 Hello, I'm Gene Price. In this lecture, we'll look at American history from 1968 to about 1980 and how those years changed traditional American culture. We're going to look at the increasing effect that foreign tensions had on American history during the time, looking at calls for greater equality from various groups and will assess the decline of presidential prestige that happened in this time. The courts faced increasing calls to make decisions regarding civil rights. And let's look at four of those. In 1967, a case came up, Loving v. Virginia. In this case out of Virginia, a couple, the Lovings, were an interracial couple. And in those days, it was against the law in the state of Virginia to have a black woman and a white man married or vice versa. And so this was a declared and constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, thereby opening the way for interracial marriage and getting rid of misogynation laws. In Swan v. Charlotte Mecklenburg, Board of Education in 1971, one of the ways the federal courts took up integration was through busing. And what they basically were trying to do was to take black segregated schools, white segregated schools and mix the students together to achieve some level of integration. And what this meant was taking children out of their neighborhood schools and moving them into schools where they could achieve some balance on racial mixture. And so this was done through busing. And it wasn't very popular. It was seen a lot of black students and their families didn't like it. Likewise, a lot of white students and their families didn't like it, obviously. Then there was also Roe v. Wade. This was a very famous and important and long reaching court case that really dealt with women and their medical privacy. But part of the privacy was in the ability of women to consult their doctors about getting an abortion without having a man's input, their husband or their father, for example. And so this idea of women and medical privacy is decided in Roe v. Wade. And of course this is still a big issue and whether or not women can have abortions. Then there's Miller v. California in 1973 and this redefined what was considered obscene. As far as foreign affairs were concerned, there were problems going on in the Middle East. One of those was in 1967, the so-called Six Day War. This is where Egypt went to war with Israel and began restricting their shipping. This turned into a full fledged war. But it only lasted six days. Israel won the war and Egypt left humiliated. There were continuing frustrations in Vietnam. President Johnson ordered a bombing campaign that came to be known as Operation Rolling Thunder. And this provoked a lot of concern in the United States because of the use of chemicals like agent orange and napalm. And this increased bombing also put American lives, American servicemen's lives at risk because many of them were affected by these agents and there were carcinogens and soldiers developed cancer and other diseases as a result of agent orange and napalm. In the light of all the growing frustrations in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned in 1967. President Johnson announced the resignation and then in January of 1968, a year later, during the Vietnamese New Year, Tet, there was a major retaliatory strike from the Viet Cong, the communist troops. And this left a lot of Americans demoralized and military troops demoralized. We thought and we have been told on the media and by the president that we were winning the war in Vietnam and then for them to be able to launch this counter strike. Now, historically, when we look at this, this was really a last-ditch effort and they were really losing. But it appeared in public perception, to the public's mind that they weren't. And so this left many Americans concerned about how long we were going to be in Vietnam and troops were concerned as well. In 1968, in March, the Milai massacre occurred. These were American troops went in and massacred a village of people, mostly women, children and some old men. And this came out at the end of the next year in 1969 and November became public. And this also made Americans question about our role in the war and if we were really in there with moral superiority when we were massacring people who were seemingly innocent. In March of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced to the nation that he would not run again for office. To many people, this seemed to be a retreat from the defeat he was facing in Vietnam and other problems the president was having with problems within the Democratic Party and civil rights. But if we look at this historically, we can go back and look at Johnson had planned to leave office in 1968 due to health reasons. He had many heart problems and in fact, he did die about five years later. Further problems in the United States led many to believe that America was really coming apart of the seams. In 1968, the Kerner Commission, which had been instructed a few years early to investigate the long hot summer riots, race riots going on in major American cities, pointed at white supremacy and segregation as the cause of frustration in black America. And this is why the violence was occurring. Many Americans weren't ready to accept that. There were a couple of assassinations that led to unrest. First April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee was assassinated while standing out on the balcony of his hotel. You can see the photograph there of the incident. And in 1968, just a couple of months later, Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of John Kennedy, was also assassinated in Los Angeles. And so you have two assassinations that really rip at the heart of the civil rights movement. In 1968, the Democratic National Convention that met that year in August was also the scene of protests and riots in Chicago. Police attacked the protesters very brutally, very viciously. And Chicago Mayor Richard Daly was kind of seen as encouraging that and signing off on those attacks of police against the protesters. And speaking of protests in 1968, the Olympics, you see the picture here on the right of two Olympic medalists, a gold medalist and a silver medalist who raised their hands with a black power salute. This is part of the Olympic project for human rights. But many people saw