Reagan Years Research Articles

A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement

A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy by Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard

Reviewed by: Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy by Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard Aryeh Neier (bio) Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), ISBN 9781108495639 (hard-back), 324 pages. Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, a Danish historian teaching at a Swedish university, has written an excellent account of the way that the United States Congress, through its struggles in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration, helped to make the promotion of international human rights an important ongoing component of American foreign policy. His book, Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy, is deeply researched. To one who was a close observer and participant in those struggles as they were taking place, Søndergaard’s highly detailed reporting seems flawless. Most of his judgments seem well-considered and fair. And yet, despite his book’s many virtues, it appears to me that Søndergaard has told only part of the story. It was not only struggles with Congress during the Reagan years that led to an ongoing American commitment to promote human rights. It was also the focus on human rights reporting in the mainstream American press during that period and the emergence of an array of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to the human rights cause. The press coverage and the lobbying by NGOs complemented and contributed to the efforts of those members of Congress who were at the forefront of disputes with the Reagan administration. In turn, of course, the battles waged by members of Congress provided material for press attention to human rights, and NGOs built their constituencies by mobilizing their supporters around struggles in Congress. Before the 1970s, the international human rights cause did not attract much attention. It was rarely an issue in the US Congress. Press coverage was scarce. And a civil society movement to promote human rights barely existed. Amnesty International had been founded in 1961, but while it caught on in a few European countries, it had only a small following in the United States. Also, in those days, it restricted its activities to very few issues. Its main activity was to identify “prisoners of conscience” in a number of countries and to organize letter-writing campaigns for them. All of this changed in the 1970s because human rights became a focal point in the Cold War struggle. The most important developments were the emergence of a small dissident movement, quickly subjected to harsh repression in Moscow, at the heart of the Soviet empire; a military coup that was accompanied by extensive torture and killings that overthrew a democratically elected leftist government in Chile; and large scale protests against the Apartheid government in South Africa that were violently suppressed. The geopolitical alignments of the governments engaged in repression became a central part of the story. Some reacted to abuses because of their political sympathies for certain victims of repression. Others were insistent that all such abuses should be condemned and that human rights should be upheld regardless of Cold War alignments. [End Page 157] A member of Congress who responded to the human rights developments in different parts of the world was Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota. He conducted hearings on those developments and was the principal author of legislation that would change the way the United States Department of State would deal with human rights. Fraser’s legislation mandated the creation of the post of Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, provided that the Department would issue annual “country reports” on the human rights practices of governments worldwide, and prohibited security aid to governments that had practiced gross abuses of rights. The latter provision was seen as a repudiation of the role of Henry Kissinger in facilitating the military coup in 1973 that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The legislation was vetoed by President Gerald Ford, for whom Kissinger served as Secretary of State. It was adopted by Congress over Ford’s veto. An essential part of the process that secured the votes needed to override Ford’s veto is that the legislation won the support of right-wing members of...

There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

Diurnal and Nocturnal Cityscapes in Miami Vice

Amid intense inter-network rivalry and the proliferation of cable, pay television and a nascent and competitive video industry, the major American Networks in the 1980s were faced with major challenges if they wished to continue attracting audiences and profits as they had during the 1970s. Miami Vice, which ran for five seasons on NBC between 1984 and 1989, was probably one of the most influential and innovative episodic series of the decade. Following Julia Kristeva’s assumption that urban space can be understood and analysed as a text, the present paper will therefore examine the role of the city of Miami as the show’s main character, before deciphering the possible readings of the diurnal and nocturnal cityscape in relation to the influence of noir and neo-noir films, which are traditionally associated with a city’s “mean streets”. Consequently, the present study will attempt to demonstrate how the show offers a vision of the post-modern city during the Reagan years, while pinpointing the crucial influence the series had on the networks’ future primetime episodic crime series as well as – more surprisingly – its impact on the city’s urban renovation.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan

Campus activism at Yale: fragmentary memories and reflections on the 1980s

American college campuses during the Reagan years were far from quiescent or complacent. Anti-apartheid activism and efforts to get universities to divest from companies doing business in South Africa dominated campus activism in the mid-1980s. To dramatize racial and economic oppression in South Africa, students built shanties to represent the poverty and exploitation of that county’s black population. They also signed petitions, demonstrated, and formed alliances with local activists. Such was the case at Yale. While anti-apartheid politics dominated the mid-1980s, students also challenged the Reagan administration’s interventionist policies toward Central America and engaged in local causes, particularly the union organizing efforts of Yale’s employees. Anti-apartheid activism thus represented but one organizing effort, albeit a major one, at Yale during the 1980s. Yale never fully divested, but the actions of students, as well as the often hostile response of the administration, ensured that apartheid and divestment were front and center of college life.

