It is tempting to dismiss the 1970s in the United States as an ‘in-between’
decade. After all, the 1970s fell between two momentous decades: between the
swinging sixties and the materialistic eighties; between the liberal Great Society
and the conservative New Right revolution; between Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson and President Reagan; between the civil rights movement and the
religious right; between Vietnam and facing down the Evil Empire; between
landing on the moon and the Star Wars project; between rock ’n’ roll and rap.
Sandwiched between such dynamic eras, the 1970s stand small. The years
that Tom Wolfe famously described as the ‘me decade’ seemed to run out of
gas (literally, in American terminology, with long queues at the petrol pumps).1
This was the decade of Nixon’s Watergate and Carter’s weak leadership, of an
oil crisis and a hostage crisis, of economic stagflation and inner city decay, of
declining voter turnout and increasing pessimism, of a backlash against
bussing and affirmative action, of cringe-worthy blaxploitation movies and a
short-lived disco fad.
