Table of Contents |
One of the most effective advertisements during President Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984 included the following:
“It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
This ad depicted the 1980s as a period of renewal. Thanks in part to Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, stagflation had subsided and the incomes of many Americans had risen. This progress reinforced the hope that the United States would remain a great nation.
However, others argued that the 1980s were a time when preexisting divisions—along the lines of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation—widened. Efforts to censor popular music and to limit abortions, as well as the controversies related to the AIDS crisis, are evidence of the “culture wars.”
The free-market principles and individualism celebrated by the Reagan administration and the New Right during the 1980s contributed to a growing belief in the value of personal wealth acquisition. The president’s commitment to deregulation, including the deregulation of the financial industry, created opportunities for individual prosperity.
Financial deregulation was not without consequences, however. In 1982, President Reagan signed a bill that increased the amount of federal insurance available to savings-and-loan (S&L) associations to $100,000. Subsequent legislation allowed S&Ls to engage in a range of loan and investment activities.
This legislation gave S&Ls many of the same capabilities as banks without subjecting them to the same level of federal oversight, including the Glass-Steagall Banking Act that was enacted during the New Deal.
By the mid-1980s, the heads of many S&L associations were engaging in suspect, risky investments involving business mergers and real estate. Some of these investments did not do well. As a result, some S&Ls collapsed, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, which insured depositor accounts, went bankrupt. The federal government had to bail out many of these associations.
The rapid rise and spectacular collapse of the S&L industry was one instance in which “Reaganomics,” which emphasized free enterprise and deregulation, led to the enrichment of a few at the expense of many. The greed of some S&L officers destroyed their industry, but a similar focus on wealth and material gain extended throughout American society during the 1980s. In 1984, Newsweek magazine coined a term to describe a new generation that focused their lives on wealth acquisition and consumption: yuppies.
Yuppies were, in one way, similar to the hippies associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s; their interests, values, and lifestyles were an alternative to those of mainstream Americans.
Unlike the hippies, however, yuppies were “young, urban professionals” who were highly involved with consumerism, comfort, and individual prosperity. Some worked as venture capitalists or traded on Wall Street and drove BMW and Mercedes automobiles. They valued connections to those who had similar goals and lifestyles above links to family, friends, and neighbors.
EXAMPLE
The Art of the Deal, the autobiography of real estate magnate Donald Trump, was a national bestseller in 1988. In it, Trump provided a step-by-step formula to achieve individual success; celebrated his real estate achievements; and proudly noted, “Deals are my art form” (p. 1).Liberal critics believed that the self-centered individualism of yuppies was cancerous to American society. However, many others admired those who acquired wealth, associating their success with the “American Dream” and American traditions of individual property ownership and independence.
The celebration of wealth, and the spectacular increase in CEO compensation, was in stark contrast to the rise in homelessness during the 1980s.
EXAMPLE
The number of homeless people in the United States doubled during the 1980s, from 200,000 to 400,000.President Reagan once stated that many homeless people chose to live on the street. However, the reality was more complex. A number of factors led to the rise in homelessness, including the reduced funding of welfare programs and job losses due to deindustrialization.
The New Right, particularly the Moral Majority and other evangelical groups, supported Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party because they believed that “traditional family values” (i.e., heterosexual two-parent households headed by husbands) were under siege as a result of the sexual revolution. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States, was of particular concern to social conservatives.
Supporters of abortion, who insisted upon a woman’s “right to choose,” were opposed by an increasingly vocal and militant antiabortion movement during the 1980s.
EXAMPLE
In 1987, some antiabortion advocates joined Operation Rescue—an organization that used sit-ins and other activities to block access to abortion clinics. Some antiabortion activists resorted to violence—bombing clinics and intimidating doctors who performed abortions.Although social conservatives were unable to overturn Roe v. Wade in the federal courts, antiabortion advocates continued to mobilize at the state and local levels. The legal right to an abortion remained in effect, but the nation continued to be divided by the issue.
Another notable battle during the “culture wars” began in 1985 with the founding of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC).
PMRC members included Susan Baker, the wife of President Reagan’s treasury secretary (James Baker), and Tipper Gore, the wife of Democratic Senator (and future Vice President) Al Gore. To prevent children from hearing music that contained sexual or violent content, the PMRC asked the recording industry to adopt a voluntary rating system, similar to the one used by the Motion Picture Association of America for movies.
In August 1985, almost 20 record companies voluntarily agreed to label recordings that contained “explicit lyrics.” Still, the Senate held a hearing on the issue in September.
While many parents (and a number of witnesses at the September Senate hearing) supported the use of labels, many in the music industry rejected them as censorship.
The Senate hearing produced an interesting spectacle. It also indicated that, as children increasingly consumed sexually explicit and violent material, many Americans sought to limit their access to it.
Although political figures in Washington, DC, worried about whether children were listening to sexually explicit material, they largely ignored the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Beginning in the early 1980s, doctors noticed a disturbing trend. Young gay men in large cities, especially San Francisco and New York, were being diagnosed with, and dying from, a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Doctors soon realized that the disease coincided with other symptoms, including a rare form of pneumonia. For these reasons, they initially named the disease “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID), even though people other than gay men—primarily, intravenous drug users—were also dying from the disease.
The connection between gay men and the disease—later renamed human immunodeficiency virus/autoimmune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS)—led some heterosexuals to assume that they were immune (because they were not gay). The connection also led many Americans to ignore the growing health crisis in gay communities. As the disease spread throughout the world, President Reagan rarely spoke about it, and his administration ignored calls for additional funding for research and to find a cure.
Even after it became clear that heterosexuals could contract the disease through blood transfusions, shared needles, and sexual intercourse, some in the Religious Right continued to refer to it as a “gay cancer.” Some claimed that HIV/AIDS was a form of divine retribution, punishing homosexuals for their lifestyle.
During the height of the epidemic (i.e., the 1980s and early 1990s), as doctors struggled to understand the disease, an AIDS diagnosis meant certain death to thousands of Americans. By 1985, approximately 5,600 had died from AIDS.
As the medical community struggled against AIDS and the federal government continued to offer little support, gay communities organized.
EXAMPLE
In 1982, gay men in New York formed the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), a volunteer organization that operated an information hotline provided counseling and legal assistance and raised money to support people with HIV/AIDS.EXAMPLE
In 1987, Larry Kramer (a founding member of the GMHC) formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). ACT UP took a militant approach to the crisis, staging demonstrations on Wall Street, outside the office of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and inside the New York Stock Exchange. These demonstrations were intended to call attention to the crisis and to pressure government officials to take action.
During one ACT UP protest, Larry Kramer said, “AIDS is our Holocaust and Reagan is our Hitler.” The group reinforced this statement by adopting a pink triangle paired with the phrase “Silence = Death” as one of its official images.
The pink triangle was used in Nazi concentration camps to identify those who had been imprisoned for homosexuality. Gay rights activists in New York reused the image during the 1970s to represent solidarity and resistance. During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, it was a visual condemnation of government inaction and widespread ignorance as thousands died from the disease.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History.” Access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL
REFERENCES
Trump, D. (1987). The Art Of The Deal : Donald Trump : Free Download & Streaming. Retrieved May 16, 2017, from bit.ly/2qsriC6
