 This lecture is going to focus on the 1970s. We're going to look at the 70s as a decade of crisis, of economic crisis, of political crisis, of international crisis, and ultimately of domestic crisis as well. There's always a danger when you use decades as a means of explaining historical events, because decades ultimately are artificial constructs. There's no reason why we should use 10 years as a unit of measurement, but we do. So when we use decades and we sort of try to distinguish important trends that are happening during decades, we have to realize that these are artificial, and that sometimes by doing so we tend to over-emphasize some historical trends and perhaps under-emphasize others that may continue across decades. So I just want to sort of make that caveat, that kind of explanation before we discuss this decade, because some of these changes certainly happen before the decade, and I'll do my best to explain so in the course of this lecture, and they certainly carry on into the subsequent decades. But the 1970s is certainly a decade that we see a lot of these major, major crises striking the United States. And it's a decade in which these crises are made even worse because of the very high post-World War II expectations that many Americans had. The decades from the end of World War II up until the beginning of the 1970s were arguably incredibly prosperous decades for the United States and for Americans. Many Americans, for the first time in their lives, entered the middle class. They received college educations, or they obtained very good, strong, well-paying union jobs that didn't require college educations. And in either case, they made a fairly reasonable amount of money and were able to sort of live the middle class lifestyle that they had aspired to. And certainly many of it in cases their parents had aspired to. So for people living, growing up or coming of age between the end of World War II, 1945 and the beginning of the 1970s, this was a great time period. These were a golden period in American history, despite all the sort of social unrest of the 1960s and despite the war in Vietnam and all these other problems that happened in the 60s, arguably this was a very, very good time period for many Americans. And abruptly, in the very early part of the 1970s, this period of prosperity, of economic prosperity, of relative social prosperity comes to a halt and comes crashing down and it just creates a real sense of crisis in the United States. Between 1945 and 1970, the United States, again, is in a very prosperous position. The U.S. is primarily an exporting nation. The U.S. is exporting a considerable amount of the material that people in throughout the rest of the world are using. So U.S. is a net exporter. We're exporting more than we're bringing in. And as a result of that, we're making a lot of money. A lot of money is flowing into the United States. And the balance of trade is in the U.S. favor. In other words, the U.S. is exporting more than it's importing. It's taking in more money than it's paying out to other nations. The military industrial academic complex, this sort of this term, the shorthand term for the relationship between the U.S. government, corporations, and academia that had developed during the Cold War, have been very successful in putting a lot of people to work. A lot of college graduates got jobs in industry or got jobs working for the government. A lot of businesses were very successful because they were largely being funded by the government for military purposes or for national defense purposes. And as a result, for most Americans, job security was really an all-time high. Wages were outpacing inflation, which meant that people had more money to spend. And in many respects, life was very good. There was this common sense of prosperity, and it was consumer prosperity. People spent money on stuff, and they were able to accumulate things because they had that money to spend and they could save and spend at the same time, and they had enough money to do so. Well, beginning in the early 70s, that period of economic prosperity comes crashing down for a number of reasons that we'll explain here in just a minute. One of the reasons for this is that domestic spending in the United States really got out of control during the 1960s because presidents Kennedy and then Johnson and Nixon ultimately were trying to spend money on too many different things. And the biggest problem was that a lot of money was going out for the Vietnam War. I'm talking about millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. But an equally large amount of money was going out to support the so-called great society projects that Lyndon Johnson had initiated, Medicare, Medicaid, educational programs, anti-poverty initiatives. So the US government was just spending far more money than it was taking in, in a sense. And it was starting to run deficits and debt, and it was starting to grow. And as a result of that, this creates an economic situation in the United States that's rather difficult because the government was having a problem sort of meeting some of its obligations, its financial obligations. There's a trade balance that begins during this same time period. Here we have a graph that shows this. In the 1970s, balance of trade was roughly even. In other words, America was exporting the financial terms, was exporting as much as it was importing. It was basically breaking even. It was paying out other countries for products as much as other countries were paying the US in net terms for products. But during the 1970s, this trade imbalance begins to start moving away from in America's favor, especially as we begin to see the first instances of trade deficits starting in 1971, where, in fact, the US for the first time in the post-World War II era is actually sending out more money than it's taking in for products on a nationwide scale. The reason for that is there's multiple factors. One was that the automotive industry in Japan and Germany was becoming very successful during this decade. German manufacturers were manufacturing cars that Americans wanted to buy. Japanese