Book Review: The Seventies By Bruce Schulman

Book Review: The Seventies by Bruce Schulman

The Seventies by Bruce Schulman accurately portrays the decade of the 1970’s as an era of transformation. He states that while the Seventies “form a dreary catalogue of depressing events” (xii) America still experienced a core change in cultural and economic life, and compared the change of the decade to that of the revolutions during the 1920’s and 1960’s. To prove America’s transformation during this era, Schulman declares the area affected most in his thesis: from 1969-1984, the United States underwent a fundamental change in its economic outlook, political ideology, cultural assumptions, and social arrangements. To support his claim, he utilizes specific evidence from the decade and strategically

This decade was also home to the first major political scandal involving a president, also known as ‘Watergate’. The scandal gave a boost to conservatism, as the lesson taken away by the American public was that “you can’t trust the government.” (51). The specific use of evidence surrounding Nixon’s presidency supports Schulman’s claim that America underwent a fundamental political transformation.

The argument related to the American cultural transformation was centered around evidence related to Tom Wolfe’s new phenomena “Plugging in” (79). In presenting his phenomena, Wolfe noted American’s new willingness to break off from “conventional society”, such as their families, neighborhoods, and communities to form their own. Specific examples include young people founding communes, because they were tired of old-fashioned culture centers and the elderly leading a mass migration to the sunbelt and settling in retirement

The order follows a chronological timeline of events, which allows Schulman to reference prior evidence and elaborate on the effect it had in the future. Had Schulman instead structured the book in a point-by-point format, in which he offered evidence based on his argued four areas of transformation in order of the categories, his argument would have been less effective. One example of this would be the political structure throughout the seventies. President Richard Nixon shaped the publics opinions and attitude towards politics and government during the Seventies. The mistrust in government caused by Nixon’s Watergate scandal is still apparent even