A RELIGIOUS COLD WAR: INHERITING THE INTERWAR US RELIGIOUS POLICY TOWARDS EASTERN EUROPE IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA

The present article looks at the religious policy developed during the interwar period to encompass the ideological war with communist Russia that was later translated in what the literature termed the religious Cold War. It will regard this policy through the political and religious positioning of the US ambassador to Romania during the Reagan administration, David Funderburk. The article looks at the appointment of the North Carolina professor as ambassador as accomplishing the type of politics that were described by the literature as religious Cold War that reach an apogee in the Reagan years.

Radio Free Cuba: From Détente to Re-escalation in Havana and Miami

While the United States long represented a safe haven for Cuban political exiles, the Cuban Revolution and its Cold War context accelerated the tendency of disaffected Cubans to flee the island for Yankee shores. As the main destination of those that left Cuba in the decades following the revolution, Miami and its émigré community played an increasingly important role in exile politics, and later US national politics. This article looks at how the first-wave of migrants to Miami established an outsized influence there and continued to dominate politically and culturally, even as subsequent waves representing more diverse perspectives on the Cuban Revolution set down roots in Florida. It does so by considering the attempts by one segment of the exile community to start a dialogue with the island during the Carter administration and another section’s establishment of the propaganda station Radio Martí in Reagan years. These examples highlight the fluidity between political violence and soft-power subversion in maintaining the hegemony of an antagonistic position to the Cuban Revolution.

Death by Reinterpretation: Dynamics of Norm Contestation and the US Ban on Assassination in the Reagan Years

AbstractRecent scholarship analyzes norm dynamics in the US context using the prohibition on assassination contained in Executive Order 12333 as the relevant norm. These studies argue that—before 9/11—the ban on assassination was largely uncontested and effectively constrained US foreign policy. In doing so, these studies overlook the impact of the Reagan administration on the evolution of the ban. This article establishes that the Reagan administration engaged in a concerted, and largely successful, effort to undermine the ban. The article relies on scholarship on norm contestation and norm robustness. The analysis identifies key features of the ban as a norm, including its ambiguity and executive character. It highlights the role and power of a cluster of US officials led by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Casey. Crucially, the analysis traces the prominence of dynamics of contestation of the ban in the context of unconventional warfare and counterterrorism. In line with existing scholarship, the analysis finds cases of validity contestation, meaning contestation, and applicatory contestation. Contrary to existing scholarship, however, the analysis stresses the radical nature of actors’ attempts to shrink the remit of the ban through applicatory contestation. This contestation was often made superfluous by the blurring—through meaning contestation—of the expectations set by the norm. A historically grounded analysis of contestation during the Reagan years provides a better understanding of how US officials (re)shaped the ban, establishing precedents for the legal, political, and discursive conventions surrounding assassination deployed after 9/11.

