Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (7 page)

T
HE ILLS OF URBAN SCHOOLS
joined a long list of ailments afflicting cities in the United States. The phrase “urban crisis” constantly confronted readers of magazines and daily newspapers in the 1970s. There was good reason to feature such a phrase, because America’s cities, particularly those with large populations of minority groups, faced a host of serious problems at the time.

One of these ailments, as school administrators well knew, was fiscal. Although the percentage of Americans residing in central cities did not change greatly in the 1970s or later (it was 32 in 1975, 31 in 1995), one of the strongest demographic trends of late twentieth-century America featured the flight—much of it white flight from the cities—of middle-class, taxpaying people to suburbs (which housed 35 percent of the population in 1970, 40 percent in 1975, and 50 percent in 1995).
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In the 1970s alone, some 13 million people (more than 6 percent of the total population in 1970) joined this exodus to the greener subdivisions of suburbia.
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Many who replaced them in the central cities migrated from areas where large-scale commercial agriculture was throwing small farmers and farm laborers out of work. Other people fled economically depressed rural regions and small towns.
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The stream of migrants to northern cities from the South—of poor whites as well as blacks—had been huge in the 1950s and 1960s and by the 1970s had created extraordinary crowding in central-city areas. As time went on, millions of very poor people from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America added to the numbers that helped overwhelm the resources of these urban centers.

These demographic shifts owed a good deal to technological changes, notably the mechanization of agriculture, which dramatically reduced the need for farm workers, especially cotton pickers in the South. The changes also stemmed from federal policies, especially farm subsidies promoting the growth of agribusiness that helped to drive small farmers off the land. Other federal policies promoted suburban development: low interest rates for home mortgages facilitated by agencies such as the Veterans Administration and Federal Housing Administration, and generous appropriations for interstate highway construction. The number of motor vehicle registrations (cars, trucks, and buses) in America exploded from 156 million in 1980 to 221 million in 2000, by which time there were 190.6 million licensed drivers among the 217 million Americans who were sixteen years of age or older.
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The dominance of car culture hastened suburban “sprawl,” or “slurbs,” which appalled a host of urban planners and architects. A great many suburbs, they lamented, were all-white, socially homogenous havens that served to shelter people from the lower classes. Other suburbs featured rapid inand out-migration, which damaged volunteerism and community spirit. Environmentalists, among others, assailed politically connected developers who struck deals allowing suburbanites to encroach on wetlands, destroy flood plains, and cut down trees.
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Critics of suburbs, then and later, denounced them as “cultural wastelands” and as enclaves of tastelessness and banality. With characteristically cosmopolitan asperity, Ada Louise Huxtable of the
New York Times
complained in 1974, “There is [in these suburbs] no voyage of discovery or private exploration of the world’s wonders, natural and man-made; it is cliché conformity as far as the eye can see, with no stimulation of the spirit through quality of the environment.”
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Most city leaders did not worry a great deal about suburban aesthetics. Rather, they had to cope with deteriorating tax bases caused not only by the exodus of the middle classes but also by the flight to suburbs—and to the South and West—of many businesses. Other industries, notably in manufacturing, were laboring to stay afloat. All such companies had been key sources of property tax revenue and of jobs. Deprived of these resources, many cities struggled to support basic services, not only schools but also mass transit and police and fire protection. In 1975–76, New York City suffered a traumatic fiscal crisis that caused the discharge of some 3,400 police officers, 1,000 firefighters, and 4,000 hospital workers. Nationally aired, the city’s desperate straits symbolized the larger plight of urban America in the economically troubled late 1970s. Three years later, Cleveland, widely ridiculed as the “mistake by the lake,” defaulted on its debt.

In New York City, as in many other metropolises, the “urban crisis” particularly afflicted low-income workers and the “underclasses,” as contemporaries came to brand the residents, most of them black, of poverty-stricken central cores. By the late 1970s, investigative reporters, politicians, and others were graphically exposing the social ills of these “miserable,” “disorganized,” “dysfunctional,” and often “dangerous” “ghetto dwellers.” Some of these accounts were sensationalized, ignoring viable inner-city connections of extended families, churches, and civic groups that combated social disorganization. These accounts followed in a long tradition of scare-mongering exposés of the “dangerous classes” and of the “other Americans.” But there was no doubting that many people living in these areas confronted extraordinarily serious hardships, which stemmed from white racism as well as from structural flaws in the economy, notably the exodus of jobs from the cities.
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In 1978, Senator Kennedy warned of “the great unmentioned problem of America today—the growth, rapid and insidious, of a group in our midst, perhaps more dangerous, more bereft of hope, more difficult to confront, than any for which our history has prepared us. It is a group that threatens to become what America has never known—a permanent underclass in our society.”
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Kennedy, a liberal, sought to direct more federal resources to the underclasses. But many other Americans were frightened by the specter of disorder, crime, and violence that seemed to be threatening central cities. In 1977, a massive power blackout in New York City unleashed a terrifying spate of looting and burning. Within minutes of the blackout at 9:30 P.M. on July 13, a hot and sticky evening, looters—most of them black, many of them teenagers—poured into streets, especially in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Armed with crowbars to pry loose steel shutters and saws to cut through padlocks, they smashed windows and brazenly carried off merchandise. Police, their numbers seriously depleted since the fiscal crisis of 1975, tried to stop them but were hit by barrages of bricks and bottles. Soon the looters, gleeful and defiant, began burning buildings and pelting firefighters who intervened. The mobs seemed indiscriminate. A priest in the Bronx discovered that his altar had been stolen. “Soul Brother” signs erected as safeguards by black storeowners did little to deter the rampaging crowds.
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By the time the rioting subsided some five hours later, more than 1,600 stores had been looted, and more than 1,030 fires—50 of them serious—had been set. Damage was estimated at $1 billion. Police arrested some 3,800 people—compared to 373 who had been charged following disturbances in Harlem in 1964, and 465 who had been arrested in the city as a result of unrest that broke out after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. For many New Yorkers, the blackout of 1977 deepened a culture of despair that lasted for many years.
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Frightening though this rampage was, it was for many Americans but one grim sign of a much larger breakdown of “law and order” that had seemed to spread in the late 1960s and to peak in the 1970s. Murder rates, which had hovered at around 4.5 to 5 per 100,000 people per year in the 1940s and 1950s, swelled after 1963, doubling to 9.6 per 100,000 by 1975. They climbed to an all-time high in the late 1970s and early 1980s of around 10 per 100,000. By then it was estimated that the murder rate in the United States was eight times that of Italy, the next most afflicted industrial nation.

