discussion response 2-3 paragraph (due the end of tonight )

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What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

What forces drove the economic resurgence of the 1990s?

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

How did a divisive political partisanship affect the election of 2000?

Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001?

F R O M T R I U M P H T O T R A G E D Y

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The year 1989 was one of the most momentous of the twentieth century. In April, tens of thousands of student demonstrators occupied Tianan-men Square in the heart of Beijing, demanding greater democracy in China. Workers, teachers, and even some government officials joined them, until their numbers swelled to nearly 1 million. Both the reforms Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced in the Soviet Union and the example of American institutions inspired the protesters. The students erected a figure reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, calling it “The Goddess of Democracy and Freedom.” In June, Chinese troops crushed the protest, killing an unknown number of people, possibly thousands.

In the fall of 1989, pro- democracy demonstrations spread across eastern Europe. Gorbachev made it clear that unlike in the past, the Soviet Union

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would not intervene. The climactic event took place on November 9 when crowds breached the Berlin Wall, which since 1961 had stood as the Cold War’s most prominent symbol. One by one, the region’s communist govern- ments agreed to give up power. In 1990, a reunified German nation absorbed East Germany. The remarkably swift and almost entirely peaceful collapse of communism in eastern Europe became known as the “velvet revolution.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union itself slipped deeper and deeper into crisis. Gorbachev’s attempts at economic reform produced only chaos, and his policy of political openness allowed long- suppressed national and eth- nic tensions to rise to the surface. In August 1991, a group of military lead- ers attempted to seize power to over- turn the government’s plan to give greater autonomy to the various parts of the Soviet Union. Russian president Boris Yeltsin mobilized crowds in Mos- cow that restored Gorbachev to office. Gorbachev then resigned from the Communist Party, ending its eighty-

four- year rule. One after another, the republics of the Soviet Union declared themselves sovereign states. At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist; in its place were fifteen new independent nations.

The sudden and unexpected collapse of communism marked the end of the Cold War and a stunning triumph for the United States and its allies. For the first time since 1917, there existed a truly worldwide capitalist system. Even China, while remaining under Communist Party rule, had already embarked on market reforms and rushed to attract foreign investment. Other events sug- gested that the 1990s would also be a “decade of democracy.” In 1990, South Africa released Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress, from prison. Four years later, as a result of the first democratic elections in the coun- try’s history, Mandela became president, ending the system of state- sponsored racial inequality, known as “apartheid,” and white minority government.

The Goddess of Democracy and Freedom, a statue reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, was displayed by pro- democracy advocates during the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. After allowing it to continue for two months, the Chinese government sent troops to crush the peaceful occupation of the square.

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Throughout Latin America and Africa, civil- ian governments replaced military rule.

The sudden shift from a bipolar world to one of unquestioned American predominance promised to redefine the country’s global role. President George H. W. Bush spoke of the com- ing of a new world order. But no one knew what its characteristics would be and what new challenges to American power might arise.

T H E P O S T– C O L D W A R W O R L D A New World Order?

Bush’s first major foreign policy action was a throwback to the days of American interven- tionism in the Western Hemisphere. At the end of 1989, he dispatched troops to Panama to overthrow the government of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, a former ally of the United States who had become involved in the international drug trade. The United States installed a new government and flew Noriega to Florida, where he was tried and convicted on drug charges.

The Gulf War

A far more serious crisis arose in 1990 when Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, an oil- rich sheikdom on the Persian Gulf. Fearing that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein might next attack Saudi Arabia, a longtime ally that supplied more oil to the United States than any other country, Bush rushed troops to defend Kuwait and warned Iraq to with- draw from the country or face war. His policy aroused intense debate in the United States. But the Iraqi invasion so flagrantly violated

1989 Communism falls in eastern Europe

U.S.-led Panamanian coup

1990 Americans with Disabilities Act

Germany reunifies

1991 Gulf War

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

1992 Los Angeles riots

Casey v. Planned Parent- hood of Pennsylvania

Clinton elected president

1993 Israel and Palestine Liber- ation Organization sign the Oslo Accords

North American Free Trade Agreement approved

1994 Republicans win Congress; Contract with America

Rwandan genocide

1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombed

1996 Clinton eliminates Aid to Families with Dependent Children

Defense of Marriage Act

1998– Clinton impeachment 1989 proceedings

Kosovo War

1999 Protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization

Glass- Steagall Act repealed

2000 Bush v. Gore

2001 9/11 attacks

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

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international law that Bush succeeded in building a forty- nation coalition com- mitted to restoring Kuwait’s independence, secured the support of the United Nations, and sent half a million American troops along with a naval armada to the region.