manufacturers had started developing small, inexpensive cars that appealed to Americans who didn't have as much money. And over the course of this decade, more and more Americans are willing to start buying cars made internationally as opposed to being American-made. By the end of the decade, about 35% of US cars are being imported. And this is just a remarkable figure since most Americans had bought American-made cars prior to the 1970s. So this trade balance begins to grow and grow. Over the course of the 70s, it's getting more and more positive again, but then, especially beginning around 1975-76, it starts getting more and more negative. And finally, by the early 80s, it just completely drops off a cliff in many respects. One of the reasons for this is, of course, as I mentioned, this economic imbalance is more and more people are buying foreign-made products. And more and more US companies were beginning to outsource production to overseas, which meant that while the companies themselves were making money, a lot of that money was ultimately going overseas. So this is just to create trade imbalance problems and balance of payment issues. And in financial terms, what it means is that US dollars are fleeing the United States to foreign countries. And at this point, the United States was still on the gold standard, which meant that US dollars, paper bills, could be exchanged literally for gold at a one-to-one relationship that foreign countries could take US currency and say, we want gold in place of greenbacks and in place of dollar bills. Well, as more and more foreign US currency leaves, as people spend money on products made overseas, and foreign governments want to cash in those greenbacks for gold, this starts to deplete the US gold reserves. And there's a sense of political crisis, that the US gold reserves are being depleted and at a very quick, rapid pace, and the US begins to worry about what's going to happen. Ultimately in 1971, President Nixon and his advisors make the decision to take the US off the gold standard. No longer will US dollar and currency be directly exchangeable for gold. And he does this because of this fear that US gold reserves are being depleted because US currency is going overseas. Also, he takes the US off the Bretton Woods Agreement. We talked about Bretton Woods in an earlier lecture. But Bretton Woods was this agreement that happens at the end of World War II that says the dollar will be the official kind of benchmark currency against which all of their countries will adjust their currency. So as the US dollar adjusts, all the other currencies will automatically adjust in relationship to that. What that tended to mean was that the US dollar was overvalued and other currencies oftentimes were undervalued. In basic economic terms, that meant that buying products overseas was cheaper because the US dollar was overvalued, foreign currencies were undervalued, and you could get a lot more for your dollar. And more dollars were going overseas as a result of that. So taking the US off Bretton Woods meant that the dollar would free float against other currencies. And the US government could use various economic policies to increase or decrease the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. And other countries could do the exact same with their currencies. What this does is, again, it ends the US dollars at fixed standard against other international currencies and leads to a major, major shift in the value of the dollar. A lot of other countries start kind of panicking because they see the US is changing the rules of the game and they go off, the UK goes off the British pound sterling as their standard and their currency starts to free float against the dollar. Other countries in Europe take the same measure and so all of a sudden it's sort of all the rules have changed and no longer is there a gold standard, no longer is the US dollar the currency against which all their currencies are measured and this causes a major weakness as a result in the dollar. The dollar becomes very weak against other foreign currencies. Well as this weakening of the dollar is happening internationally, another crisis happens and this is the oil crisis that begins in 1973. In 1973, OPEC, the organization of petroleum exporting countries which was primarily Middle Eastern nations and a few other countries outside the Middle East, makes a decision to impose an oil embargo against the United States in a number of other European nations in response for support of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War against its Middle Eastern neighbors and in this case it's seen as sort of a way of punishing the United States for supporting Israel. Israel had been attacked and the US had helped essentially bail out the Israelis through massive, both financial and military support during the war. Well this causes a major oil crisis because with the oil cut off from the Middle East there's not enough oil in the United States for gasoline or for electrical generation purposes and this price goes up considerably because essentially demand is inelastic, in other words people can't just stop using oil right away so because of that the price goes up and the price increases four times in less than a year and causes a massive amount of inflation because oil prices going up leads to food prices going up because you use gasoline to transport food and you use gasoline to power farm equipment and so pretty soon everything is going up food prices are going up, oil prices are going up everything is going up and this starts to create a major disaster for US industries because they can't afford to manufacture and they can't afford to sell at the old prices they have to raise prices and American consumers suddenly can't afford to buy things because their wages aren't going up to meet the inflation and of course this oil crisis for Americans means no gasoline suddenly gasoline is unavailable and as a result of that rationing in a sense begins to take place the US government imposes these special rules about when everybody's allowed to get gasoline when only commercial gasoline can be sold or when