detroit motor companies faced fierce competition from Japanese auto manufacturers. Steel industries closed permanently or moved abroad, turning the formerly bustling Midwest along the Great Lakes into the Rust Belt. Liberals blamed this economic downturn on the abandonment of Johnson’s Great Society programs, while conservatives blamed it on the failures of liberalism, particularly taxation and government regulation, which they said had constricted the free market.

Lepore explains past economic growth on the development of technologies, starting with electricity and the automobile. This growth was not sustainable, however, and the pace of innovation had slowed. Few inventions patented after 1970 produced the vast changes and growth that had been enjoyed previously. Additionally, economic inequality became more common in the last quarter of the 20th century. The advent and rise of the Internet in the 1990s did not bring forth earlier levels of economic growth. It actually contributed to “widening income inequality and political instability” (657). Wages for male workers dropped, causing more married women, particularly white women, to work outside of the household. Many women began to demand government-funded child care. Still, household incomes did not rise much. Typically, liberals blamed conservatives and conservatives blamed liberals, while Phyllis Schlafly blamed feminists.

When the Republican Party was founded in 1854, it “had been the party of abolition and the party of women’s rights” (658). By 1896, it was “the party of big business” (658). However, it had remained supportive of civil liberties for women. It was not until 1968, when the ERA was left off of the Republican platform, that feminism experienced its first backlash within the Republican Party. In 1972, feminist Republican women tried to restore the party’s pro-ERA plank to the platform. Phyllis Schlafly worked to ensure that they wouldn’t gain headway, forming an organization of conservative housewives called STOP ERA. STOP stood for Stop Taking Away Our Privileges. In response, at the 1976 Republican National Convention, 30 GOP feminists formed the Republican Women’s Task Force to fight for platform planks in support of the ERA, reproductive rights, affirmative action, federally funded child care, and the extension of the Equal Pay Act (659).

When liberal feminists organized the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Schlafly complained that neither she nor any other conservative women had been invited to help organize the conference. The women, who included anthropologist Margaret Mead, tennis champion Billie Jean King, and actress Jean Stapleton, met over four days. Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, and Betty Ford were also in attendance. Ann Richards, then a Texas county commissioner, gave a speech about the ERA, in which she invoked her daughter, Ann, who grew up to become president of Planned Parenthood.

In the end, it was race that had divided the second-wave feminist movement, despite the entreaties of some nonwhite activists, such as Coretta Scott King. Nonwhite women made up over a quarter of the women delegates in Houston. However, Schlafly saw more reasons for the divisiveness. The conference’s two most controversial proposals were for equal rights for gays and lesbians and government funding for abortion. Feminist Betty Friedan had been hostile to the burgeoning movement for gay rights, believing that it would harm the feminist movement. Some conservative activists, including the singer Anita Bryant, had seized onto the issue, though this only convinced many liberal feminists that they had a moral responsibility to support gay rights.

Schlafly also helped bring together anti-abortion, anti-ERA, and anti-gay rights groups under one political umbrella. Evangelicals, meanwhile, had largely stayed away from politics. This changed in 1961, when the Supreme Court “overturned a Maryland law that required an employee to declare his belief in God” (662). The following year, the court decided that mandatory school prayer was unconstitutional. In 1963, it forbade Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools. Finally, in 1971, the court declared that segregated private schools would no longer be tax-exempt. These schools had been a refuge for white supremacists who had opposed school integration. Ultimately, it was religion, not desegregation, that drew evangelicals to conservatives and, eventually, the Republican Party.

Strategists within the Heritage Foundation continued work on building a conservative coalition that would bring in evangelicals. They later recruited Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979. The organization’s aim was to battle “secular humanism.” This included women’s liberation, gay rights, the ERA, sex education, government-funded child care, and, primarily, abortion. Prior to Falwell’s efforts, evangelicals had actually supported abortion, particularly “under conditions such as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of […] damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother” (664).

By now, Ronald Reagan was the Republican Party’s most powerful conservative and he had Phyllis Schlafly’s support. Moderates in the GOP, particularly the feminist Jill Ruckelshaus, reminded members of the party that Republicans had long supported the ERA. She and her moderate cohorts were driven out of the party. Reagan won the party’s nomination and ran with George H. W. Bush, who adopted a conservative position on both abortion and the ERA, despite having previously expressed support for them.

Strategists knew that the New Right didn’t have many ideas, but they did have better technology than the New Left, including computers, telephone marketing, television, cassette tapes, and toll-free numbers from which they asked for both votes and campaign contributions. They used census records, polls, campaign finance records, and election data to target potential support. They also bypassed the mass media, which they believed was biased against conservatives.