In February 1991, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm, which quickly drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Tens of thousands of Iraqis and 184 Americans died in the conflict. The United Nations ordered Iraq to disarm and imposed economic sanctions that produced widespread civilian suffering for the rest of the decade. But Hussein remained in place. So did a large American military establishment in Saudi Arabia, to the outrage of Islamic fundamental- ists who deemed its presence an affront to their faith.

The Gulf War was the first post– Cold War international crisis. Relying on high- tech weaponry like cruise missiles that reached Iraq from bases and aircraft carriers hundreds of miles away, the United States was able to prevail quickly and avoid the prolonged involvement and high casualties of Vietnam. The Soviet Union, in the process of disintegration, remained on the sidelines. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Bush’s public approval rating rose to an unprecedented 89 percent.

Visions of America’s Role

In a speech to Congress, President Bush identified the Gulf War as the first step in the struggle to create a world rooted in democracy and global free trade. But it remained unclear how this broad vision would be translated into policy. Soon after the end of the war, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Dick Cheney, the secretary of defense, outlined different visions of the future. Powell predicted that the post– Cold War world would be a dangerous environment with conflicts popping up in unexpected places. To avoid being drawn into an unending role as global policeman, he insisted, the United States should not commit its troops abroad without clear objectives and a timetable for withdrawal. Cheney argued that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States possessed the power to reshape the world and prevent hostile states from achieving regional power. It must be willing to use force, independently if necessary, to maintain its strategic dominance. For the rest of the 1990s, it was not certain which definition of the American role in the post– Cold War world would predominate.

The Election of Clinton

Had a presidential election been held in 1991, Bush would undoubtedly have been victorious. But in that year the economy slipped into recession. Despite

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E A S T E R N E U R O P E A F T E R T H E C O L D WA R

The end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia redrew the map of eastern Europe (compare this map with the map of Cold War Europe in Chapter 23). Two additional nations that emerged from the Soviet Union lie to the east and are not indicated here: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

victory in the Cold War and the Gulf, more and more Americans believed the country was on the wrong track. No one seized more effectively on the widespread sense of unease than Bill Clinton, a former governor of Arkansas. In 1992, Clinton won the Democratic nomination by combining social liberal- ism (he supported abortion rights, gay rights, and affirmative action for racial

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

1076 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

minorities) with elements of conservatism (he pledged to reduce government bureaucracy and, borrowing a page from Republicans, promised to “end wel- fare as we know it”). A charismatic campaigner, Clinton conveyed sincere con- cern for voters’ economic anxieties.

Bush, by contrast, seemed out of touch with the day- to- day lives of ordi- nary Americans. On the wall of Democratic headquarters, Clinton’s campaign director posted the slogan, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”—a reminder that the eco- nomic downturn was the Democrats’ strongest card. Bush was further weak- ened when conservative leader Pat Buchanan delivered a fiery televised speech at the Republican national convention that declared cultural war against gays, feminists, and supporters of abortion rights. This seemed to confirm the Demo- cratic portrait of Republicans as intolerant and divisive.

A third candidate, the eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot, also entered the fray. He attacked Bush and Clinton as lacking the economic know- how to deal with the recession and the ever- increasing national debt. That millions of Americans considered Perot a credible candidate— at one point, polls showed him leading both Clinton and Bush— testified to widespread dissatisfaction with the major parties. Perot’s support faded as election day approached, but he still received 19 percent of the popular vote, the best result for a third- party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Clinton won by a substan- tial margin, a humiliating outcome for Bush, given his earlier popularity.

