Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

"To understand Jimmy Carter and his presidency, it’s important to understand the context in which he was elected and served as president. For a long time, people looked back at the 1970s as an in-between decade. The sixties were the start of the Vietnam war and counterculture, the time of the civil rights movement , student protests and the maturing of the baby boomers. The Eighties were the Reagan era , the beginning of a new conservative regime in the United States. And for a long time, the 1970s were seen as just the transition from the sixties to the eighties. In recent years, historians have been paying more careful attention to what was going on in the seventies and identifying the decade as an important turning point in American politics. That’s what Jefferson Cowie’s book, among others, does. “There’s no question that he is the greatest ex-president the United States has ever had” The seventies were a time of economic transition. We begin to see the first inklings of big changes in the American economy. Deindustrialization leads to the disappearance of jobs that had sustained the American working class for most of the 20th century and the hollowing out of cities that used to be industrial powers. This big economic transformation is the thrust of Cowie’s book. Situating the Carter presidency amid the changing economic landscape, the decline of the industrial economy, the slide of the working class and the rise of the service economy in the United States is important to understanding the man and his administration. Inflation got especially acute in the last years of the Carter presidency, but it had been an issue earlier in the seventies. These episodes of inflation were triggered by two oil shocks. One began in 1973 with the first OPEC oil embargo; one came later, during the Carter administration. The presidency of Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford, who became president when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, was consumed with inflation as well. Ford waged a “whip inflation now” publicity campaign; people wore buttons that read “WIN: Whip Inflation Now.”"