The New Right’s rise coincided with the increasing influence of the polling industry. In 1972, political scientist Leo Bogart learned that polls largely manufacture opinion because most Americans know nothing or nearly nothing about many issues that are raised among politicians and, therefore, have no opinion.

In 1980, the New Right finally elected their ideal candidate, Ronald Reagan, who, at his 1981 inauguration, declared that government was not the solution to people’s problems but the problem itself. He encouraged Americans to rebuild the nation’s defenses, to protect unborn children, and to permit Christian faith in the classrooms. Part of Reagan’s support had come from voters who were fed up with the complicated tax code. Thus, Reagan made tax cuts a key plank on his campaign platform. He also cut federal spending to social programs, claiming that they promoted dependency and immorality and eroded traditional family life by discouraging marriage. During the Reagan era, over 1 million people lost food stamp benefits. However, Reagan protected Social Security and Medicare.

Reagan’s other policy measures included increasing military spending by 35%, which tripled the national debt during his eight years in office. The federal government also expanded, as did financial irresponsibility due to deregulation that “allow[ed] savings-and-loan banks to sell junk bonds and high-risk securities” (671).

In March 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan with a revolver that he had bought at a pawn shop in Dallas. In the early part of the 20th century, the National Rifle Association (NRA) had actively sought out state and federal gun safety measures. It had supported the 1968 Gun Control Act, which had banned mail-order sales, kept high-risk people from owning firearms, and “prohibit[ed] the importation of military surplus firearms” (672). The 2nd Amendment received little attention. It was Black nationalists who first began to invoke the 2nd Amendment in the 1960s, while some conservatives, including Nixon, loathed gun ownership and found the idea that it was “a constitutional right to be absurd” (673).

Gun rights emerged as a conservative political movement, “a rights fight for white men” and a “backlash against both feminism and civil rights” (673). The movement also coincided with a rising White Power movement, which was a response to both the post–civil rights era and an increase in the number of immigrants arriving in the US. While the number of Mexican immigrants remained the same, the number of legal immigrants from Mexico declined. Since the 1960s, Mexican American intellectuals had been pursuing immigration reform as part of a civil rights struggle. With the rise of the Chicano movement, that effort “turn[ed] toward ethnic separatism and nationalism” (674). Eventually, the two strains of the movement—elders had focused on labor rights, while the younger Chicano activists wanted restrictions on immigration lifted—came together in the mid-1970s, seeing that it was important to protect the rights of undocumented workers. However, by the 1990s, the US-Mexican border had become a kind of military zone (674).

Meanwhile, in 1975, the NRA created a lobbying arm led by Harlon Bronson Carter, a marksman and former chief of US Border Patrol who had been convicted of murder in 1931. The NRA had endorsed Reagan’s presidency, and Reagan, despite his attempted assassination, had become so opposed to gun laws that he supported abolishing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, “had been shot in the head with a bullet designed to explode on impact” during the incident and “was permanently paralyzed” (676). He and his wife later created the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, leading to the passage of the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks. President George W. Bush later allowed the law, passed in 1994, to expire.

To aid the gun rights argument, conservatives developed originalism as a new mode of constitutional interpretation and focused on the 2nd Amendment. By 1991, more Americans were familiar with the 2nd Amendment than they were with the First. The originalist argument flourished in law schools. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan found the idea that modern judges could ascertain the intentions of the Founders patently absurd. The public, however, didn’t believe him. Conservatives had used talk radio, cable television, and direct mail to convince them otherwise.

Reagan’s election had also been partly aided by the Iranian hostage crisis in early 1979, when rebels held 66 Americans hostage at the US embassy and Foreign Ministry offices, demanding the return of the tyrannical shah from his exile in the US. The rebels did not release the hostages until Reagan took office, allowing the new president to take credit, though Carter had negotiated the peace.

During the Reagan era, fear of nuclear holocaust coincided with fear of “global environmental catastrophe” (679). There was increasing concern about pollution. A decade earlier, Nixon had established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), expanded the Clean Air Act, and signed the Clean Water Act. Environmentalists, noting that pollution knows no borders, advocated for global measures. When Reagan ascended to the presidency, he emphasized defense instead of the environment, unveiling the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was nicknamed “Star Wars,” in March 1983. Its intent was to defend the US from a nuclear attack “with a network of satellite-based missiles” (681). This, to Reagan, would make a nuclear war “winnable.”