Clinton in Office

In his first two years in office, Clinton turned away from some of the social and economic policies of the Reagan and Bush years. He appointed several blacks and women to his cabinet, including Janet Reno, the first female attorney gen- eral, and named two supporters of abortion rights, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, to the Supreme Court. He modified the military’s strict ban on gay soldiers, instituting a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy by which officers would not seek out gays for dismissal from the armed forces. His first budget raised taxes on the wealthy and significantly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—a cash payment for low- income workers begun during the Ford administration. The most effective antipoverty policy since the Great Society, the EITC raised more than 4 million Americans, half of them children, above the poverty line during Clinton’s presidency.

Clinton shared his predecessor’s passion for free trade. Despite strong oppo- sition from unions and environmentalists, he obtained congressional approval in 1993 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty nego- tiated by Bush that created a free- trade zone consisting of Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

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The major policy initiative of Clinton’s first term was a plan devised by a panel headed by his wife, Hillary, a lawyer who had pursued an indepen- dent career after their marriage, to address the rising cost of health care and the increasing number of Americans who lacked health insurance. In Can- ada and western Europe, governments provided universal medical coverage. The United States had the world’s most advanced medical technology and a woefully incomplete system of health insurance. The Great Society had pro- vided coverage for the elderly and poor through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Many employers offered health insurance to their workers. But tens of millions of Americans lacked any coverage at all.

Announced with great fanfare by Hillary Rodham Clinton at congressio- nal hearings in 1993, Clinton’s plan would have provided universal cover- age through large groupings of medical care businesses. Doctors and health insurance and drug companies attacked it vehemently, fearing government regulations that would limit reimbursement for medical procedures and the price of drugs. Too complex to be easily understood by most voters, and vulner- able to criticism for further expanding the unpopular federal bureaucracy, the plan died in 1994.

The “Freedom Revolution”

With the economy recovering slowly from the recession and Clinton’s first two years in office seemingly lacking in significant accomplishments, voters in 1994 turned against the administration. For the first time since the 1950s, Republicans won control of both houses of Congress. They proclaimed their tri- umph the “Freedom Revolution.” Newt Gingrich, a conservative congressman from Georgia who became the new Speaker of the House, masterminded their campaign. Gingrich had devised a platform called the Contract with America, which promised to curtail the scope of government, cut back on taxes and eco- nomic and environmental regulations, overhaul the welfare system, and end affirmative action.

Viewing their electoral triumph as an endorsement of the contract, Repub- licans moved swiftly to implement its provisions. The House approved deep cuts in social, educational, and environmental programs, including the popular Medicare system. With the president and Congress unable to reach agreement on a budget, the government in December 1995 shut down all nonessential operations, including Washington, D.C., museums and national parks.

Gingrich had assumed that the public shared his intense ideological con- victions. He discovered that in 1994 they had voted against Clinton, not for the full implementation of the Contract with America. Most Americans blamed Congress for the impasse, and Congress soon retreated.

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

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Clinton’s Political Strategy

Like Truman after the Republican sweep of 1946, Clinton rebuilt his popularity by campaigning against a radical Congress. He opposed the most extreme parts of his opponents’ program, while adopting others. In his state of the union address of January 1996, he announced that “the era of big government is over,” in effect turning his back on the tradition of Democratic Party liberalism and embracing the antigovernment outlook associated with Republicans since the days of Barry Goldwater.

In 1996, ignoring the protests of most Democrats, Clinton signed into law a Republican bill that abolished the program of Aid to Families with Depen- dent Children (AFDC), commonly known as “welfare.” Grants of money to the states, with strict limits on how long recipients could receive payments, replaced it. At the time of its abolition, AFDC assisted 14 million individuals, 9 million of them children. Thanks to stringent new eligibility requirements imposed by the states and the economic boom of the late 1990s, welfare rolls plummeted. But the number of children living in poverty remained essentially unchanged. Nonetheless, Clinton had succeeded in one of his primary goals: by the late 1990s, welfare, a hotly contested issue for twenty years or more, had disappeared from political debate.