this as disrespect for the Olympics and disrespect for the sports. And so they were criticized for this. As I mentioned in the last lecture, you also had the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Helter-Skelter murders, as they're sometimes called by the Charles Manson family or cult that happened in 1969. As far as women were concerned, feminism and equal rights, the movement continues. In 1968 and September, there was a protest of the Miss America pageant. Many women believe that this was basically objectifying women. So you had a group called the New York Radical Women's that protested outside the Miss America pageant, throwing away items that they believe oppressed women. Ironically, at the same time, it was also the first ever black Miss America pageant, or Miss Black America pageant that was held nearby. And it was held because it was a segregated event. Blacks were not allowed to participate in the whites only Miss America pageant. And so at the same time, you had protests from women who felt that this was objectification of women. You also had African American women who were participating in the first black Miss America pageant. As far as the Equal Rights Amendment was concerned, it did pass Congress in 1972. The states had seven years to ratify. And only 35 had ratified by 1977, not enough for it to become an amendment to the US Constitution. There was a lot of conservative opposition. I mentioned Phyllis Shafley, Shafley before, and her organization Stop ERA. But also there was religious objections to it from conservative religious leaders like Jerry Falwell. On July 20, 1969, the world watched as televisions around the world broadcast the moon landing of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. And this intensified people's concerned about the fragility of the world and earth and the environment and concerns over pollutions were exacerbated. Look Cleveland, Ohio, the Coiga River caught fire in 1969 because of pollutants and waste being thrown into the river. Now this in fairness wasn't the only time that river caught fire. And it was a horribly polluted river. But this brought attention to the fact that we needed to do something to protect the environment. In 1970, they instituted the first Earth Day. And also that same year, the National Environmental Policy Act was passed, which established the Environmental Protection Agency. There was a campaign called Keep America Beautiful that resulted from this. And in 1972, you have the Clean Water Act. When LBJ announced that he wouldn't run again for president in 1968, his vice president Hubert Humphrey ran on the Democratic ticket, as opposed to former Nixon vice president, Richard Nixon, who ran for the Republicans. Nixon won the election. And one of his promises during the campaign was that he had a secret plan to get us out of Vietnam. And some people have joked that the secret plan was he had no plan at all. In reality, what Nixon wanted to do was in the war soon. And so one of the things that he instituted was what was called Vietnamization. And this was the simple idea of putting American troops, replacing them with Vietnamese troops. Let Vietnam take care of its own internal politics. But he did, at the same time, increase bombing in the neighboring country of Cambodia because he believed because sources had shown that Vietnamese were using the Cambodian mountains as a route. And so Nixon started bombing this other country. This led to college protests at various colleges around the United States and at Kent State in 1970. This image on the right hand side is from when protesters were attacked, were shot at by national guard troops who feared the protesters were getting out of hand, somebody fired a shot, and several protesters were killed. This is so-called Kent State massacre. But this also happened at Jackson State in Mississippi as well. In 1971, the Supreme Court took up the case, New York Times versus the United States, over what was called the Pentagon Papers. These were documents that had been kind of classified between the Pentagon and the government, the White House and whatnot, talking about how the war was going on and details about the war. The New York Times got a hold of some of these documents, wanted to print them. The United States tried to stop them. The Supreme Court said that we needed a free and unrestrained press and allowed the New York Times to print the Pentagon Papers. And what this showed was that there was a lot more going on in Vietnam that Americans felt that they were led to believe. And they felt that they were kind of misguided by the administration, by the military. And so this further led to calls for a more quick retreat from Vietnam, for getting American troops out of Vietnam. And so Nixon began this winding down. The war powers resolution that LBJ had gotten expanded during the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was rescinded. You had the Paris Peace Accords going on in 1973 to try to broker a truce between the United States and Vietnam. And finally, in April of 1975, the US withdrew its troops from Vietnam fully. Speaking of President Nixon, in 1972, he was up for reelection. And Nixon ran on kind of what was called the Nixon doctrine. This was his foreign policy, which was led by his Secretary of State and foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger. And Henry Kissinger believed in a policy that he called detente. And this was kind of an old policy from the 1870s, European power politics that was called real politic. And what it was was, you know, showing a force and building up a forces in order to get people to the bargaining table. Nixon did take advantage of this detente, this kind of brokering of a peace and an agreement, not to go to war. He was the first president ever to go to communist China. And he went there in 1971. And he had other foreign successes, too. He went to Russia in 1972. So he visited two communist country. He began negotiating treaties with the Soviets and the Chinese over ballistic missiles, the ABM treaties, and saw treaty strategic arms limitation talks. One, the first treaty in 1972. And so when he was up for reelection, one of his big opponents was the Democrat, George Wallace, George Wallace, you may recall, was governor of Alabama and a staunch segregationist using the Southern