The scientist and popular host of the TV science series Cosmos, Carl Sagan, raised concerns that “even a very limited nuclear war could lead to the end of all life on the planet” by initiating a “nuclear winter” (681). Some environmentalists challenged this idea, finding the science inconclusive. Conservatives then worked to roll back the 1949 Fairness Doctrine, which had been amended a decade later, requiring broadcasters to offer Americans various opinions on major issues. Conservatives advocated for a market-based rule that declared, if people liked something, broadcasters could air it. Reagan also set about trying to undo the Fairness Doctrine and eventually succeeded.

In 1984, the economy of the Soviet Union was in shambles. In the same year, Reagan won 60% of the popular vote and every state’s Electoral College except for Minnesota—the home state of his opponent, Walter Mondale. As communism began to fall and the USSR began to open up and restructure its economy, it seemed as though Reagan had led the world into capitalist democracy. By 1991, the Soviet empire had collapsed and, the following year, the Cold War ended.

Reagan used his political capital to change the judiciary at home, looking to appoint judges to lower courts whom he believed embraced “family values.” In 1986, he named Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court—one of the “most learned and eloquent proponent[s] of originalism” (684). The originalist argument came to a head, however, in 1987 during the debate over the nomination of well-known conservative legal theorist Robert Bork, who had been supported by the Federalist Society. Bork believed that “[n]o fundamental rights exist[ed] outside of those listed in the Constitution” (687).

Meanwhile, the gay rights movement was growing, largely in response to the federal government’s inaction on HIV and AIDS, a medical condition that first appeared in the early 1980s. Gay men made up three out of four cases. Reagan did not speak about AIDS until 1985. Like arguments in favor of reproductive rights, legal cases involving gay rights had long been fought on privacy grounds. Gay rights activists became frustrated with this method, focusing instead on visibility—that is, coming out—and seeking equal rights.

The Democratic Party had long been the party of the working class—that is, until Republicans began to court prospective blue-collar white male voters “who’d lost their manufacturing jobs” (693). The Democratic Party had largely abandoned the working class in favor of “knowledge workers,” particularly those who belonged to the emerging information and technology industry. They also began to see racism as less of a structural problem than one derived from ignorance (694). The 1992 Democratic nominees, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, called themselves “New Democrats” and declared their predecessors’ support for unions old-fashioned.

The computer would become the dominant technology in the 1990s. Childhood friends and Seattle natives Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded Microsoft in 1975. The following year, in Cupertino, California, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak founded Apple Computer. Four years later, Apple’s IPO “broke a record held by the Ford Motor Company since 1956” (695).

When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, he made health care reform his first priority. Insurance companies and conservative groups “spent hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and lobbying campaigns to defeat the proposal” (698). Hillary Clinton advised her husband to stay the course and fight for universal health care. By the midterm elections in 1994, when Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, the legislation failed. On the other hand, a crime bill passed, leading many liberals to take credit for being “tough on crime” (699). The crime bill brought in an era of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected nonwhite people and gave the US the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In 1996, Clinton sought common ground with his conservative enemies by trying to “end welfare as we know it” by rolling back benefits for those who remained trapped in poverty (700). After Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act, the securities industry saw record profits. By the end of the decade, the average corporate CEO “earned nearly four hundred times as much as the average worker” (700).

The 1990s were a boom time “for dot-commers and hedge fund managers, for Hollywood moguls and global traders” (702). Incomes rose across the board during the Clinton years, but the middle class, particularly “the rural white middle class,” still saw wage decline (702). Conspiracy theorists, notably Alex Jones, blamed elites. He also made the claim that the government was behind Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Jones was among several right-wing radio talk show hosts to emerge in the nineties. The most popular, however, was Rush Limbaugh, “who began broadcasting nationally, on fifty-six stations, in the summer of 1988” (704). The Republican political strategist and TV producer Roger Ailes began producing a TV show for Limbaugh soon after meeting the media personality in 1990. Though the show failed, Ailes was convinced that there should be a television network for conservative news.

Meanwhile, CNN had been producing 24-hour news programming since it was launched in 1980. MSNBC, a network dedicated to the liberal perspective, started in July 1996. Later that year, Ailes started Fox News, which was owned by the Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Ailes had no background in journalism and often expressed his dislike of journalists. He claimed that he had started Fox News “to rescue journalism” (707).

For many years, the only TV channels were the major networks. The news was broadcast every night at 6:30. Those who were less interested in politics—moderates—still tended to watch. However, with the rise of cable, they had other viewing options. As a result, these voters became less engaged in politics and, thus, less likely to vote. Television had also become more salacious, particularly where the Clintons were concerned. In March 1994, the major networks aired 126 news stories about the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal, but had only aired 42 stories about the Clintons’ proposed health care plan (709). In the last years of the decade, the electorate developed less faith in the ability of the federal government to accomplish anything.