Commentators called Clinton’s political strategy “triangulation.” This meant embracing the most popular Republican policies, like welfare reform, while leaving his opponents with extreme positions unpopular among middle- class voters, such as hostility to abortion rights and environmental protection. Clinton’s strategy enabled him to neutralize Republican claims that Democrats were the party of high taxes and lavish spending on persons who preferred dependency to honest labor. Clinton’s passion for free trade alienated many working- class Democrats but convinced much of the middle class that the party was not beholden to the unions.

Clinton easily defeated Republican Bob Dole in the presidential contest of 1996, becoming the first Democrat elected to two terms since FDR. Clinton had accomplished for Reaganism what Eisenhower had done for the New Deal, and Nixon for the Great Society— consolidating a basic shift in American politics by accepting many of the premises of his opponents.

Clinton and World Affairs

Like Jimmy Carter before him, Clinton’s primary political interests concerned domestic, not international, affairs. But with the United States now indisput- ably the world’s dominant power, Clinton, like Carter, took steps to encour- age the settlement of long- standing international conflicts and tried to elevate

THE POST– COLD WAR WORLD ★ 1079

support for human rights to a central place in international relations. He achieved only mixed success.

Clinton strongly supported a 1993 agreement, negotiated at Oslo, Norway, in which Israel for the first time recognized the legitimacy of the Palestine Lib- eration Organization. The Oslo Accords seemed to outline a road to Mideast peace. But neither side proved willing to implement them fully. Israeli govern- ments continued to build Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank— a part of Jordan that Israel had occupied during the 1967 Six- Day War. The new Palestinian Authority, which shared in governing parts of the West Bank as a stepping- stone to full statehood, proved to be corrupt, powerless, and unable to curb the growth of groups bent on violence against Israel. At the end of his presidency, Clinton brought Israeli and Palestinian leaders to Camp David to try to work out a final peace treaty. But the meeting failed, and vio- lence soon resumed.

Like Carter, Clinton found it difficult to balance concern for human rights with strategic and economic interests and to formulate clear guidelines for humanitarian interventions overseas. For example, the United States did noth- ing in 1994 when tribal massacres racked Rwanda, in central Africa. More than 800,000 people were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and 2 million ref- ugees fled the country.

The Balkan Crisis

The most complex foreign policy crisis of the Clinton years arose from the dis- integration of Yugoslavia, a multiethnic state in southeastern Europe that had been carved from the old Austro- Hungarian empire after World War I. As in the rest of eastern Europe, the communist government that had ruled Yugo- slavia since the 1940s collapsed in 1989. Within a few years, the country’s six provinces dissolved into five new states. Ethnic conflict plagued several of these new nations. Ethnic cleansing— a terrible new term meaning the forcible expulsion from an area of a particular ethnic group— now entered the inter- national vocabulary. By the end of 1993, more than 100,000 Bosnians, nearly all of them civilians, had perished in the Balkan crisis.

With the Cold War over, protec- tion of human rights in the Balkans gave NATO a new purpose. After

What were the major international initiatives of the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Cold War?

Serbian refugees fleeing a Croat offensive during the 1990s. By the fall of 1995, the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia and accom- panying “ethnic cleansing” had displaced over 3 million people.

1080 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

considerable indecision, NATO launched air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces, with American planes contributing. UN troops, including 20,000 Americans, arrived as peacekeepers. In 1998, ethnic cleansing again surfaced, this time by Yugoslavian troops and local Serbs against the Albanian population of Kosovo, a province of Serbia. More than 800,000 Albanians fled the region. To halt the bloodshed, NATO launched a two- month war in 1999 against Yugoslavia that led to the deployment of American and UN forces in Kosovo.

Human Rights

During Clinton’s presidency, human rights played an increasingly important role in international affairs. Hundreds of nongovernmental agencies through- out the world defined themselves as protectors of human rights. During the 1990s, the agenda of international human rights organizations expanded to include access to health care, women’s rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples like the Aborigines of Australia and the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Americas. Human rights emerged as a justification for inter- ventions in matters once considered to be the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The United States dispatched the military to distant parts of the world to assist in international missions to protect civilians.

