The '70s: A Time of Pause

By Frank Trippett

Time Essay

Once gone, and often before, every decade migrates into the vocabulary of folklore. There it persists as a sort of handy hieroglyph for conjuring up popular memories of a time. So it is that "the '20s," as a phrase, evokes not only The Great Gatsby but more social lore than the entire text of the novel. Similarly, to allude to the '30s, the '40s, the '50s or the '60s is to speak volumes. In contrast, the '70s have not, so to speak, learned to talk.

The waning decade has remained elusive, unfocused, a patchwork of dramatics awaiting a drama. Here on the brink of the '80s, it would still be risky to guess what people will mean when they speak of the '70s ten years from now. Why have these times seemed so indefinite?

There are doubtless many reasons. An odd but important one is that the '60s lasted too long. As folklore, decades seldom observe the calendar's nice limits. The '20s actually began with the adoption of Prohibition; the '30s, launched by the 1929 crash, did not end until 1941, when the U.S. entered the big war. The election of Dwight Eisenhower as President in 1952 began the time consistently, if imperfectly, remembered as the quiet '50s. The furies and griefs that are recalled as the essence of the '60s began not in 1960 but at the death of John Kennedy. Then came that brutal ransacking of the national spirit that did not even pause at the end of 1969 but continued through the disillusionments of Watergate. The '60s did not really let go until Richard Nixon resigned.

So it may be that the '70s, having started late, have not been going on long enough to give clear shape to whatever they are finally to be. At first, they could scarcely be recognized except by what they were not. Mainly, they were not the '60s. To an exhausted, convalescent society this was a relief but also disconcerting. It was not easy, even with Jerry Ford in the White House, to begin watching for pratfalls instead of apocalypses. Still, by the time Jimmy Carter tried to whip up a moral crusade for energy conservation, much of the country seemed to have perfected the knack of shrugging off the alarms of crisis. It was easy to read that mood as indifference, but it is more reasonable to suppose the country just needed a rest.

It did not come to a dead standstill, however, and the record of the trends and tendencies of the brief post-'60s period has become clear enough. So has the fact that the record is shot through with perplexing contradictions. Any attentive observer could jot down a fast thumbnailer of the '70s so far:

The voters were apathetic; no, they were outraged at taxes and mobilized to demand reform. People had given up on the capacities of government; no, citizens everywhere were forming diligent factions and forcing government's hand on one issue and another. The individual had learned he could not change any thing; no, so many individuals had learned they could shake things up in court that there was a litigation crisis.

More: Society had slumped into a posture of cynical disbelief; no, the search for spiritual illumination was epidemic and had grown so fervent (so Columnist Harriet Van Home claimed last week) that it was endangering the state-church separation. The moral permissiveness achieved in the '60s was ripening into generalized decadence; no, not only was fidelity growing fashionable once again, but television was even cutting back on sex and violence for fear of losing the mass audience.

Clearly this social flux consisted more of motion than of movement. The women's liberation movement may turn out to be profoundly epochal, but neither it nor any other trend gripped or provoked the nation as did, say, the now quiescent civil rights crusade. Surely no single label or slogan could possibly embrace such a diffuse drama, and efforts to encapsulate these times in a single-shot insight have been quite unconvincing.

Some have called it the "apathetic age," but to accept this is to be blind to boundless activity by innumerable social and political groups. In its farewell issue, New Times depicted this as a "decadent" age; yet the magazine itself, though born out of the sensibilities of the '60s, went out sounding a faintly puritanical note that was proof that not everything had been infected by decadence. American journalism has always been inspired more by the Mafia than by the Gray Ladies. Moreover, it has a recurring weakness for the kind of tunnel vision that imagines a glimpse into Plato's Retreat reveals the daydreams of the inhabitants of Texarkana. So it is useful to remember the warp of many impressions of the '70s that have gained currency. Some result from the tendency to mistake the new and exotic for the prevalent and enduring.

Many commentators, all too many, have followed the lead of New Journalist Tom Wolfe and accepted the '70s as the "me decade." Wolfe's term has been useful, but anyone who imagines that it is definitive has swallowed a dose of glib chic whole. The discovery of the insuperable self-centeredness of human nature did not await the '70s. Neither did the national habit of self-improvement, which was going strong when Public Man Ben Franklin was its high priest. Broadly, the premise of the "me decade" view is that great numbers of people are disdaining society to pursue existence as narcissistic massage buffs, om-sayers, encounter groupies and peacocks. The type is to be found, true, but the number seems very small. A thousand times as many Americans are to be found at any time --around hospitals, churches, offices, schools, neighborhoods --all as lost as ever in the volunteerism that has been a striking phenomenon of the national character since Tocqueville came meandering about. Thank God he did not get his information from the crowd at Elaine's.

Anyhow, self-improvement is not incompatible with sociability. Even joggers have been known to donate to the United Fund. Such matters ought also to be spread on the record--but without any intent to identify the '70s as the "civic decade." It has, unquestionably, been a confused time, neither here nor there, neither the best nor worst of times, as free of a predominant theme as of a singular direction. Maybe the reason is not even visible. Maybe the little energy left over from the '60s got mostly spent, in secret, on assimilating and liquidating the traumas and griefs of that overlong epoch. If so, then perhaps the most memorable thing about the '70s has been simply that, as Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, "nothing disastrous is happening." Such a historical pause may not at the moment seem worth remembering -- but it will as soon as disaster drops among us again.

-- Frank Trippett

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