No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch

Reviewed by: No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch Timothy Francisco No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture. By Adam Theron-Lee Rensch. (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2020. 181 pp. Cloth $16.28, ISBN 978-1-78914-200-6.) Adam Theron-Lee Rensch’s No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture is a powerful account of economic and political inequity from the Reagan years to the present, through the author’s lived experience growing up working poor in Findlay, Ohio. Rensch’s political autobiography combines memoir, journalism, commentary, and skillful social history and critique into a narrative that richly teases out the difficulties of class and culture that have confounded the sociopolitical landscape since the much-mythologized Reagan years. A millennial, born during Reagan’s utopic Neoliberalism regime and growing up and coming-of-age through the Bush, Clinton, and Obama years, Rensch locates in Reagan a worldview that “endures in the way we think about politics today. It dramatically limits what many imagine is possible, including so-called ‘progressive democrats’ that function as gatekeepers preventing a truly class-based politics” (166). This frustration with the failure to realize class-based solidarity is a recurring concern for Rensch, and his sharp critique of the ways in which culture and class are confused, or rather, the ways in which the former muddies the latter in politics on the Right and on the Left, is worth unpacking. Delineating the Political Left’s struggle with the Cultural Left’s insistence on identity over an “essentialist” redistributive model grounded in labor, Rensch sees such tensions as “red-baiting” that shift focus away from resisting “the true cause of suffering—a profit hungry society, its state institutions, and its policies of austerity and violence” (149). He explains that the “culture wars” that have become a kind of default narratology for the [End Page 99] political divide, “have inadvertently (or not) become a way to rationalize and naturalize class war,” and such normalizations obscure the fictions of meritocracy on which our economic and political structures are based—structures that set up so many to fail (162). This is smart political critique, and while Rensch admits he can offer no real solutions to these enormous challenges, his awareness of the traps of the ideology of meritocracy provides a compelling frame for organizing his experiences of growing up working class in Findlay, his investment in the promise of cultural capital offered in New York, and the elitism of Sarah Lawrence College. It’s a venture that ultimately fails in erasing his rural working-class roots, one that only contributes to his sense of precariousness as he becomes another victim of the debt economy of higher education and much vaunted “knowledge economy.” Like so many working-class intellectuals, he straddles “an imagined divide,” between his rural roots and “the ivory tower of academia” with no real sense of belonging or promise in either the world he has left or the world in which he has landed. Intertwined with his story is that of his father—a writer, a once-political radical turned dispirited alcoholic—a man whose fits, starts, and tragic end anchor Rensch’s extensive social history of inequity, downward mobility, and disenfranchisement. While his father is one of the vast swath of Americans failed by the promise of “bootstraps” capitalism, he is also a man who consistently questions it—he is no caricature of the nostalgic “white working-class” male. His father’s troubled life and ignoble death, along with the “deaths of despair” of his two friends Gabe and Kevin, from suicide and a drug overdose, respectively, make very real the burdens of a meritocracy trap that reconfigures brutal systemic inequities as personal weaknesses or failures. Rensch’s narrative is compelling, thorough, ambitious, and unquestionably moving. In a few places, his integration of many excellent sources feels like a disruption from his very fine storytelling, but this is understandable given the hybridity of such narratives. Overall, No Home for You Here is a lucid and challenging example of the power of memoir to make plain the human consequences of...

A Student’s Plea to Professor North: An Episode in Academic Politics and Interdisciplinarity in the Reagan Years

A Student’s Plea to Professor North: An Episode in Academic Politics and Interdisciplinarity in the Reagan Years

Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association by Thomas A. Britten

Reviewed by: Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association by Thomas A. Britten Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association. By Thomas A. Britten. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) If remembered today, the National Tribal Chairmen's Association (NTCA) is recalled as a pawn of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a force against change that opposed the Red Power activists of the early 1970s while serving as a force of exclusion, seeking to silence the voice of newly arising unrecognized tribes, urban Indians, and pan-Indian groups. As I revealed in my book, Claiming Tribal Identity (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), scholars have not paid enough attention to the legitimate concerns of federally recognized tribes in seeking to protect valuable economic, political, and social capital in opposition to a chorus of competing groups seeking to speak for the "Indian people" in the modern era of tribal sovereignty and self-determination that began in the early 1970s. With this work, historian Thomas Britten has provided a valuable and nuanced examination of these contending constituencies and demands through the lens of the NTCA from its creation in 1971 to its demise during the Reagan years in 1987. In clear prose, Britten details the efforts of the NTCA to influence developments in Indian policy during these important decades. As he notes, the chairmen's group claimed to be the only legitimate voice of Indian people due to its position as the representative body of duly elected tribal chairpersons. Until the mid-1980s when it reversed course (a stance that led to its demise, according to Britten), the NTCA strived to utilize its insider status, personal connections, and generally accommodationist strategy with the BIA (in the executive branch) and Congress to pursue its goals to improve the status of reservation-based Indians. National developments that the association influenced included helping to pass the landmark Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and other laws that protect Native children, trust lands, and natural resources. Britten concludes the NTCA was moderately successful in its lobbying and consulting work to defend recognized tribes from various efforts to erode tribal sovereignty posed by "backlash" groups over fishing and hunting rights, legal jurisdiction, and campaigns to end the BIA and the perceived dependency of Indian peoples on government funding. Throughout the book, Britten attempts to offer assessments as to the efficacy of the NTCA's work in its various campaigns. As critics often noted, the association potentially was compromised and coopted because it received almost all its funding from the federal government, particularly the BIA. To this Britten argues the NTCA was able to resist cooptation due to its ability to reach out to the public and by having made itself "indispensable" to the government in providing data and information, recommendations on legislation, and meaningful consultation. However, once [End Page 503] its new executive director Elmer Savilla took charge in 1981 and took a clearly adversarial tone and stance toward the anti-tribal Reagan Administration, its funding was canceled in 1987, and the organization ceased to exist. In its analyses regarding the impact of NTCA lobbying and political activities, the book is marred by a strong tendency to conclude with statements such as it "may never be known" or it "cannot be determined." This propensity is linked to the general absence of oral interviews, which if conducted correctly, could have rooted out the answers to these questions, given more voice to the participants, and strengthened the work overall. That said, the book is well-grounded in appropriate secondary sources as well as strong research into archival sources. Voice of the Tribes should be on reading lists of serious students of federal Indian policy, modern Indian organizing, and tribal politics of the 1970s and 1980s. It is well written and fills an important gap in the literature on native politics during these decades. Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller Southern Utah University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

