I’ve been reading about 1972 lately, and I’m shocked by the amount of notable events that occurred that year. It feels like a dividing point between the optimism of the sixties and the disillusionment of the seventies. Some of the most prominent:
Nixon won reelection in a landslide. As Hunter Thompson said at the time: “McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
Pruitt-Igoe was demolished only 18 years after it opened, taking with it the modernist architecture that spawned it. The architect, Minoru Yamasaki, had also designed the world trade center, which opened next year.
Apollo 17 lands men on the moon for the last time (Are we ever going back?). The club of Rome publishes Limits to Growth. Next year the oil crisis ends the post-war economic boom.
Arthur Bremer shoots George Wallace, which inspires the plot of the movie taxi driver, which inspires John Hinckley to assassinate Reagan.
The first successful video game is released (Pong). A pornographic movie, Deepthroat, goes mainstream.
The Bronx begins to resemble a bombed out city. Crime continues to rise inexplicably. Miner’s strike in the UK as unemployment doubles.
Nixon goes to china. Then he carpet bombs North Vietnam. Then he bombs them again for Christmas. Sweden compares the US to Nazi Germany. The US cuts off ties with Sweden.
Of course, this was long before my time, so I probably have no clue what I’m talking about. For those of you who were around back then, what do you think?
The change wasn’t abrupt. The counter-culture movement got its start in the 60s (there had been a similar counter-culture movement of sorts in the 50s with the Beatniks, though not as severe). By the late 60s and early 70s, it had become fashionable to protest everything.
The older generation liked Nixon. It was the younger generation that hated him and called him things like Tricky Dick. It wasn’t until Watergate that Nixon lost his older supporters.
Nixon going to China was considered a good thing by most back then. I don’t recall anyone making a comparison between China and Vietnam. After Watergate, people were saying that if Nixon hadn’t been caught (and subsequently resigned), then opening up relations with China after being shut out for so long would have been his big legacy, and he would have been seen as a good president.
None of my memories about Vietnam include Sweden. The protests about the war were plenty loud enough at home. Again, this didn’t start in 1972.
Apollo 17 wasn’t a big deal. In fact, that was kind of the problem with it. Nobody cared, and everyone had been arguing for some time that the money would be better spent at home. There was a lot of social unrest and economic issues at the time and the common people were wondering why we were spending so much money sending guys all the way to the moon just to collect rocks. People had been calling for an end to the Apollo program long before Apollo 17.
The oil crisis was 1973, so that’s not 1972.
If you want to pick a dividing line at 1972 go ahead, but it’s a fuzzy line at best. There’s no clear divide. Things happening in 1972 had been building for years.
On the other hand, in the spirit of the OP, I’d go with 1968:
Iconic 1968 events
Vietnam peaking with Tet, Khe Sanh - made it pretty obvious that the war was unwinnable (especially when Walter Cronkite said pretty much the same thing on the nightly news)
USS Pueblocaptured - made the US seem less than invincible
A topic that comes up here sometimes is “When was the 60s?” in the sense of events/culture/etc. vs. the actual decade.
I give from when The Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan (or maybe a little earlier) to the day Nixon resigned in 1974.
The later is key in regard to this OP. Up until then it was mostly more of the same. The fact that many events happened in certain years doesn’t matter. Nixon’s resignation started the whole post-Watergate US political and social changes. That it was soon after the US exited Vietnam also helps. (And Ford refused to go back in when the South started collapsing.)
While the resignation took effect the next day, it’s the easy to remember date of 8/8/74 when he announced it that ends the previous era with the 9th being the start of the new one. As Ford said: “Our long national nightmare is over.”
The activists slacked off. They thought they had won. Vietnam over, Nixon out, etc. But there was just a few years of regrouping by the Establishment and they soon came back into power and really dug in with only weak opposition.
This thread has gotten me thinking about Hunter S. Thompson’s famous wave speech from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
And that was published in 1971 … looking back quite a while to the peak of The Sixties.
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
And yet for some weird reason kids go around wearing tie-dyed Jimi Hendrix shirts.
I’ll stick with 1968 but wanted to given an honourable mention to 1969 on the basis of:
‘Man on the Moon’ - what would the next quest be? (Nixon tried the war on cancer, but like Vietnam and Afghanistan, victory proved elusive. We’re still waiting.)
Woodstock and all it embodied - followed months later by Altamont which, when combined with the Manson murders, snuffed out the decade’s innocence. Well, Altamont, Manson, and the revelations about My Lai
I think you’re stopping short by glossing over a key date from 1974: “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in”. Really let the wording and ramifications of that one sink in for a minute.
As mentioned in a recent Decades thread, I put 1974 as a watershed year because Nixon resigned, but I call 1972 the start of the current era because Intel released the first microprocessor. No μp’s --> no modern life globally.
