30 toys that defined the '70s By Madison Troyer of Stacker | 30 toys that defined the '70s In a 1973 letter to a colleague, then-ambassador to India Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “That’s it. Nothing will happen. But then nothing much is going to happen in the 1970s anyway.” And for a time that prediction seemed to ring true. Smashed between the white-hot 1960s and the “greed is good” attitude of the materialistic 1980s, the 1970s seem, at best, a troubled decade, primarily defined by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. While it remains true that the ‘70s are often overlooked and undervalued, the decade did have several long-lasting, decidedly negative effects on American culture. First, before the decade every class, culture, and industry was an upwardly mobile one. Since the close of the ‘70s, this no longer is true. Second, American culture, as a whole, is much more individualistic and far less communitarian than it was before the decade. According to American Heritage, this makes notions our culture used to take for granted, like deferred gratification, sacrifice, and sustained national effort a “hard sell.”