The American economy, however, continued to thrive. Dot-come stock was high. By the end of Clinton’s second term in 2000, “unemployment had fallen to 4.1% and the United States was producing nearly a quarter of the world’s output” (714). By comparison, the British Empire, at its height, had produced only 8% of the world’s output in 1913 (714). Still, Americans without a college education, and especially those without a high school diploma, floundered in a culture in which worship of the rich was predominant. Around this time, the real estate tycoon Donald Trump had been hinting at a possible presidential run, though no one took it seriously. Despite his personal wealth and business career, he identified with “the workers, the construction workers, the taxicab driver” (714). He also decried both parties’ inability to speak to working people and centrists.

In 2000, George W. Bush, son of the 41st president and governor of Texas, won the Republican presidential nomination. The younger Bush, who was a born-again Christian, coined a new slogan: “compassionate conservatism.” It was based on the notion that conservative values and conservative ideas could aid in fomenting “justice and opportunity” (716).

The 2000 election, however, was extremely close. Even after it was over, it remained unclear who had won an election that had hinged on Florida and the possibility of corruption. The networks had first announced that Gore had won. Fox News countered that prediction. Several minutes later, the major networks followed Fox’s lead and named Bush president. Gore contested the results. He had won the popular vote by over 500,000 ballots. The Florida Supreme Court supported Gore’s call for a recount. For weeks, the election was undecided. Then, on December 12, the Supreme Court called off the recount. The 5-4 decision had been led by judges who were appointed by Reagan and Bush. They rested their decision on the 14th Amendment, which “had been written and ratified to guarantee the rights of African Americans” (717).

On the final day of his presidency, Bill Clinton admitted to having lied under oath about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, “in exchange for immunity from prosecution” (717). It was the end of a presidency that had been marked by both national prosperity and seemingly endless scandal.

Lepore covers a broad expanse of history in this section, from the end of the Nixon era, which resulted in China opening itself up to the West economically, to the end of the Clinton years, a time of unprecedented prosperity that was partly due to the economic reforms of some of Clinton’s conservative predecessors. Though Clinton was an object of conservative ire, his economic policies, Lepore notes, continued the Reagan era and pursued centrism, particularly after the 1994 midterm elections.

The death of communism, marked by the fall of the Soviet Union, had encouraged already deeply polarized Americans to move farther apart politically. Lacking foreign enemies abroad, they turned on each other. Voters fell along party lines regarding abortion and guns. Thus, moral issues and identity politics defined both parties, with the Republican Party increasingly becoming the haven of the disaffected white male voter. Both sides in the abortion and guns debates—that is, antichoice activists and antigun activists—cast their respective opponents as immoral, even evil, and used less factual evidence than impassioned rhetoric to support their positions.

Lepore also notes, however briefly, the lack of cohesion in the second-wave feminist movement—a problem that has impacted contemporary understandings of feminism. Lepore describes how the movement could never reconcile its disparate strains, as it had during its first wave when suffragists passed the 19th Amendment, and during the Progressive Era, when they pursued reforms that protected women and children from labor abuses. Lepore notes, even more briefly, the sexism that also existed in the Black nationalist movement, as exemplified by Carmichael’s comment, which both objectified women and discounted the pivotal role that Black women played in both the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. Some women in the Black Panther Party, including Elaine Brown and Kathleen Cleaver, had leadership positions within the organization.

The ERA’s initial success is a testament to the popularity of liberalism, which had persisted since the 1930s, despite the communist witch hunts of the postwar era. The fact that the legislation had sunk by the end of the decade is a testament to Phyllis Schlafly’s political acumen and, possibly, feminists’ underestimation of her and her cohort. In a previous chapter, Lepore mentions that white Republican women had become the foot soldiers of the GOP, and Schlafly was very much in that mold.

She, like Ronald Reagan, perpetuated an idealized conservative myth of an America that had never existed, one in which everyone knew their rightful place and stayed within it. It provided comfort to those who were reeling from the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. Reagan had encouraged an erosion of faith in the federal government that has persisted in contemporary discourse. This was not, however, rhetoric that he applied to his governance, as defense spending increased significantly during his administration and more employees were added to the Department of Defense. It was an era in which, yet again, foreign policy was prioritized over domestic needs; and military brawn mattered more than the care of the nation’s most vulnerable.