Increasing divorce rates drug use and crime. From the american historical Associations Annual meeting last month in new york city this is two hours. Welcome, everybody, to todays panel on the crises of the 1970s. So we have a great panel today and i im going to just start out by talking a little bit about what we thought how we kind of framed this panel and what we are kind of hoping to accomplish. One of the things we have set this up as a round table intentionally. All of us were going to speak for maybe about ten minutes, so kind of making a few brief remarks about the literature on the 1970s and thinking you about the 1970s, what this unique time means to us today and then we would like to open it up and have a lot of time for conversation, both among both with each other and most importantly, with the audience. So we are going to be sticking to a pretty, you know pretty tight time and hopefully having a lot of time for conversation. So, one of the things that we were thinking about in setting up this panel is the central role of the idea of crisis in thinking you about the 1970s, both in the contemporary political imagination of the time and also in historical scholarship. From water bait to the Energy Crisis, the urban crisis the fiscal crisis, the rhetoric of the era is infused with this sense of danger and awareness of historical change. And histories of the decade, too, often treat it in these kind of heightened terms. Theres as many people have observed, the period of 1970s has gone from being easily dismissed historical footnote or a kind of punchline of some sort to being sort of interesting the 1960s, 1980s to being seen as in some ways a moment when many of the things that were most aware of in our own present world really came into existence. History such as nixon land the invisible bridge laura kalmans right star rising, no direction home jeff cowys staying alive, michael foleys front porch politics the excellent work on welfare and welfare organizing by anna lease orrack, nancy mccleans work on affirmative action, stephanie gilmore, ann balk and alice echols on feminism. We have seen this real revival and expansion of scholarly interest in thinking about the period. So after we a talk today about the 1970s, some of the things we will be thinking about is what it meant for various different a areas of American Life to be experiences fraught with crisis at this moment in history and what is at stake in defining the period as one of crisis . Dont do we how does the whole idea of crisis complicate things for us as historians and if we are thinking about the 1970s in these terms, what do we think were the really critical and irreversible transformations that occurred over this time if thats how we want to set things up. Are there important areas important connections between the different areas that we are thinking about on this panel the Economy National politics and state structure family and sexual relationships, race, the prison system, cities, interNational Politics or do we see these as more discreet areas that are at length in some underlying way over this time . So, with that as a kind of brief framing, our first panelist is beverly gauge. Before hely is a professor of history, 20th century American History at yale university. Her first book, the day wall street exploded, a story of america and its first age of terror looked at the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries focussing on the 1920 wall street bombing and her next book gman, j. Edgar hoover and the American Century century will be a biograph foift former fbi director, j. Edgar hoover, who died in 1970. So, beverly. I think the protocol was that that we would stand up here for comment and sit back down when we get to the get to the q a and the full discussion. Does this microphone is that okay . Okay. So, when i agreed to be on this panel at kims initiation, i said that i would talk a little bit about the intelligence crisis of the 1970s. During the 1970s, there was a learning period in which americans discovered a lot of thing these did not know and perhaps did not want to know about ways in wit intel he jones establishment was operating, particularly the fbi and the cia. And really the most notable feature of that intelligence crisis was, in fact maybe not the death of j. Edgar hoover though it was an important precompany for all of those things. So hoover died in may of 1972 i think thats the most important event of the 1970s, but the Church Committee, which came along in the mid1970s, really 1975, 1976 was a Senate Committee and conducted really wideranging investigation into what the intelligence agencies in the United States have been up to, certainly since the 1940s and a arguably even earlier than that. But as i got into thinking about the intelligence crisis is guy see all sorts of connections to other crises and because part of our charge in this panel was to make these kinds of connections i thought i would just offer a little bit of a sense of what i see going on in National Politics overall but particularly in the mechanisms of government in washington, d. C. , during particularly the early period of the 1970s. Roughly, 1971 to 1976. Before get into talking about that im going to take the opportunity to offer a brief pitch for those of how want to know more indepth about the intelligence crises of the 1970s for two other panels. One is that if youre come together oah in st. Louis in april, we are going to be doing a panel on the 40th anniversary of the Church Committee, which is going to be this year, 2015. We are going to be joined by fbi historians, people who have been staffers on the Church Committee and a variety of other people and really going to think in depth about the legacy of the Church Committee itself. The second panel that i just want to mention briefly is actually going to be at the aha. Its very much in