New institutions emerged that sought to punish violations of human rights. The Rwandan genocide produced a UN- sponsored war crimes court that sentenced the country’s former prime minister to life in prison. An interna- tional tribunal put Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloševič on trial for sponsor- ing the massacre of civilians. It remained to be seen whether these initiatives would grow into an effective international system of protecting human rights across national boundaries. Despite adopting human rights as a slogan, many governments continued to violate them in practice.

G L O B A L I Z A T I O N A N D I T S D I S C O N T E N T S In December 1999, delegates from around the world gathered in Seattle for a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a 135-nation group created five years earlier to reduce barriers to international commerce and settle trade disputes. To the astonishment of residents of the city, more than 30,000 persons gathered to protest the meeting. Their marches and rallies brought together factory workers, who claimed that global free trade encouraged corporations to shift production to low- wage centers overseas, and “ tree- huggers,” as some reporters called environmentalists, who complained about the impact on the earth’s ecology of unregulated economic development.

Some of the latter dressed in costumes representing endangered species— monarch butterflies whose habitats were disappearing because of the widespread

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS ★ 1081

destruction of forests by lumber companies, and sea turtles threatened by unrestricted ocean fishing. Protesters drew attention to the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, which shields the earth from harmful solar radiation. The heightened use of aerosol sprays and refrigerants containing damaging chem- icals had caused a large hole in the ozone layer. A handful of self- proclaimed anarchists embarked on a window- breaking spree at local stores. The police sealed off the downtown and made hundreds of arrests, and the WTO gather- ing disbanded.

Once a center of labor radicalism, the Seattle area in 1999 was best known as the home of Microsoft, developer of the Windows operating system used in most of the world’s computers. The company’s worldwide reach symbolized globalization, the process by which people, investment, goods, information, and culture increasingly flowed across national boundaries. Globalization has been called “the concept of the 1990s.” During that decade, the media resounded with announcements that a new era in human history had opened, with a borderless economy and a “global civilization” that would soon replace traditional cultures.

Globalization, of course, was hardly a new phenomenon. The internation- alization of commerce and culture and the reshuffling of the world’s peoples had been going on since the explorations of the fifteenth century. But the scale and scope of late- twentieth- century globalization was unprecedented. Thanks to satellites and the Internet, information and popular culture flowed instanta- neously to every corner of the world. Manufacturers and financial institutions scoured the world for profitable investment opportunities.

Perhaps most important, the collapse of communism between 1989 and 1991 opened the entire world to the spread of market capitalism and to the idea that government should interfere as little as possible with economic activity. Amer- ican politicians and social commentators increasingly criticized the regulation of wages and working conditions, assistance to the less fortunate, and environ- mental protections as burdens on international competitiveness. During the 1990s, presidents Bush, a Republican, and Clinton, a Democrat, both spoke of an American mission to create a single global free market as the path to rising living standards, the spread of democracy, and greater worldwide freedom.

The media called the loose coalition of groups who organized the Seattle protests the “antiglobalization” movement. In fact, they challenged not glo- balization itself but its social consequences. Globalization, the demonstra- tors claimed, accelerated the worldwide creation of wealth but widened gaps between rich and poor countries and between haves and have- nots within societies. Decisions affecting the day- to- day lives of millions of people were made by institutions— the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and multinational corporations— that operated without any democratic input. Demonstrators demanded not an end to global trade and capital flows, but the establishment of international standards for wages,

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labor conditions, and the environment, and greater investment in health and education in poor countries. The Battle of Seattle placed on the national and international agendas a question that promises to be among the most pressing concerns of the twenty- first century— the relationship between globalization, economic justice, and freedom.

The economy’s performance in the 1990s at first seemed to justify the claims of globalization’s advocates. After recovery from the recession of 1990–1991, economic expansion continued for the rest of the decade. By 2000, unemployment stood below 4 percent, a figure not seen since the 1960s. The boom became the longest uninterrupted period of economic expansion in the nation’s history. Because Reagan and Bush had left behind massive budget defi- cits, Clinton worked hard to balance the federal budget— a goal traditionally associated with fiscal conservatives. Since economic growth produced rising tax revenues, Clinton during his second term not only balanced the budget but actually produced budget surpluses.