there's no gasoline available and essentially a form of rationing goes into effect during the worst months of the crisis immediately after the 1973 embargo begins and of course this creates a real sense of urgency in the United States as Americans who are used to being able to get gasoline whenever they wanted to and as much as they wanted to suddenly find themselves unable to travel because they can't get gasoline truckers become concerned because it makes harder for them to make a living for independent truckers and this creates a real political crisis in the United States the other aspect of this is that it leads to something called stagflation stagflation being a word that's created out of the word stagnation and the words inflation and what happens during this period is that we see both of these processes inflation because of increasing oil prices because of the weakening of the US dollar against other currencies after the end of the gold standard in Bretton Woods and stagnation in the economy businesses stop hiring and they stop raising wages because they can't afford to industries start relocating overseas to save money and this creates a period during the 70s and into the early 1980s of just stagnant economic activity in the United States people suddenly have been used to their wages going up every year or two people have been used to having more money to spend and suddenly all of that is reversed and this huge gain that's made after World War II is halted in its tracks with the long term consequences of this economic crisis are a number of them and the sources of corporations continue to outsource they continue to look overseas for cheaper labor and cheaper places to manufacture and so more and more jobs are leaving the United States especially manufacturing jobs leaving the United States for overseas and this has an impact on the US economy we also see a decline in public services as a result of this because as more and more good jobs are going over the seas people are having to take lower paying jobs or they're just losing they're not paying as much in taxes they're not being able to pay as much for nice homes so local cities states and ultimately the federal government began to take in fewer and fewer tax dollars and this leads to having to slash budgets and so suddenly they can't spend as much money on police services or as much money on fire services and this really leads to a decline in the quality of life for people who are living in these locations it also leads to a gap between rich and poor rich are able to hang on to more of their money through various means than the poor and the poor who are dependent on the work that's going overseas or the companies that are shutting down they can't find replacement jobs as easily and so we begin to see a greater gap the gap between rich and poor has been shrinking since the 30s and suddenly that reverses and of course the poor are most affected by stagflation because they're the ones who have the poorest jobs they can't afford to save money and put it away in banks which are paying very high interest rates at this point having to try to survive as best they can on what they can get we also see during the same time period a decline in good well-paying union jobs in the north places like Detroit and Buffalo and companies relocating if they were choosing to stay in the United States relocating to non-union places in the south or in the west where they could pay lower wages for the same level of work and ultimately the cultural outcome of this is that we see in other words people begin to start realizing that perhaps their lives or their children's lives are going to be worse than their parents' lives here everybody was thinking you know my kids are going to live better than me suddenly people start questioning whether that's the case this quote-unquote American dream of the next generation being better than the previous people start to question that and it also of course leads to this creation of in some ways a permanent economic underclass in the United States people who just simply have no ability to have a reputation of rising up from poverty and living better lives people who essentially sort of essentially resign themselves to being poor their whole lives so this economic crisis of the 70s has a very strong kind of social impact and cultural impact on the United States during the 70s and the decades that follow now in addition to this economic crisis of the 70s we also have a political crisis and it's a political crisis that just like the economic crisis has a strong impact on American's belief in government, American's belief in their political leaders because before the 70s politics have been largely considered to be an honorable profession of course there were corrupt politicians everybody knew that but media tended not to report on that quite as much they tended not to be perhaps as high a level of corruption or the corruption tended to be financial corruption in a sense and not sort of the moral corruption deliberate misrepresentations, things like that but during and after the 70s there's a growing disenchantment with politics and with the American government in a sense that instead of the government being there to do good things for the American population that the government was a problem the government lied American political leaders did their best to deceive the American public to not tell them what was really going on a lot of this of course came about as a result of Vietnam of the Vietnam war of the 1960s that doesn't eventually end until 1973 when U.S. troops are finally withdrawn in total but the Vietnam war after the war itself lots of leaks happened and lots of documents become public and it becomes very clear that the U.S. government had been misleading the public throughout the course of the war about how likely the U.S. was to win the conflict it becomes obvious here we have a map that was issued by the CIA that CIA is the central intelligence agency was conducting secret wars in places like Cambodia and Laos along the border of Vietnam that there were these covert wars happening in countries that we were not in