Dalton Conley: Making Sense of the 'Me Decade'
[Dalton Conley is vice provost and dean of the social sciences and a professor of sociology at New York University. The paperback edition of his latest book, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, was published this year by Vintage.]
Does anyone really understand the 1970s? My excuse is that I was only 11 when they passed from the scene. What's yours? Even those folks 10 or 20 years older than I am, who ostensibly were at least semiconscious for the Equal Rights Amendment, Evel Knievel, busing, blackouts, Archie Bunker, Gerald Ford, pet rocks, disco, Jonestown, and stagflation can't seem to offer much in the way of sense-making for the "me decade."
Part of the problem in defining the era is that nobody can even agree when it really began, since of course, history rarely corresponds neatly to our calendar system of decades. Roughly, there can be said to exist the long seventies and the short seventies. In Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press), Jefferson Cowie, an associate professor of labor history at Cornell University, takes the long view, starting the 1970s on the last day of the sixties when the dissident mine worker leader Joseph (Jock) Yablonski was murdered along with his family on December 31, 1969. The dirty deed had been the work of William Anthony (Tony) Boyle, the—as Cowie puts it—"authoritarian" president of the United Mine Workers of America. Besides serving as a timely marker of the start of the decade, the event is a significant metaphor for labor shooting itself in the foot (or head) throughout the 1970s....
Read entire article at CHE
Does anyone really understand the 1970s? My excuse is that I was only 11 when they passed from the scene. What's yours? Even those folks 10 or 20 years older than I am, who ostensibly were at least semiconscious for the Equal Rights Amendment, Evel Knievel, busing, blackouts, Archie Bunker, Gerald Ford, pet rocks, disco, Jonestown, and stagflation can't seem to offer much in the way of sense-making for the "me decade."
Part of the problem in defining the era is that nobody can even agree when it really began, since of course, history rarely corresponds neatly to our calendar system of decades. Roughly, there can be said to exist the long seventies and the short seventies. In Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press), Jefferson Cowie, an associate professor of labor history at Cornell University, takes the long view, starting the 1970s on the last day of the sixties when the dissident mine worker leader Joseph (Jock) Yablonski was murdered along with his family on December 31, 1969. The dirty deed had been the work of William Anthony (Tony) Boyle, the—as Cowie puts it—"authoritarian" president of the United Mine Workers of America. Besides serving as a timely marker of the start of the decade, the event is a significant metaphor for labor shooting itself in the foot (or head) throughout the 1970s....