“White Male Rage”: Todd Phillips’ Joker and the Cultural Zeitgeist

The article explores the cultural phenomenon of the DC Comics super villain and the films based on them, including the latest highly acclaimed by the public and critics film by Todd Phillips - "Joker" (2019), which provoked a broad public debate. As a popular archetype, deeply rooted in American consciousness and in its 80 years of history, reflecting the dark side of different eras of American history, the Joker offers the key to understanding current social processes and political realities. Since his appearance in 1940, through the moral panic of the 1950s, the escapism and disenchantment of the Reagan years, the Joker has served as a barometer of prevalent moods in the American society.

A Brief Overview of the Foreign Policy Decision Making Team in the Reagan Administration

This article describes the Reagan Administration and its key figures dealing with foreign policy, their personalities, interaction with each other, and impact on the overall foreignpolicy decision making. The Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency played key roles in formulatingand implementing the foreign policy in the Reagan years. President Reagan entered the White House without a clear foreign policy strategy, but determined to move foreign policyadvising out of the White House and back to the State Department while at the same time keeping overall control of foreign policy decision making in the NSC.Keywords: Administration, foreign policy decision-making, Reagan, Shultz, Weinberger

A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neo-conservative Catholics by Todd Scribner

Reviewed by: A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neo-conservative Catholics by Todd Scribner Donald T. Critchlow A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the Rise of Neo-conservative Catholics. By Todd Scribner. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 244. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-813-227290.) Todd Scribner, education outreach co-ordinator at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, provides a judicious, albeit at times critical, account of the rise of Catholic neo-conservatives through the writings of three prominent Catholic public intellectuals, Michael Novak, the Reverend Richard Neuhaus, and George Wiegel. He shows that these three men often differed on important questions facing the nation and the Catholic Church in the United States in the Reagan years but agreed that the U.S. bishops had become too involved in current policy debates and were neglecting their responsibility to provide an ecclesiological foundation for maintaining moral order in an increasingly secular society. Novak, Neuhaus, and Weigel came into prominence in the post-Vatican Council II years. Novak and Neuhaus began as liberals; and Weigel, a generation younger, was deeply influenced by the pacifist antiwar activist Robert Pickus. All turned to the right in the 1970s in response largely to antiwar post-Vietnam U.S. foreign policy. All believed that the Soviet Union posed a serious threat to American foreign policy interests, but all initially supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Novak and Neuhaus came on-board Reagan's presidential bid only in the latter stages of the campaign. The rise of neo-conservatives in this period is well-trodden in popular and scholarly literature. Scribner's significant contribution is to add nuance to the meaning of neo-conservative Catholics, especially around ecclesiological issues reflected in their political positions. He explores in detail their positions on American foreign policy during the Carter and Reagan years, showing that they were not of a uniform mind. Scribner sets his discussion within the context of the post-World War II era, when animosity toward Catholics in mainstream American culture began to decline, while at the same time secularism grew. The trend toward secularism, as sociologist Robert Wuthnow observes, meant that political identity became more important that did denominational identity. Scribner shows that a central goal of Novak, Neuhaus, and Wiegal was to propose a place for the Catholic Church of the United States in this new order. They accepted generally the belief that Catholicism and the American republican order were compatible, if not essential. Novak, Neuhaus, and Wiegal accepted [End Page 394] French philosopher Jacques Maritain's belief that there should be a clear delineation between church and state. Neo-conservatives were especially worried that the U.S. Catholic bishops had become too involved in specific policy issues, as was apparent in the bishops' stances on foreign policy, particularly nuclear disarmament and Latin America. The neo-conservative complaint was just a disagreement that the bishops were too sanguine about the threat that Soviet Communism posed to world stability and American interests, but that by taking such specific policy positions the Church was undermining its authority as a necessary mediating institution within the general culture. All agreed that Catholic intellectuals needed to play a role in American politics, but insisted that the church hierarchy should constrain itself from specific political positions. This parsing of these two spheres, state and church, was fraught with tensions and perhaps inconsistencies on their part. While they called for the Catholic laity to play a more important role in the institutional church and in political life, they gave little attention to how to revive the laity. Scribner does not explore fully this general absence in the thinking of the neo-conservatives. Neo-conservatives spoke in abstraction about the importance of the laity in political life, criticized the bureaucratization of the Church, and the bishops' overreliance on staff expertise, but gave little, if any attention, to how to revitalize the Catholic laity. Scribner conveys the intellectual power of these three intellectuals in policy discussions of the day. Yet the influence of any intellectuals or groups of intellectuals on policy discussion and politics in general is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain...