any way technically at war with but that were still killing people both Americans and people from those nations and that were costing lots of money and ultimately as the scope of the conflict is revealed the fact that nearly 2 million civilians are killed in Vietnam during this conflict that again thousands of Americans are killed during this conflict people become much more skeptical of the motives and sort of the honesty of American political leaders it also becomes revealed as the war is ending that both the FBI and the CIA were using various means to discredit domestic protesters for basically political orders the CIA which was not even allowed legally to operate in the United States was working with the FBI to do essentially raid operations that were being run by these peace groups or by groups like STS or STS Students for Democratic Society so in a sense it becomes very obvious that the government was essentially really abusing its power and misusing its power so people began to go very skeptical of the overall honesty of the government the one event that really contributes of course to this sense of really doubting the integrity and honesty of politicians is the Watergate Affair and Watergate stems from Richard Nixon, president elected in 1968 and who runs for re-election in 1972 his extreme distrust in his opponents and his extreme desire to get as much evidence as possible to utterly destroy his political opponents and in 1972 Richard Nixon is running for re-election and he and his supporters are looking for ways to sort of dig up dirt on opposition on ways to sort of maintain an eye on what his opponents in the Democratic Party were doing and so Nixon's staff, Nixon may not have had direct knowledge of the event itself but some of Nixon's staff hire a bunch of some cases former CIA and some former FBI people to bug the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC the DNC being sort of the organization that is running the Democratic campaign for president in 1972 and other congressional campaigns Nixon wanted to bug the office and Nixon's staff decided that bugging the offices might get them good information about what their opponents were doing well eventually these people who are hired to bug the office the plumbers as they're called they get caught through a variety of bungling actions on their part and what begins next is a huge cover-up initially again by Nixon's staff and then Nixon if he wasn't initially aware of it quickly becomes aware of it and starts lying to the public about it and his staff of course are lying to the public about the White House not having any knowledge of this trying to pay off these plumbers not to talk to the courts or not to talk to the media and ultimately this cover-up continues and gets bigger and bigger and more people get involved and as the media begins to investigate to become clear that this cover-up goes really to the highest levels of government and ultimately what it leads to is a huge congressional investigation of the Watergate Affair pictured as part of this investigation and essentially what it leads to is that the U.S. House of Representatives recommending impeachment of the president for actions that are essentially unbecoming of this political office and probably illegal rather than going through an impeachment Nixon chooses to resign the presidency and ultimately he leaves office in 1973 essentially leaves an exile to his home in California well in Nixon's place his vice president Gerald Ford takes office and Ford fairly quickly decides that the best course of action is to pardon Nixon to spare the country a trial that might you know lead to more more kind of of distrust in the U.S. government and of course for Ford by pardoning Nixon and he sort of seals his own fate in a way because he's seen as complicit in some ways in this whole activity but ultimately this Watergate event and Nixon's resignation and Ford's pardoning of Nixon again just leads many Americans to grow completely skeptical of the government to distrust it to distrust the motives of political leaders and to feel in a sense that the government was a giant scam or a giant giant just just huge mistake that was during this time period well of course after Nixon Ford takes office and Ford and then later Jimmy Carter who becomes president in 1976 neither of them are terribly effectual presidents they they have a lot of problems that they're dealing with Ford and Carter both dealing with stagflation they're both dealing with these energy crisis due to the due to the OPEX embargo and ultimately because of this there's so many problems that they're dealing with they very have a very hard time really establishing strong initiatives during their administration so in a sense Nixon resigns in disgrace Ford has a difficult presidency he doesn't win re-election Carter is elected he's still struggling with stagflation and crises and in a way America doesn't really reverse this opinion that many Americans had that their political leaders were not particularly competent or their political leaders were not particularly effectual at their jobs and so this political apathy that part of many Americans continues and sort of spreads throughout the population and so people just develop this very cynical skeptical attitude about politics and start to lose interest in being involved in politics during this time period now the third of these sort of major crises that happens during this time period is in foreign policy and while it's both a period of crisis but it's also a period of opportunity and so I have to emphasize that the crisis itself largely comes about again as a result of the Vietnam war and it's often times termed the Vietnam syndrome the sort of the shorthand phrase or the Vietnam effect sometimes it's also called and what happens is that American public and American political leaders go very wary of American military forces being involved in overseas activities and so for really a decade after the end of the Vietnam war American military is very hesitant to do anything that might lead to putting American lives at risk American political leaders Ford and then Carter are