Record rates of other violent crimes in America—rape, aggravated assault, robbery—accompanied these increases in murder. The rate of property crimes such as burglary, larceny, and theft rose almost as rapidly—up 76 percent between 1967 and 1976—and also peaked by 1980.
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As early as 1971, many Americans were applauding the film
Dirty Harry
, in which Clint Eastwood, playing a rock-hard cop who abuses the civil liberties of a psychopathic killer, welcomes the chance to blow him away. By the mid-1970s, millions of Americans, though beset by stubborn economic problems, were telling pollsters that crime was the nation’s most serious problem. They were also denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision in
Miranda v. Arizona
(1966), which had enlarged the rights of criminal defendants, and its ruling in
Furman v. Georgia
(1972), which had struck down all existing capital punishment laws.
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Why these dramatic increases in crime? Then and later, criminologists and others struggled to find the answer. Many correctly blamed an upsurge in drug abuse, which peaked in the early 1970s and incited violent gang warfare over control of the trade. Others blamed poverty, which played a role. But they had to concede that hard times in the past—as in the 1930s—had not provoked a rise in crime. Officially measured poverty rates in the 1970s, though serious (hovering throughout the decade at around 12 percent of the population), were a little more than half what they had been in the early 1960s, before the surge in crimes began. An increase in economic inequality that began in the 1970s, thereby sharpening feelings of relative deprivation, may have played a role in the rise of crime. But this inequality also intensified in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, when crime rates at last began to fall off. It was therefore difficult to establish a strong and clear causal connection between economic forces and crime rates.

Some Americans who joined the acrimonious debates about crime that persisted after the 1970s urged fellow citizens to work together in order to advance community cohesion and cooperation. Parents, ministers, and youth leaders, the argument went, should get together with the police to restore communication and order to their neighborhoods. Others came to rely on a “broken window” theory of crime. This held that city leaders and police must act quickly to curb relatively minor acts of vandalism in order to avert the proliferation of more serious crime. In the 1990s, many cities credited this approach with helping to reduce crime.
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Most Americans in the 1970s, however, were inclined to blame “softness” for the rise in crime. They demanded better patrolling of neighborhoods, larger and better-trained police forces, and tougher laws and sentences. The Supreme Court, having ruled in 1972 against death penalties as then applied, backed off and in 1976 allowed executions for certain types of murders, thereby setting the stage for the return of the death penalty in most American states. Utah executed Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer, by firing squad in January 1977. The execution of Gilmore, the first in the United States in ten years, was followed over the ensuing twenty-seven years by 943 more, most of them in southern and western states.
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But neither the reinstatement of the death penalty nor a decided trend in subsequent years toward tougher prosecution and sentences brought crime rates anywhere near to pre-1963 levels.

Still other Americans pointed their fingers at their country’s “gun culture” or, more broadly, at a “culture of violence” exacerbated by bloodletting in Vietnam and by a virtual choreography of mayhem, as they saw it, on television and in films. Would-be assassins, they emphasized, twice tried to kill President Ford in 1975. Films of the early and mid-1970s such as
The Godfather
(1972),
The Godfather Part 2
(1974),
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(1974),
Death Wish
(1974) and its four sequels, which made the brooding Charles Bronson into a star, and
Taxi Driver
(1976) appeared to revel in depicting blood and gore and to highlight the helplessness of authorized law enforcers.

Violence on television, often viewed by children, caused special outrage among contemporary parents and media critics, who charged that it helped to unleash all sorts of evil instincts into the real world. The nation’s best-known historian of the broadcast industry, Erik Barnouw, agreed that TV was a major villain of the piece: “I can’t imagine that this constant display of violence would not affect [people] in some way. . . . We are actually merchandising violence.”
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Many years later, there existed no solid consensus on the causes of rising crime in America. Blaming guns, notably semi-automatics, did draw attention to a major source of violent crime (some 70 percent of murders in the United States in these and later years were caused by guns) but slighted the fact that the non-gun homicide rate in New York City, for example, had long been considerably higher than the rate in London. Those who pointed fingers at TV and film failed to recognize that America had always had considerably higher rates of violent crime (though not of property crime) than other industrialized nations. They added that just as much violence seemed to suffuse television shows (many of them originating in the United States) in other Western nations that had far lower rates of crime, and that the increases in crime that so distressed Americans in the 1970s had started in the mid-1960s, when such depictions in film and on television had been less graphic or commonplace.
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