keeping with the themes that we are going to be talking about here. On sunday night there is going to be a xreechk a terrific documentary film called 1971. See, there relevance . The 1971 is actually about a a breakin at the media pennsylvania fbi office in 1971 by antiwar a activists. It was one of these really pivotal moments that set off the intelligence crisis of the 1970s and files that were captured in that moment were one of the first ways that we began to find out about things like cointel pro and other secret operations that the fbi, in particular, had been conducting in the 60s and the 197. So that is sunday evening, going to be a panel with the film marngd a journalist named Betty Metzger who wrote a terrific book about the media break in in 1971, i will be there as well that is sunday night. Okay. So the intelligence crisis is of the 1970s, i said for the purpose of this panel, im he going to think about as a way into considering what i see really as transformation of the institutions of governance in washington in particular during the 1970s. I think we tend to think about the 1970s az a period of disillusionment with government, as period when americans, for the most part, retreated from politics. The standard view has been that after all the ferment of the 1960s, after all of the sort of Public Engagement of the 1960s, the 1970 become a period in which americans retreat from politics, in which they become disillusioned about the president intersection the intelligence establishment, about congress to some degree, about the electoral process about Political Parties and really step back from all of this and i think that that narrative is basically true on many levels but i want to talk a little bit about what some of the response is to that crisis of disillusionment, to that crisis of legit mass say that is sort of the broader crisis of governance in the 1970s, what some of the responses to that were and i want to throw out the idea that actually far from being a moment of retreat from politics, the 1970s, particularly when luke at institutional reform in washington, was a period of enormous political creativity, enormous Political Engagement and that our institution of governance really looked very different by the end of the 1970s than they did at the beginning of the 1970s and i would even suggest that the 1970s was as prohe found a period of institutional change in terms of the institutions of governance in this country as Something Like the progressive era. We think about the progressive era, we think of all of the energy that went into political reforms like the direct election of senators, city council governments, to some degree the invention of the primary election, but there are a lot of changes that come of that and we recognize the progressive era as a period in which these institutions of governance change in significant ways and i would argue, or at least i will throw out for discussion the idea that this is 1970s is actually a comparable period of institutional change. So, we are sticking to tenmine minh time limits here so rather than go into great depth about that, i want to briefly point to a few moments of crisis i think rather widely recognized moments of crisis in the early 1970s and then point to some of these institutional responses that, i said, are quite sweeping responses and really are happen all together in the space of about five years. So, when we think about the crisis of governance in the 1970s, i think there are a few images that often come to mind maybe. We are going to talk about a long 1970s up here, i think, push it back into the late 60s, maybe push it forward into the early 80s, but in my mind, in many ways, we want to start with the 1968 Democratic National convention, the beatings of protestors will and the sense that something has gone wrong in a deep, deep way with electoral mechanisms with Party Politics and with the relationships between citizens of Political Parties and citizens in the state. Obviously, there are lots of other causes of this civil rights vietnam, in these brief remarks, i wont get into all of those, but if we he start with 1968, we move on to a moment like watergate which is obviously not only a crisis of legitimacy for the presidency but a crisis about the relationship between the president and congress the relationship between the president and the citizenry and then finally move into the intelligence crises of the mid1970s, as i said with Church Committee, else. So we have all of these things together and if you begin to look at what happens as a result of this crisis of governance, it is a pretty remarkable transformation of at least certain aspects of american Political Institutions. And so to close my remarks here, i just want to list off a few of the changes that happened, again, in the course of a very short period of time in the early 1970s and i think one of our challenges to think about what some of the consequences of those are and as kim said whether or not these are connected to each other. So, between about 1971 and 1976 and 1977 we first of all, get millions of new voters in this country, right . So you get a constitutional amendment that makes the voting age 18 instead of 21, so thats early in the 1970s. You also get a transformation of the primary system in this country, right . Prior to the 1970s, you had primary systems they were not binding primary systems so the primary system that we all experience that at times has caused the last five or ten years crises of its own, that is also birthed in the early 1970s. You begin to get a transformation that had already started in the 1960s, but comes to true you wigs wigs in the 1970s of the ways in which Congressional Committees are structureded. You get the break down of the old Congressional Committee structure, dominated largely by southern senators, particularly in the senate and the