very hesitant to use the military as a foreign policy option to send American troops overseas to places where that might get hurt or killed not to take military risks in this very strong America couldn't afford to take military risks anymore and as partly a result of this sort of this Vietnam effect or Vietnam syndrome we see a decline in American hegemony in other words hegemony or hegemony is depending on how you pronounce it is the use of force to sort of exert power and America had used its economic and military and political power to have hegemony in places like the Middle East where American influences were very strong but as the America begins to increasingly hesitate to use military force or military influence to kind of get its way as it loses a lot of money as a result of the economic crisis of the 70s increasingly America can't afford to exert power or hegemony throughout the world and as a result of this we see areas like the Middle East become increasingly more perhaps hostile to the United States or at least more complicated for the United States and areas in Latin and South America the same way American influences decline in South America and Latin America places that start to become falling under communist influence or socialist influence which many Americans, especially political leaders are very concerned about we see a growing threat from political terrorism throughout the world in both in Europe and in the Middle East and also ultimately the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East the growth of a radical kind of Islamic movement that begins in the Middle East and eventually spreads and ultimately has broader impacts on the world in the 1980s and 1990s so this whole sort of trickle down effect of the Vietnam war and the outcome of the Vietnam war really affects American confidence foreign policy confidence during the 70s in very profound ways on the other hand the 70s is really a decade where the Cold War is in some ways really evaluated or kind of reinterpreted and much of that has to do with President Nixon and then Gerald Ford dealing with other communist nations Nixon shocks the world certainly shocks Americans when in 1972 he goes to China and meets with Mao the Chinese communist leader who had really helped bring about this communist revolution in China in the 1940s and Nixon had been a hardcore anti-communist throughout his entire political career and was really seen as being one of these true anti-communist political leaders in the United States and so it shocks many people that he would be willing to go to China and meet with one of the the truly powerful communist leaders of the world but ultimately what it becomes clear is that Nixon's strategy is part of a sort of a reevaluation of the Cold War and Nixon and his advisors recognize that China and the USSR were not part of one giant powerful monolithic communist movement that China and the USSR actually had a lot of hatred and aggression towards each other that they had actually fought a number of border skirmishes in places in Manchuria and so Nixon and his advisors started to think that perhaps the US could be friend China or could establish diplomatic relationships with China and China had been excluded diplomatically from the United Nations and a lot of other international organizations basically because of the US influence in those organizations but if the US and China could establish a working relationship and China could gain influence in the international community this might actually be a way of going after the USSR and so Nixon goes to China in 1972 establishes diplomatic relations with China China gets a seat in the United Nations on Security Council which is very important for them and it also opens economic opportunities in China for American businesses and pretty soon China starts to export products to the United States and of course this continues up until the present era. So for Nixon to go to China and really embrace this sort of communist nation is a dramatic event during the 70s and really kind of helps shape and really shift the focus of the Cold War in some ways and showing that not all communist nations were necessarily inherently dangerous or inherently threatening to the United States. Another shift in the Cold War during this time period is an emphasis on a new policy called DATAN which was a policy of a peaceful relationship or at least establishing a sort of a peaceful middle ground between the United States and the Soviet Union an effort to sort of ratchet down the tensions of the 1960s especially the nuclear tensions of the 1960s and so in 1975 Gerald Ford and Brezhnev who's the head of the Soviet Union at the time signed a number of accords they signed a number of military accords for nuclear weapons they also signed the Helsinki Accords in Helsinki Finland which was a human rights accords which in exchange for the western US and the western powers kind of recognizing the borders that had existed in Eastern Europe since the end of the World War II which the Soviet Union very much wanted to recognize at least Germany existing as a separate nation in exchange for that these Eastern European nations in the Soviet Union pledged themselves to do more to recognize human rights within their borders and this is a very important moment of agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on this action another important thing that happens during this period is that the US and the Soviet Union launch a joint space mission the Apollo Soyuz mission where Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft dock in space this sort of political and international scientific recognition that these two nations perhaps could work get along after all that they didn't necessarily have to destroy each other through nuclear nuclear force if need be so with these both political economic challenges and kind of foreign challenges but also opportunities in the 70s also we begin to see environmental and technological challenges post World War II the era had been an era of almost unlimited faith in science and technology people felt that science and technology were making the world a