Dumping the Pump: Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Community Activism and Eco-Politics in the Age of Reagan

ABSTRACT Environmental activists in 1980s Bucks County, Pennsylvania, waged a nearly decade-long battle against a plan to pump water from the free-flowing Delaware River. The activists ultimately lost their fight to stop construction of a pumping station, but in the process, galvanized environmental awareness in the region. This article, as a case study of grassroots community activism during the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, a struggle known locally as “Dump the Pump” and spearheaded by a nonprofit organization called Del-AWARE, provides a regional take on recent scholarship illuminating the vibrant underlying dynamics of local civic engagement occurring amid the overshadowing political conservatism of the Reagan years. In addition, as a case study in public history, it explores how collective historical memory fueled not only Del-AWARE's protracted struggle, but its enduring legacy in public policy and community life.

Boudreaux on high wages; a critique

Professor Don Boudreaux has made many contributions to pro- moting liberty and good economics including his refutations of common economic fallacies concerning unions, free trade, occupa- tional licensure, and the minimum wage.
 Yet, we must take issue with a recent column of his entitled «Do We Need to Bring Back the Reagan Years?» In it he offers what we consider several economic fallacies. We start off by repeating it in its entirety, one, because it is so short, and two, to obviate any pos- sible misinterpretations. Then, we make clear our criticism of it.
 Do We Need to Bring Back the Reagan Years? By Don Boudreaux
 Heard on the radio this morning while driving in northern Vir- ginia:
 We need policies to bring back the high-paying jobs this coun- try lost since the Reagan years.
 I missed the name and affiliation of the particular interviewee who issued this proclamation. Of course, this proclamation is, in one form or another, a familiar one. It trips frequently out of the mouths and off of the keyboards of politicians and pundits too numerous to count. Yet it is economic foolishness.

The Continuing Persistence of Intense Religion in the United States: Rejoinder

In their comment on our article about the persistence of intense religion in the United States, David Voas and Mark Chaves (2018) claimed that 'the intensely religious segment of the American population is shrinking.' In this response, we show that intense religion has persisted from the 1970s to the present, with a temporary uptick during the exceptional Reagan years. Voas and Chaves concluded otherwise because their analytical strategy was not sufficiently sensitive to nonlinear patterns. In addition to demonstrating the continuing persistence of intense religion, we also discuss criteria for measuring intense religion over time and the importance of avoiding unfounded assumptions in age–period–cohort analysis. We conclude that aspects of the classic secularization thesis championed by Voas, Chaves, and others are not supported by the data, and we suggest that scholars should look for better ways of thinking about religious change.

Scattered and Sacred: Calling on Agee and Evans in the Reagan Years

Scattered and Sacred: Calling on Agee and Evans in the Reagan Years

Terrorism Discourse and the Militarization of U.S. Counterterrorism: The Reagan Years

This article analyzes the emergence of the militarization of U.S. counterterrorism policy, showing that militarization as well as preemption as a doctrine of fighting terrorism originate in the mid-1980s – counter to the prevailing assumption that the current militaristic counterterrorist approach is both without precedent and largely the result of the 9/11 attacks. Following a radical shift in terrorism discourse in early 1987, the Reagan administration suddenly reverted to a law enforcement approach towards terrorism, which was retained by the George H.W. Bush and the first Clinton administration. The article further demonstrates that counterterrorism measures were strongly contingent to preceding and legitimizing discursive practices that produced knowledge, popular images and mythical narratives of terrorism, and were exploited as a power strategy by the U.S. government. I therefore suggest that the discursive practices that construct terrorism, and thereby structure the potential field of action for both policy makers and security services, and the non-discursive counterterrorism practices should be regarded as an analytical entity connected by a Foucauldian dispositif. ** N.d T. Se mantiene el término dispositif en francés porque así lo hace el autor.