American Culture in the 1970s (Twentieth-Century American Culture)

265 Pages·2009·1.04 MB·English

by  Professor Will Kaufman

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American Culture
in the 1970s
Will Kaufman
American Culture in the 1970s
Twentieth-Century American Culture
Series Editor: Martin Halliwell,Professor of American Studies, University
ofLeicester
This series provides accessible but challenging studies of American culture in
the twentieth century. Each title covers a specific decade and offers a clear
overview of its dominant cultural forms and influential texts, discussing their
historical impact and cultural legacy. Collectively the series reframes the
notion of ‘decade studies’ through the prism of cultural production and
rethinks the ways in which decades are usually periodised. Broad contextual
approaches to the particular decade are combined with focused case studies,
dealing with themes of modernity, commerce, freedom, power, resistance,
community, race, class, gender, sexuality, internationalism, technology, war
and popular culture.
American Culture in the 1910s
Mark Whalan
American Culture in the 1920s
Susan Currell
American Culture in the 1930s
David Eldridge
American Culture in the 1940s
JacquelineFoertsch
American Culture in the 1950s
Martin Halliwell
American Culture in the 1960s
Sharon Monteith
American Culture in the 1970s
Will Kaufman
American Culture in the 1980s
Graham Thompson
American Culture in the 1990s
Colin Harrison
American Culture in the 1970s
Will Kaufman
Edinburgh University Press
In memory of my mother, Vickie Kaufman, and for my brothers,
Mikeand Steve, survivors of theseventies
© Will Kaufman, 2009
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 11/13 pt Stempel Garamond by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 2142 2(hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 2143 9(paperback)
The right of Will Kaufman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.
Contents
List of Figures vi
List of Case Studies vii
Acknowledgements viii
Chronology of 1970s American Culture xi
Introduction: The Intellectual Context 1
1. Fiction and Poetry 27
2. Television and Drama 55
3. Film and Visual Culture 81
4. Popular Music and Style 113
5. Public Space and Spectacle 139
Conclusion: Rethinking the 1970s 167
Notes 182
Bibliography 208
Index 225
Figures
I.1 Seventies Pad (c.1975) 6
1.1 Toni Morrison, author of Song of Solomon(1977) 52
2.1 The cast of M*A*S*H (1975) 59
2.2 Sammy Davis Jr and Carroll O’Connor in All in the
Family(1972) 64
3.1 Mark Hammill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars(1977) 95
3.2 Diane Arbus teaching at the Rhode Island School of
Design (1970) 111
4.1 Bruce Springsteen (1980) 127
4.2 New York Dolls (1974) 129
4.3 Donna Summer with Gerald and Betty Ford at
Disco Dinner Benefit (1979) 134
5.1 World Trade Center under construction (1971) 142
5.2 Protesters in front of Capitol, Washington DC (1971) 148
5.3 Richard Nixon receives the gift of a hard hat (1970) 154
5.4 President Carter and Ronald Reagan shake hands
during debates (1980) 164
C.1 That Seventies Show(1998) 171
Case Studies
Introduction
The Culture of Narcissism(1978) 7
Orientalism(1978) 13
Our Bodies, Ourselves(1973) 19
1. Fiction and Poetry
Language Poetry 33
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?(1976) 37
Song of Solomon(1977) 48
2. Television and Drama
M*A*S*H(1972–83) 57
All in the Family(1971–9) 61
David Mamet 73
3. Film and Visual Culture
Taxi Driver(1976) 84
Star Wars(1977) 91
Diane Arbus 108
4. Popular Music and Style
The Eagles 118
Bruce Springsteen 123
Disco 131
5. Public Space and Spectacle
Learning from Las Vegas(1972) 143
Vietnam: Protest and Counter-protest 149
The Town Hall Debate (1971) 159
Acknowledgements
When Martin Halliwell cornered me at an American Studies confer-
ence and asked me to contribute a book on the 1970s to his ‘Twentieth-
Century American Culture’ series, I positively blanched. ‘Come on,’
he said. ‘You know the references.’ I’m still not sure what he meant.
The seventies wasn’t really my area, professionally – I was much more
at home in the nineteenth century (the Civil War, Mark Twain) or, at
the very latest, the 1930s (Woody Guthrie). My scholarly work on the
seventies was limited to a few articles and chapters on Kurt Vonnegut
and anti-Nixon satire. So, even now, I wonder if what Martin really
meant was: ‘Come on. You were there.’
If you can remember the 1960s, so the joke goes, you can’t have
been there. Well, I can certainly remember the seventies, and not
always fondly. I entered my teens in 1971 – not a period of unalloyed
happiness for many people. My mother was recently widowed, a low-
paid secretary trying to support three boys through a string of job
losses against a backdrop of high inflation and high unemployment:
the previously unheard-of combination called ‘stagflation’. For a brief
period my mother had a paid job in the local office of the anti-war
pressure group, SANE; consequently, I often found myself in the
midst of turbulent demonstrations in the waning years of the Vietnam
War, including the May Day march on Washington in 1971. The war
was Nixon’s, the battered economy was Carter’s, and the comedy was
Gerald Ford’s (courtesy of Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live). In
my home town of Montclair, New Jersey, I was in the first class of chil-
dren to be bussed across town to a school that neither of my older
brothers knew anything about and for reasons I only barely under-
stood. After gym class one day in 1974, the locker room reverberated
to the wild chants of ‘Ali! Ali! Ali!’ I watched Anita Bryant get hit in
the face with a pie on national television. The girl next door asked me
Acknowledgements ix
what I thought of this guy Springsteen’s new album, the one with the
song about Rosalita on it. From Montclair Heights I watched the two
skeletons of the World Trade Center gradually rise and overtake the
Empire State Building, feeling vaguely affronted by the change to a
familiar and beloved skyline. These and other ‘references’ have
unavoidably fed into the writing of this book. I didn’t understand their
significance at the time. This is where the scholarship has come in.
I am grateful, first of all, to Martin Halliwell and to Nicola Ramsey
at Edinburgh University Press for the opportunity to contribute this
book and for their willing assistance throughout its composition. A
number of colleagues and friends have pointed me to valuable mater-
ial or honed my impressions through discussion. I’m grateful to Sämi
Ludwig for his thoughts (and his work) on Toni Morrison; to Lynn
Breeze for reminding me of the significance of the Last Whole Earth
Catalog; to Nigel Wells for his gift of Sam Shepard’s Rolling Thunder
Logbook; to Nick Selby for material on the Language poets; to Donald
Morse for presenting me with his authoritative study of Kurt
Vonnegut; and to Zoltán Abádi-Nagy for sharing his critical wisdom
about Vonnegut, Robert Coover and other seventies writers during a
delightful drive across the Hungarian countryside. I am especially
grateful to have received from the hand of Kasia Boddy a copy of her
masterful Boxing: A Cultural History which illuminated so much
about Norman Mailer and the Ali–Foreman ‘Rumble in the Jungle’.
My friends and, respectively, present and former colleagues, Jan
Wardle and Heidi Macpherson, were always there when the work
seemed to get on top of me. I appreciate the conference funding
awarded by my department and faculty at the University of Central
Lancashire. Finally, to my dear wife Sarah and our ace sons, Reuben
and Theo . . . well, you know.