better place the atomic bomb which of course had been very destructive was also sort of seen as this amazing American product that America had the scientific know-how to create nuclear weapons and you know wasn't that great weren't we a powerful nation as a result of this as many Americans thought but at the same time in general a sense of that technology was going to make the world and science would make the world a perfect or at least a much better place than it had been and ultimately this sort of almost unlimited faith in science if science and technology does something it must be right starts to come into question in the 70s because we'll begin to happen as we see a number of environmental impacts of the science and technology of the post World War II era air pollution becomes a major source of concern then in this period water pollution becomes a major source of concern Rachel Carson pictured here on the left was a scientist who studied the environment and begins to note in 1962 in 1962 a little bit before the 70s but this continues into the 70s notes that the product DDT which was a pesticide that was very effective at killing insects and helping American farmers grow more crops was also killing bird populations it was getting into the egg birds and then the egg shells were becoming very fragile and then it was not allowing the young chicks to hatch so Carson in Silent Spring ultimately argues that if the U.S. didn't, if internationally these essentially pollutants weren't dealt with that ultimately it would destroy the environment and so it really helps bring about kind of the beginnings of the modern environmental movement this continues during the 70s there are a number of crises here the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania pictured there's a partial meltdown in one of its reactor units which is sort of in many ways quite a shock to many Americans, many people worldwide because nuclear power had been championed as this safe this effective source of power that was going to ultimately be the future of energy in the United States and suddenly it's seen as a threat as a potential health hazard for American population so people begin to start questioning science and technology, they begin to start questioning whether in fact science was bringing about good things or technology was bringing about good things and we started to see a growing emphasis in the 70s on environmentalism on pushing for defensive natural resources bills passed to regulate air pollution regulate water pollution promote wild and scenic rivers to do more to reverse the problems of environmental pollution that had been caused by this new technology of the post war era an increasing emphasis on sort of a new do it yourself ethic of getting off the grid as some people put the whole earth catalogue here being sort of a catalogue for people to do things themselves as it says access to tools to do it yourself and so this whole idea of sort of people stopping not depending so much on big businesses anymore not depending so much on the grid quote unquote but doing it more themselves being more independent being part of the problem being part of the solution in terms of environmental issues so all this is a really big shift in kind of America's way of thinking during the 60s and certainly the decade of the 70s there are also a few social shifts I want to just briefly touch on here at the end of this lecture in that in a sense the revolution the social revolution of the 1960s the student revolution the political revolutions of the 60s the rights revolutions as we call them in a previous lecture continue into the 1970s the new rights the right to privacy becomes a big focus of discussion of legal discussion during the 70s right to birth control right to abortion access all these become important political and kind of social conversations during the decade of the 70s and increasingly many many groups assert that they have rights the gay and lesbian community transgender community asserts more rights again Native American communities assert more rights other groups Hispanic Latino groups and so increasingly there was a sense of what becomes called identity politics that if you weren't part of that group you really just couldn't understand it and this actually in some ways makes it harder for big pieces of legislation to be accomplished because it makes it harder for groups lots smaller groups to come together and pass big legislation so this in a way affects Congress and affects politics in the United States as well so ultimately you have all these important shifts in socialism that take place during the 60s and that create during the 70s a decade where Americans were beginning to sort of reevaluate socially and culturally how they really fit into the broader society questioning you know whether things like premarital sex were wrong whether things like birth control were wrong whether going to psychologists in getting therapy was a bad thing or a good thing and many people start to question these sort of these older cultural notions and change their minds and ultimately generates what becomes known in later years as a me generation that you have a generation of young people some of whom had been grown up had come of age in the 60s some of whom came of age in the 70s who become more and more focused on kind of themselves on you know making sure me first on making sure that they were taken care of before other things and so it's sort of a important cultural shift in the United States that's part of these broader kind of economic political social crises and also of course continues to influence the United States well into the 1980s and 1990s. So in summation of the 70s well it's a decade of crisis as I've already talked about certainly there are some important positive social changes that come out of it the environmental movement certainly this sort of reevaluation of cultural and social norms that I've just talked about a moment ago and ultimately that these all these forces have a strong influence beyond the 1970s and the decades of the 1980s and the decades of the 1990s and certainly even to this present day.