invention of what is supposed to be a new, much more traps parent Congressional Committee structure during that period. The freedom of information act for the first time really gains weight in the 1970s, particularly because of reforms in 1974. The foya passed in 1966. It does not really get teeth until the mid1970s. You get the war powers resolution which again, sort of changes the nature of the relationship between the president and the congress and you begin to get a whole series of intelligence reforms as well that begin to come out. This is slightly later than the watergate era reforms. You begin to get congressional oversight of the intelligence coast. You begin to get the courts coming into it pieces of legislation that are very much in the news today. And the last pieces that i will mention are the federal election reforms that come out of watergate and Campaign Finance reform. So, all of this again, we can go into some detail about what any of these laws mean, where any of them are coming from, but i think in total this is a pretty serious rethinking of american governance during this period and shows a kind of political creativity in washington that hasnt been really a recognized part of how we talk about the 1970s. Many of these reforms were of course, partial reforms. They didnt solve the problems they were meant to solve and im about to finish. Many of them were in fact attempts to contain social protests, to bring people, quote up quote, back into the system. And to think about ways to change the government to that effect. Some of them were the prod douskts of deep disillusionment with government. Overall, i think in this sixyear period, we see a very energetic push toward a certain kind of testimony mock krit tizization, a certain kind of new openness in American Government a certain kind of new transparen say that we havent seen before and many of these changes that are put in place in the 1970s, as i said, were incomplete and turn out to be flawed and to have unintended consequences and in many ways we are dealing with some of those unintended sequence consequences as well as maybe soft some of the intended consequences today. [ applause ] our next speaker is donna merch. Donna is an assistant professor associate professor, sorry, of history at rutgers university. She is currently a fellow at the Ralph Bunche Center at ucla this year and she is the author of living for the city which won the Phyllis Wheatley award in 2011. She is currently at work on a book called craft in l. A. , policing you the crisis and the war on drugs. Um, good afternoon, thank you all for coming. I have a formal paper so im going to read from that, but im going to provide an overview of thinking about some of the issues about the drug crisis of the 1970s then talk about some of the new hist tore graphical lit sure chaurnd fineerature and wish list of things to look at. In a decade of per received an overlapping multiple crisis southeast, nothing embodied the as the moral panic over heroin consumption, illicit dplugts 1970s n a special message to congress in 1969, president Richard Nixon wand the public that i will his silt drugs represented a growing menace to the general welfare. Two years later, nixon declared drug use public enemy number one and committed himself to waging an allout offensive against that deadly enemy. On the streets and perhaps most disturbingly forth mainstream public, i will his still have sit drug use by large numbers of American Military proved particularly destabilizing and indeed, was walk talk band he can excitizens of vietnam syndrome. Popular estimates ran as high as 25 of returning u. S. Veterans selfidentifying as heroin users. Contemporary come scholarship challenged that figure but that appeared cop poplar media. The French Connection and deiter hunter dein the piblgt a world in which eye comic masculinic and Authority Found itself imper rel riled by illicit had drug sale and consumption. Black ploitation offered a parallel account of the dom minutian and damage brought by vice, drug consumption so much could so that activist of the era denounced productions themself asz staging a counter revolution in which drug economies rather than grassroot struggles for black power and Community Chrome were rendered as the central focus of black communities in the 1970s. While this per says vase sive image of hedonistic and unsustainable culture of reckless abandonment embodied by vice continued to dominate tull poplar culture aal representations of the 1970s letters understood is the role of state itself in generating the spectacle and perceived crisis that justified unprecedented punishment campaigns that followed the passage of the rockefeller drug laws in 1973. As state rhetoric and Popular Culture converged to represent a burgeoning crisis of disorder, drug users were identified and targeted as the primary causes of crime. In this way, one of societys most vulnerable population found themselves directly if the crosshairs of unprecedented repression. As stewart hall has argued in police the crisis, mugging the state of law and order in conjunction with popular immediate yeah the state helped generate crisis to justify the expansion of its powers to wage domestic war and policing. In the case of britain, the very application of the american term mugging to the english context provided a rationale and justification for what he he kaunls authoritarian consensus and the adoption of new tools to reestablish law and order. Calling into question whether or not mugging was even a real phenomena or simple construction, hall highlighted the interdependence of the state and popular media in reproducing intense moral panic over increased crime understood as sensible and transparent fact. Halls primary point is a simple one, the production of crisis itself served as a means to expand state power. The same could be said said o