The Computer Revolution

Many commentators spoke of the 1990s as the dawn of a “new economy,” in which computers and the Internet would produce vast new efficiencies and the production and sale of information would occupy the central place once held by the manufacture of goods. Computers had first been developed during and after World War II to solve scientific problems and do calculations involving enormous amounts of data. The early ones were extremely large, expensive, and, by modern standards, slow. Research for the space program of the 1960s spurred the development of improved computer technology, notably the min- iaturization of parts thanks to the development of the microchip on which cir- cuits could be imprinted.

Microchips made possible the development of entirely new consumer prod- ucts. Videocassette recorders, handheld video games, cellular phones, and dig- ital cameras were mass- produced at affordable prices during the 1990s, mostly in Asia and Latin America rather than the United States. But it was the com- puter that transformed American life. Beginning in the 1980s, companies like Apple and IBM marketed computers for business and home use. As computers became smaller, faster, and less expensive, they found a place in businesses of every kind. In occupations as diverse as clerical work, banking, architectural design, medical diagnosis, and even factory production, they transformed the American workplace. They also changed private life. By the year 2000, nearly half of all American households owned a personal computer, used for enter- tainment, shopping, and sending and receiving electronic mail. Centers of com- puter technology, such as Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, the Seattle and Austin metropolitan areas, and lower Manhattan, boomed during the 1990s.

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The Internet, first developed as a high- speed military communications network, was simplified and opened to commercial and individual use through personal computers. The Internet expanded the flow of information and com- munications more radically than any invention since the printing press. At a time when the ownership of newspapers, television stations, and publishing houses was becoming concentrated in the hands of a few giant media con- glomerates, the fact that anyone with a computer could post his or her ideas for worldwide circulation led “netizens” (“citizens” of the Internet) to hail the advent of a new, democratic public sphere in cyberspace.

The Stock Market Boom and Bust

Economic growth and talk of a new economy sparked a frenzied boom in the stock market that was reminiscent of the 1920s. Investors, large and small, poured funds into stocks, spurred by the rise of discount and online firms that advertised aggressively and charged lower fees than traditional brokers. By 2000, a majority of American households owned stocks directly or through investment in mutual funds and pension and retirement accounts.

Investors were especially attracted to the new “dot coms”—companies that conducted business via the Internet and seemed to symbolize the promise of

Two architects of the computer revolution, Steve Jobs (on the left), the head of Apple Com- puter, and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, which makes the operating system used in most of the world’s computers.

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1084 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

the new economy. The NASDAQ, a stock exchange dominated by new technol- ogy companies, rose more than 500 percent from 1998 to 1999. Many of these “ high- tech” companies never turned a profit. But economic journalists and stock brokers explained that the new economy had so revolutionized business that traditional methods of assessing a company’s value no longer applied.

Inevitably, the bubble burst. On April 14, 2000, stocks suffered their larg- est one- day point drop in history. For the first time since the Depression, stock prices declined for three successive years (2000–2002), wiping out billions of dollars in Americans’ net worth and pension funds. The value of NASDAQ stocks fell by nearly 80 percent between 2000 and 2002. By 2001, the American economy had fallen into a recession. Talk of a new economy, it appeared, had been premature.

The Enron Syndrome

Only after the market dropped did it become apparent that the stock boom of the 1990s had been fueled in part by fraud. For a time in 2001 and 2002, Ameri- cans were treated almost daily to revelations of incredible greed and corruption on the part of respected brokerage firms, accountants, and company executives. During the late 1990s, accounting firms like Arthur Andersen, giant banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, and corporate lawyers pocketed extravagant fees for devising complex schemes to help push up companies’ stock prices by hiding their true financial condition. Enron, a Houston- based energy company that epitomized the new economy— it bought and sold electricity rather than actually producing it— reported as profits billions of dollars in operating losses.

In the early twenty- first century, the bill came due for many corporate criminals. The founder of Adelphia Communications was convicted of misuse of company funds. A jury found the chairman of Tyco International guilty of looting the company of millions of dollars. A number of former chief execu- tives faced long prison terms. Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, chief officers of Enron, were convicted by a Texas jury of multiple counts of fraud.

