Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (5 page)
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Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
It is unlikely that President Nixon knew about the break-in itself. The attempt to cover it up afterward was the mistake that finally forced him to resign. And what Watergate revealed about the Nixon White House turned the public against him. Nixon had gathered around him a loyal group of advisers who followed orders without question. In the interest of serving the president they faked information, attempted to slander his opponents, tried to steal documents, and were involved in other “dirty tricks” that had become a way of life at the White House.
On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first president ever to resign his office. His vice president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in as the thirty-eighth president of the United States. Just four weeks later Ford issued a “full, free, and absolute” pardon to Richard Nixon, guaranteeing, to the disappointment of many, that the man who had brought such shame to America would never be asked to explain his part in the Watergate scandal.
Just six months after Nixon's resignation, South
Vietnam fell to the Communists. Americans watched the humiliating spectacle of marine helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, leaving desperate South Vietnamese friends behind. It was yet another blow to American pride. Now, with the defeat of South Vietnam, America had undeniably lost a war. Fifty thousand American soldiers had died for nothing.
The collapse of faith in American leadership and the defeat in Vietnam further undermined Americans' self-confidence. People responded by turning inward and becoming more focused on themselves. Instead of identifying themselves as Americans, many people began to think of themselves as members of groups with particular interests and rights. Many people now saw themselves first as women, or Latinos, or senior citizens, or environmentalists. The population seemed to be separating into special-interest groups, each fighting for its own cause.
Women were by far the largest and most successful of these groups. Feminist claims to equal rights had begun in the days of the suffragist movement. By the 1960s, the light cast by the civil rights movement made it increasingly obvious that African Americans weren't the only ones being denied equal opportunity.
In 1962 Betty Friedan had published a landmark book called
The Feminine Mystique
. In it she gave
voice to the powerful but hard-to-explain feeling that so many women shared: that there was something missing from their lives, that motherhood and housework alone did not nourish the spirit or bring fulfillment. In 1966 Friedan established the National Organization for Women (NOW), which quickly focused on two main goals: the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the right to safe, legal abortion.
In 1972 Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment. And in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion rights in a landmark case called
Roe v. Wade
. While both of these victories would come under severe attack (the ERA was never ratified by the states), they signaled an important shift in the way American society viewed women. Many people began to take another look at the traditional roles of men and women. Why were girls always sent to home economics classes while boys were assigned to shop classes? Shouldn't boys learn to cook? Shouldn't girls know how to use tools? Why was it always the husband who worked and the wife who raised the children? Couldn't women be the family breadwinners? Couldn't fathers stay home to take care of the kids?
But these questions also awoke a backlash against some aspects of feminism. By using the same argument that had been used against suffragistsâthe idea that rights for women would destroy the familyâconservatives encouraged an antifeminist campaign. The issue that brought the emotions of
both sides to a fever pitch was abortion. To many feminists, abortion was the most fundamental of rights, the right of a woman to control her own body and her own health. By contrast, their conservative and religious opponents saw abortion as an act of human arrogance, an attempt to replace the will of God with the will of the individual.
For many women, the goals of the women's movementâequal pay for equal work, affordable child care for working mothers, the ability to control their reproductive livesâwere very close to home. Marie Wilson, born in 1940, was typical of the women who began to demand change.
I
was quite certain that after college I'd marry, have children, stay at home, and have this great life that I saw in the Betty Crocker ads. But I was living in a very interesting time, sort of on the cusp between two eras. Half of me wanted to do something different, but half of me felt loyal to this vision of life as a wife and mother. So when my boyfriend proposed to me in 1962, I decided to drop out of college and marry him, but then I immediately changed my mind and canceled the wedding, deciding to go to graduate school instead. Just as suddenly I changed my mind again and had the wedding after all. Within nine months I was pregnant with my first child.
I felt like things had gone badly for my mother because she had to work outside the home, but it would be different for me, I thought, because I would stay home and be a happy, loving, perfect mother. Of course, things didn't happen that way. My husband and I moved around a lot and I didn't have a very good support system, so I was home alone with the baby quite a lot. I started to feel like you would feel on an airplane when they tell you the mask is going to drop and that you should just breathe normally. You can't breathe normally with a child in an apartment, without a lot of money, without friends and family. Children aren't meant to be raised in a home with just one adult who never leaves the house. I didn't like it. And I was also disappointed with myself for not absolutely loving this motherhood experience.
I got pregnant againâmy fourth time in four and a half years. I had been sick a lot during those yearsâmy body was just worn outâand I remember sitting in the bathtub and crying. I asked myself, “What am I gonna do? I really can't deal with having that many children, and the only alternative is abortion. Can I risk getting an illegal abortion?” There was a good chance then that I could die from it, and I didn't want to leave
my children motherless. It suddenly hit me that something was wrong with this picture. For the first time, I realized I had been working for African American rights, for peace in Vietnam, but that I still had no choices, nor any peace, in my personal life.
The push for women's rights in this country really was a kitchen-table movement, started by women like me who needed changes in their lives. I found a number of women out there who felt the same way I did, and we started working together in our homes. Everything we wanted in lifeâwhether it was to choose how many children to have, to go back to school, to get involved in the workforceâwe were determined to go out and create in the world. So we gathered around kitchen tables and pieced together legislation, wrote petitions, and planned events while our children ran around the room. We figured out who to write to in the legislature in order to pass the Mondale child-care bill in the early seventies. I remember working on the Mondale bill, talking to a labor economist in my kitchen; I had a child in one hand, and I was stirring spaghetti sauce with the other.
