The end of the American century: Narratives of national decline and family decline in the 1970s

This study explores the relationship between two discourses of decline that were pervasive throughout American politics and popular culture in the 1970s: one focusing on the decline of the nation, the other focusing on the decline of the middle-class family. In the early part of the decade, as the national economy entered its first major postwar recession, a range of critics—from corporate and labor leaders to policy experts and public intellectuals—linked the nation's recent economic, military, and political woes to the gradual erosion of paternal authority within the white, middle-class family over the course of the century. Revisiting and reworking many of the debates about family pathology that had emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, these critics concluded that paternal authority within the family—supposedly the linch pin of healthy (and intrinsically masculine) psychosocial development—had been undermined by a host of outside forces including an interventionist welfare state, modern feminism, and consumer culture. At a time when it appeared that the American Century was coming to a premature close, these critics contended that this crisis of paternal authority was linked both causally and symbolically to economic recession, the depletion of natural resources, and military defeat abroad. Noting the dramatic rise in rates of divorce and single motherhood, many observers of the family speculated that a literal and metaphoric epidemic of male absenteeism once confined to the African American family had now infiltrated the white middle-class, with dire national consequences. The dissertation is organized around five individual case studies, each of which looks at the complex ways in which this ostensible collapse of paternal authority was tied to a perceived crisis in foreign or domestic policy. Chapter themes include the controversy surrounding American POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia; the OPEC oil embargo of 1973–4; discussions of “productivity lag” in the steel and automobile industries; the Bicentennial Celebration of 1976; and intellectual debates about the psychological and cultural meanings of narcissism.