strategy. There was an attempted assassination on Wallace in May of 1972. He was left wounded and he used a wheelchair paralyzed for the rest of his life. Also as a part of the reelection, it was discovered that in the Watergate office building in Washington, DC, the Democratic National Convention office was broken into. And research showed links between the burglars, the Watergate burglars, and the President's reelection committee, the committee to reelect the President, also known with the unfortunate initials as Creep. The Watergate break in and investigations into the break in led to the Washington Post and New York Times beginning a series of conversations with a secret informant. They called deep throat. Now they didn't reveal the name of the informant, but they use the name of a pornographic movie title to to identify their informant and this deep throat gave them information that they printed in the newspapers that eventually led to congressional investigations in January of 73. The Senate began inviting Sam Irwin, a Democratic senator from North Carolina, began televised investigations that summer. What we found out was that Nixon had been taping conversations in the White House. And what that meant was that there may have been information on those tapes that could have implicated or possibly exonerated the President. The real question was what did the President know and when did he know it? And so they were going after these tapes to listen to them to find out what those meetings were about, who Nixon met with and what information he was given. Did the President help cover up a crime? If so, that is a high crime and misdemeanor and therefore he could be impeached as a result of it. The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to give those tapes up. When they did and when the committees listened to those tapes, there was a mysterious 15 minute blank piece of tape where Nixon's secretary said she accidentally recorded over that conversation. Later that year, the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered the Department of Justice to fire the special prosecutor looking into the burglary and the President's role in the burglary when the Justice Department refused to fire the special prosecutor Nixon replaced the head of the Justice Department and this led to other problems for Nixon. Finally, on July 30th of 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment against the President and in order to avoid what was almost surely going to be a conviction by the Senate, the head of the Republican National Committee at that time, a young man named George Herbert Walker Bush went to Nixon's office and told the president that he really should resign. Nixon took his advice and on August the 9th, 1974, in order to avoid the impeachment trial, Nixon resigned. He was replaced by his vice president Gerald R. Ford and in September a month later, President Ford issued Nixon a pardon so that he could never be brought up on charges related to the impeachment. This really soured a lot of Americans on the Republican Party and politics in general and so when they went to vote in the 1976 elections, they wanted an outsider and they found that in the Democratic nominee, James Earl Carter of Georgia. When Carter came into the presidency, he was facing problems that he, Gerald R. Ford before him and even Nixon had started to face before he left office. One of these was the economic decline. A part of this was as a result of the amount of money we're spending fighting the Vietnam War but also the fact that Europe had started to rebuild from the ravages of World War II and so their economy was up and going too. So basically, it was kind of an early form of globalization that was hurting the United States economy. The cost that we were fighting in the Cold War, our own stalled economy led to increasing unemployment and rising inflation. So much so that Nixon was forced to take the United States off the gold standard in order to try to correct and stem that rising inflation. On top of that in 1973, the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East declared a oil embargo. The oil producing export countries, OPEC, declared an oil embargo on the United States and this was in retaliation for our support of Israel during the Six-Day War and also as a result of another war that happened in 1973, sometimes called the Arab-Israeli War or Yom Kippur or sometimes a Ramadan war of October that Israel also won the United States supported Israel. So, this was a retaliation and it led to problems with American refineries getting crude oil and therefore no oil at the pumps and so you would see signs like you see on the right hand side. These were very common during the 70s and the price of oil started going up because of our growing dependence upon foreign oil. Manufacturing jobs in the Midwest were also facing ahead as well. A lot of the big three auto manufacturers were moving to plants in the south and in the so-called Sun Belt, the southwest. Part of this was because they were building and implementing new forms of mechanization that they then brought to those plants in the south where they were able to pay lower taxes and they also had stronger laws against unions so unions were weaker in the southern and southwestern states therefore driving the price of the employees down. In the midst of these problems there was conservative backlash and many people were wondering if civil rights had gone too far. You see groups like the Heritage Foundation in 1973 as a conservative think tank and they're a mandate for leadership that they published in 1981 also another conservative more of a libertarian group the Cato Institute and the Publication, the Libertarian questioning the movement of civil rights and although this was not this next incident was really not related to civil rights many saw that it was. Jim Jones the fellow you see here with the sunglasses was the leader of a church, a Protestant Pentecostal church that he called People's Temple and they started off in the Los Angeles community reaching out to a lot of African-American and other minority groups. Believing that the United States would not end its level of segregation he and his followers moved to Jonestown, Guyana in South America and there this is where we get the term drink the Kool-Aid from because there were a