Meanwhile, the media was creating a movement that was unrecognizable to meâpeople who burned bras, who hated men
and all of that. I had no idea who these people were, what they did, what they looked like. That branch of the movement was never something I could identify with. My feminism came straight out of my own circumstances. I needed to space my children, so I worked on [reproductive] choice. I needed child care in order to work, so I worked on child care. I needed a better job, so I worked on creating good work for women. It wasn't about a national movement. It was simply something that was happening to me, to my friends, to my community. That was feminism.
Arguments over the future of the environment, like the battles over feminism, occupied Americans more and more in the 1970s. Once it had seemed as though there was no limit to America's material progress. Factories had produced an endless stream of products. The land had produced enough food to feed the country and export the surplus around the world. But the image of the earth seen from the Apollo XI moon landing had given Americans a new perspective, one of a vulnerable planet that had been contaminated by people and industry.
Many Americans began to question their way of life: Was mass consumption morally right? They also began to question science: Had technology
been exploiting natural resources without considering the consequences? Americans looked around and noticed what they had done to their own country: pollution, toxic-waste dumps, poisoned rivers, and endangered species.
In March 1979 the nation's attention was riveted on a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania: Three Mile Island. A nuclear accident had brought the plant dangerously close to a meltdown. The sense of science gone awry filled people's minds with frightening images of birth defects and cancers. There was a growing belief that American prosperity was risking the health of the earth itself.
Lois Gibbs, who was born in 1951, personally suffered the consequences of the industrial machine. She and her family lived in Love Canal, a small town in upstate New York where people mysteriously began to get sick.
W
hen I moved to Love Canal, in 1972, I felt I had achieved the American dream: I had a husband with a good job, a healthy one-year-old child, a station wagon, and my very first house, which even had a picket fence. I was living in a thriving community directly across from the mighty Niagara River. Everything in Love Canal seemed to be meant for families. We felt it was just the perfect neighborhood.
Then my son, Michael, got very sick. When we moved into our house, he was one year old and perfectly healthy. Then he developed skin problems, asthma, epilepsy, a liver problem, an immune system problem, and a urinary tract disorder. When I asked the pediatrician what was going on, he told me, “You just must be an unlucky mother with a sickly child.” My second child, Melissa, who was conceived and born at Love Canal, at first seemed to be perfectly healthy. Then one Friday I noticed bruises on her body. On Saturday the bruises were larger. And by Sunday the bruises on my little girl's body were the size of saucers. She looked like a child abuse victim! I took her to the pediatrician, but he didn't know what was wrong. He just took a blood test and sent us home. Later that afternoon he called and said, “Mrs. Gibbs, I believe your daughter has leukemia.” We had no family history of any of these types of illnesses. It just didn't make any sense to me why my kids were so sick.
Around that time articles started appearing in the
Niagara Falls Gazette
that talked about hazardous waste in dump sites all across the city of Niagara Falls. Then I read one article that talked about a dump next to the Ninety-ninth Street Elementary School,
where my son attended kindergarten. In this article they listed the chemicals that were buried there and what could result from exposure to these chemicals. I literally checked off every single one of my children's diseases and said to myself, “Oh, my God. It's not that I am an unlucky mother. My children are being poisoned.” I couldn't believe that somebody would build a school next to a dump site.
I found out that other people were going through the same thing I was. One person had a thirteen-year-old daughter who had to have a hysterectomy due to cancer. There were eight other epileptics living in houses that practically encircled ours. And it wasn't just children who were sick; adults were getting sick as well. People would walk me down to their basement and show me orange goo coming up from their sump pumps. In some homes the chemical smell was so strong that it was like walking into a gas station.
In the spring of 1978 the state department of health came in and did some tests around Love Canal. And then they denied, denied, denied, and denied from that point on. They told the people living closest to the canal, “Don't go in your basement. Don't eat out of your garden. Don't do this, don't do that, but it's perfectly safe to live at Love
Canal.” We did our own house survey. And we found that
56
percent of the children at Love Canal were born with birth defects. And that included three ears, double rows of teeth, extra fingers, extra toes, or mentally retarded.
Before Love Canal, I believed that if you had a problem, you could just go to your elected officials and they would fix it. I now know that that's not true. The state didn't do anything until we forced it to. Eventually nine hundred families were evacuated from Love Canal. But what outraged me the most was that a state health department knew people were sick, knew people were dying, and decided to do nothing about it.
There were many things that worried Americans in the 1970s: rising oil prices, high unemployment, toxic waste, untrustworthy government, a crumbling international reputation, and the breakdown of traditional gender roles. But in 1979 one unfolding drama in a Middle East nation closed out the decade with a new and ferocious attack on American pride.
Once again, Cold War fears had led America to become involved in the affairs of a Third World country. Iran, which was a southern neighbor of the Soviet Union, was considered strategically important
because it was so rich in the oil that America needed. For years the United States had supported the shah of Iran as a way of maintaining its influence there. But, as in South Vietnam, a government that was opposed to Communism proved to be anything but democratic.
Within Iran, anger at America's interference had been growing steadily. As Muslims, its people resented the pressure to give up their traditions and embrace American materialism. They had been listening to the words of an exiled Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini taught the lessons of the Shari'a, the seventh-century Islamic law, and denounced the modernization forced on Iran by the shah. In early 1979 the shah was overthrown in an Islamic revolution that brought Khomeini to power.