AP U.S. History 8.14: Society in Transition

Liberalism, in this period, meant using the federal government actively to solve social and economic problems. Its largest program was President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, a set of programs as sweeping as the New Deal, with reforms to end poverty and racial discrimination and big spending on education and Medicare. A series of Supreme Court decisions also expanded civil rights and individual liberties.

In the 1960s conservatives challenged those liberal laws and court decisions, and what they saw as moral and cultural decline. They wanted to limit the federal government and take a more assertive stand abroad. The course framework names voices such as Buckley's National Review, the Sharon Statement of Young Americans for Freedom (1960), and Barry Goldwater's speech accepting the Republican nomination on July 16, 1964. Nixon took office in 1969 facing Vietnam War protests in Congress and in the streets, and in a speech of November 3, 1969, he called his supporters a silent majority.

Nixon did not dismantle the Great Society. He signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and created the Environmental Protection Agency, and conservatives in his own party opposed any expansion of welfare. In 1973 he still made the conservative case: "We have lived too long with the consequences of attempting to gather all power and responsibility in Washington."

Sources: Nixon on the Home Front (Prologue, 2012); Nixon's Second Inaugural Address (Avalon Project). The Supreme Court decisions and the named conservative voices are from the AP U.S. History course framework.

In the 1970s public confidence in government's ability to solve social and economic problems declined. Three kinds of events wore it down, some reaching back to the 1960s.

Economic challenges. Nixon inherited an economy strained by heavy spending on both the Vietnam War and the Great Society. Unemployment was low but prices were rising, and his wage and price controls did not stop them. Prices kept climbing while the economy stalled, a mix called stagflation. The course framework points to a 1973 photograph of a New York gas station during the oil embargo.

Political scandal. In Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon in the summer of 1974. After the Supreme Court forced him to surrender tape recordings that revealed his knowledge of the cover-up, "even his staunchest supporters in the House admitted that they would have to vote in favor of impeachment." Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, and President Ford later pardoned him.

Foreign policy crises. The Vietnam War had divided the country. Later, on November 4, 1979, the course framework notes, the U.S. embassy in Iran was seized; 52 Americans were held for 444 days.

Carter opened his 1977 inaugural by thanking Ford: "I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land."

Sources: Watergate and the Constitution (National Archives); Nixon on the Home Front (Prologue, 2012); Carter's Inaugural Address (Avalon Project).

The 1970s saw growing clashes between conservatives and liberals over social and cultural issues, the power of the federal government, race, and movements for greater individual rights.

Race and the courts. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court unanimously approved busing as a legal means to desegregate schools. In the early 1970s, tensions over court-ordered desegregation grew in northern cities such as Boston and Detroit. Nixon opposed busing to achieve desegregation but enforced the court orders.

Women's rights. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, which sought equal legal rights for women, in 1972. By the deadline 35 state legislatures had approved it, but 38 were needed. In 1978 Congress and President Carter extended the deadline to June 30, 1982, and the amendment still fell short.

The course framework points to people on each side: Phyllis Schlafly, one of the most prominent women fighting the amendment, debating Betty Friedan, one of its most prominent supporters, on Good Morning America in January 1976; the 1977 International Women's Year conference in Houston, in a history of the battle over women's rights and family values; and the singer Anita Bryant, whose career it calls representative of the rise of the New Christian Right.

Sources: Nixon on the Home Front (Prologue, 2012); Equal Rights Amendment (National Archives). The people in the last paragraph are from the AP U.S. History course framework.

Evangelical Christians stress personal conversion, being born again, and the authority of the Bible. In these decades evangelical churches and organizations grew rapidly and substantially, and that growth came with greater political and social activism by religious conservatives.

The course framework gives a line of examples. In a 1958 speech in Charlotte, the evangelist Billy Graham named political and social problems and proposed individual, religious solutions. In 1970 the psychologist James Dobson, who later founded Focus on the Family, published Dare to Discipline, parenting advice he tied to political ideas about the American family. The Christian Broadcasting Network and its program The 700 Club carried the message on television. Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, worked to build conservative politics in the 1970s.

What drew religious conservatives into politics? Particular fights as well as a mood. The course framework places Anita Bryant and the New Christian Right among the decade's clashes over women's rights, the Equal Rights Amendment and family values, and Dobson's book tied the family to politics directly. Many religious conservatives also saw the protests and counterculture of the 1960s as moral decline.

How does this connect to the rest of the lesson? Religious activism joined the conservative challenge to liberal laws and the clashes of the 1970s.

These examples are from the AP U.S. History course framework.