I’m a shader rather than a lumper, so I am loath to point to one moment. But I’d point to Max Headroom as the point at which we are firmly in the postmodern era. With regards to architecture, this is several years after the tail end of modernist architecture, with few examples created after the turn of the 80s.
Before 1972, I’d say that a lot of pop art had postmodern elements, blatantly quoting material without being a full-on satire, but it definitely has an enthusiastic optimism underneath the apparent irony that contrasts with the cynicism found after the events of the OP.
Like Ludovic I tend to be “a shader rather than a lumper” but if the symbolism of the odometer clicking over from 1969 to 1970 is attractive and you want a single seminal event, you might go with the Free Concert at the Altamonta Speedway on December 6, 1969. It had almost as many attendees as the Woodstock Festival 4 months earlier but ended in violence. Five months later, four students were shot by Ohio Guardsmen at Kent State University. This was about when street cultures underwent a change from the grass-smoking free spirits of the Hippie Movement to junkies and petty criminals.
When did modernist architecture start to fade away? When were Le Corbusier’s monoliths no longer the way of the future?
I think the economic change was partly responsible for this change in outlook. The supercharged postwar growth gave way to stagflation and the energy crisis.
Jeb 2026, you note that the US cut off ties with Sweden in 1972. True, but it was about things that had been brewing for awhile. The Wikipedia entry for Sweden–United States relations says the time between 1960 and 1968 was a bad period in the political relations between Sweden and the U.S., mainly due to the Swedish opposition to the Vietnam War. The U.S. froze its relations with Sweden in 1972 and 1973, but basically it was about things that had been happening since 1960. Relations slowly improved over the next several decades.
You say that crime continues to rise inexplicably in the U.S. Crime more or less rose from at least the late 1950’s to the early 1980’s. (It appears that the crime statistics before then are missing or inaccurate.) It dropped in the 1980’s and then rose again. Since the early 1990’s crime has been more or less dropping. There are various theories as to why crime rose and dropped over the past 60 or 70 years, but none of those theories is universally accepted.
You say that there was an attempted assassination in 1972 (of a Presidential candidate), but there were attempted and successful assassinations of Presidents, Presidential candidates, and other people long before this and long after this.
Yes, Nixon was elected in 1972. He was also elected in 1968. There have been Presidents I thought were good and some I thought were bad since long before this and long after this. There is less correlation between overall matters (economic, crime-related, social, etc.) in the U.S. and who was President at the time that you might think.
U.S.-China relations had begun to improve in the late 1960’s. The recognition in 1972 wasn’t as big an event as you think. The improvement continued to improve until full relations were established in 1978. Arguably the entire period from 1949 (the establishment of the Communist government in China) to the present has been a slow realization that ignoring China doesn’t work.
There are always slow changes in all sorts of trends, most of which happen over decades, not just a year or even a few years. These trends start at different times and finish at different times. You can’t pick out a single year and say that it was a turning point for everything. Incidentally, why do you call this the post-modern era? How are any of the events or trends you mention similar to what’s usually called post-modernism?:
For me, having been born in 1977, it seems that the dividing line is 1980 and Reagan’s election. I have a general impression of things before 1980 as being old-fashioned and things from 1980 through today as being from the current era. But that is likely due to having been born in 1977 rather than any true dividing line being present that year.
There’s another thread running right now here in IMHO about the the 1970’s which also discusses specific notable events.
Everybody is talking about their favorite specific event --in various fields: musical (Woodstock, Altamont), political (Nixon resigning) ,historical (Kent State, Martin L King assassination), etc.
But I’m gonna disagree with the whole concept.
Events are interesting, and we remember them. But they don’t change your life. Your read it in the newspaper, and then the next day you still get up and go to work as usual
I’d say that the “new era” of the 70’s, wasn’t defined by any individual events that you saw on the news.
It was defined by a new, and huge, threat that affected every single person in his own personal life: the oil crisis.
In October 1973,the price of gasoline jumped from 19 cents per gallon to over a dollar. (Minimum wage was just over $1 an hour).And more importantly–the crisis resulted in a severe shortage of gas at the pump. Suddenly people were in a panic over how to live their daily lives, how to get to work.
People --everybody, rich and poor, realized that this was a problem which they and the government simply had no ability to solve. The optimism of the 1960’s died, and new angst was born. Previously, there were a lot of problems–civil rights, riots, Vietnam and the draft, etc–but everybody knew that there was a way to solve those problems, which the government had the power to implement.
The oil crisis was a deep shock, because it left everybody feeling powerless, and scared, facing a situation where other nations defined the problem and the American government was helpless.
Over a period of a year or two, a whole new psychology developed,as people realized that they had lost control,and felt it in their own personal lives.