mass suicide he predicted the end of the world and he said that the only way that he get out of this was by suicide and so this was a terrible terrible incident and many people believed that it was kind of tied to the civil rights movement it kind of excesses of some of the civil rights movement. You also see the growth of political action committees. This is a new animal in the 1970s and these were groups that could pool their money and support candidates of their choosing. You also see the growth of a group called neocons, neoconservatives. A lot of these people were former liberals who felt that liberalism didn't win, didn't go the right direction. Some of these were strong cold warriors and so you're going to see some parts of this mentality reflected in their policies and in their actions in later years. While he was president, Jimmy Carter faced a lot of opposition, some from his own party. You had liberal Democrats who didn't think that he was going far enough. He was challenged by Robert and John Kennedy's youngest brother Ted Kennedy for the primary. Kennedy lost, Carter retained that and he was also there were also what you would call Reagan Democrats and these were more conservative, more traditional Democrats. Some of these people were farmers. Farmers were seeing a lot of farm foreclosures in the late 1970s. Again, because of growing crops in Europe and the revitalization of the European economy, basically what we would call globalization today, a lot of American farms faced a lot of problems. There was also a boycott on the Soviet Union and we'll talk about this later on for invading Afghanistan in 79 and so we refused to sell American wheat to the Soviets and this also hurt American farmers. So in 1978, 1979, American farmers took their large tractors to Washington D.C. to protest. This became known as tractorcade. Carter in 79 also issued a speech that he called the crisis of confidence and he was talking about how Americans weren't sure if they trusted the government but this kind of became known as the malaise speech and many people said that in this malaise speech that Carter was not very optimistic and so they criticized him for this. There was also problems going on in the American Southwest. The Carter administration lost some support from others who might have voted for him and these were Mexican American voters because of police brutality in the Southwest, namely Texas, New Mexico and somewhat in California in 1975 to 1980 that Carter did not really do anything about the Justice Department to investigate but nothing was really done about it and this put a bitter taste in the mouth of many Mexican Americans who would have voted for Carter and would have voted Democrat but began changing their allegiance as a result of this. On the other hand you had the rise of Christian conservatives and these were people who advocated for traditional family values. They were against abortion, they were against the rights that the LBGTQ movement, the Stonewall rebellion had ushered in, they were anti-homosexual, they decried divorce, they thought divorce was getting too easy, they were upset about prayer, what they conceived as prayer being taken out of schools and other things and some of these so-called evangelicals as they kind of came to be known. One of the things that really prompted them to get upset, although this isn't talked about very much, was that many of their private schools were segregated and institutions like Bob Jones University refused to integrate and so the Internal Revenue Service ended their tax exempt status. Now this was seen as an attack on freedom of religion, the freedom to segregate and so evangelicals began turning against the Democratic Party as a result of this. In 1977 a family oriented group called Focus on the Family led by Jim Dobson, a psychologist, began talking about more traditional family values, they established a public policy organization and also political action committee called the Family Research Council in 1981 and you had the rise of Jerry Falwell's organization, the Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America, which also focused besides ERA on abortion, voting rights and women's rights, but from a conservative viewpoint they were anti-abortion. They had thought women's rights movement had gone too far and they start criticizing the Democrats and Carter as well. So he's got opposition from not only his own party, the Democrats, but a growing opposition from evangelicals, conservatives, and the Republicans. Finally it was foreign affairs that continued to plague the Carter administration in 1979 in Iran. The rule of the Shah was overthrown by a religious-led organization, conservative traditionalist religion, led by the Ayatollah Ruala Khomeini. The Shah of Iran had been supported by the United States government since 1953 and when the Shah fell ill with cancer and came to MD Anderson for treatment, President Carter had given the Shah sanctuary. Well, when the Ayatollah led a rebellion, a lot of them were college students, they invaded the American Embassy in Tehran and took Americans hostage. They held 52 of them, they released a few, but for 444 days they held Americans over a year as hostages and the nightly news reported on this and there were attempts to rescue them, but nothing really happened. Finally, Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, ordered an invasion of Iran and he forced Khomeini to negotiate. In 1979, the Soviet Union, as I mentioned earlier, invaded Afghanistan and there was a grain embargo, which did hurt American farmers and so it was these problems that were abroad that also led to problems. Now Khomeini did agree to negotiate, did finally agree to release the hostages, but not while Carter was president. And so in the 1970s, we see increasing foreign tensions and a lot of this was as a result of the Cold War, especially those in Vietnam and this led to increasing mistrust of the government. Also, many Americans wanted more equality, but others felt that we had gone too far and we find out that in the 1970s, 60s and 70s, the faith of the American people in their president declined tremendously and this mistrust in the government and the belief of presidential corruption led to a decline in confidence in our American presidency. I want to thank you very much for listening.