Review: Pivotal Decade How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, Stayin' Alive The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

Abstract

PIVOTAL DECADE How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies Judith Stein New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 367PP, $37.50 cloth ISBN 978-0-300-11818-6STAYIN' ALIVE The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class Jefferson Cowie New York and London: The New Press, 2010. 464PP, $36.50 cloth ISBN: 978-1-56584-875-7A striking feature of the American scene is the tendency of economic or geopolitical difficulties to initiate heated arguments over whether the United States is in decline as a world power. The 1987 WaU Street crash, for example, helped ensure a bull market for Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. For months thereafter, op-ed pages and letters columns were dominated by the debate over whether America was succumbing to the same cycle of overextension and contraction that, in Kennedy's version of world history, had struck down past hegemons. The timing was less propitious for the two books under consideration here, which were published when the recovery from the 2008 recession, albeit fitful, had begun and the United States had begun to extricate itself from at least one of its two protracted military commitments. The authors of both works differ in emphasis but agree in dating the origins of the long-term weakening of American power to the 1970s, a decade that is now attracting overdue reconsideration from historians. Judith Stein looks in detail at the impact of economic challenges, particularly oil shocks, stagflation, and the downsizing of heavy industry, on the United States' morale and prosperity. Jefferson Cowie pays more attention to cultural changes and the weakening of organized labour as a force in American politics. Each has something to say about the passing of America's postwar economic and geopolitical primacy and the domestic political alignments it reinforced. But each also either ignores or misconstrues important aspects of the topic.Stein differs with many other historians in seeing globalization not as an American triumph but as the gravest of self-inflicted injuries. According to her interpretation, the unprecedented wealth and productivity of the quarter century after 1945 was undone by unreciprocated generosity. In constructing a liberal international trade order, she writes, America not only gave direct aid to future competitors (via the MarshaU plan and the rebuilding of Japan's industrial base through American military production for the Korean War), but it also granted unprecedented access to its own markets. To guarantee its aUies' prosperity and political stability, the United States encouraged a European Community from which high-value American exports would be shut out, adopted legislation enabling successive presidents of both parties to remove old tariffs and obstruct the imposition of new ones, and foUowed tax policies that promoted the export of American capital and technology. Despite a deteriorating balance of trade, the elite consensus behind free trade largely held firm until nemesis arrived in the 1970s. By 1973, domestic supplies could no longer satisfy American demand for oil, and OPEC was able not only to raise world prices but to cut off exports to the US altogether in retaliation for American aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. At the same time, supplies of other raw materials vital to American industry were at the disposal of neutral or hostile regimes.The villains in this account of recent history are the affluent Democratic liberals who sympathized with the antiwar and social liberation movements of the 1960s and disdained organized labour for its materialism, social conservatism, and support for the Vietnam War. Stein attacks these liberals intemperately and distractingly because of their origins in the professional classes and their preference - growing out of their own economic interests - for free trade rather than buying American. This line of attack smacks of reverse snobbery. She describes Michael Dukakis, for example, as marinat[ing] in a soup of self-regard fostered by degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard Law School (274). …