Fruits of Deregulation

At the height of the 1990s boom, with globalization in full swing, stocks ris- ing, and the economy expanding, the economic model of free trade and dereg- ulation appeared unassailable. But the retreat from government economic regulation, a policy embraced by both the Republican Congress and President Clinton, left no one to represent the public interest.

The sectors of the economy most affected by the scandals— energy, telecom- munications, and stock trading— had all been subjects of deregulation. Enron could manipulate energy prices because Congress had granted it an exemption from laws regulating the price of natural gas and electricity.

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Many stock frauds stemmed from the repeal in 1999 of the Glass- Steagall Act, a New Deal measure that separated commercial banks, which accept depos- its and make loans, from investment banks, which invest in stocks and real estate and take larger risks. The repeal made possible the emergence of “super- banks” that combined these two functions. Phil Gramm, the Texas congress- man who wrote the repeal bill, which Clinton signed, explained his thinking in this way: “ Glass- Steagall came at a time when the thinking was that govern- ment was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.”

But banks took their new freedom as an invitation to engage in all sorts of misdeeds, knowing that they had become so big that if anything happened, the federal government would have no choice but to rescue them. Banks poured money into risky mortgages. When the housing bubble collapsed in 2007–2008, the banks suffered losses that threatened to bring down the entire financial system. The Bush and Obama administrations felt they had no choice but to expend hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to save the banks from their own misconduct.

Rising Inequality

The boom that began in 1995 benefited nearly all Americans. For the first time since the early 1970s, average real wages and family incomes began to grow sig- nificantly. Economic expansion at a time of low unemployment brought rapid increases in wages for families at all income levels. It aided low- skilled work- ers, especially non- whites, who had been left out of previous periods of growth. Yet, despite these gains, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the poor and the middle class became worse off while the rich became significantly richer. The wealth of the richest Americans exploded during the 1990s. Sales of luxury goods like yachts and mansions boomed. Bill Gates, head of Microsoft and the country’s richest person, owned as much wealth as the bottom 40 per- cent of the American population put together.

Dot- com millionaires and well- paid computer designers and programmers received much publicity. But companies continued to shift manufacturing jobs overseas. Thanks to NAFTA, a thriving industrial zone emerged just across the southern border of the United States, where American manufacturers built plants to take advantage of cheap labor and weak environmental and safety regulations. Business, moreover, increasingly relied for profits on financial operations rather than making things. The financial sector of the economy accounted for around 10 percent of total profits in 1950; by 2000 the figure was up to 40 percent. Com- panies like Ford and General Electric made more money from interest on loans to customers and other financial operations than from selling their products.

What forces drove the economic resurgence of the 1990s?

1086 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

The outsourcing of jobs soon moved from manufacturing to other areas, including accounting, legal services, banking, and other skilled jobs where companies could employ workers overseas for a fraction of their cost in the United States. All this lowered prices for consumers, but also threw millions of American workers into competition with those around the globe, producing a relentless downward pressure on American wages.

Overall, between 1990 and 2008, companies that did business in global markets contributed almost nothing to job growth in the United States. Microsoft, symbol of the new economy, employed only 30,000 people. Apple, another highly success- ful company, whose computers, iPads, and iPhones were among the most ubiqui- tous consumer products of the early twenty- first century, in 2010 employed some 43,000 persons in the United States (the large majority a low- wage sales force in the company’s stores). Its contractors, who made these products, had more than 700,000 employees, almost all of them overseas. In 1970, General Motors had been the country’s largest corporate employer. In the early twenty- first century, it had been replaced by Wal- Mart, a giant discount retail chain that paid most of its 1.6 million workers slightly more than the minimum wage. Wal- Mart aggressively opposed efforts at collective bargaining. Not a single one of its employees belonged to a union. Thanks to NAFTA, which enabled American companies to expand their business in Mexico, by 2010 Wal- Mart was also the largest employer in that country.

C U L T U R E W A R S The end of the Cold War ushered in hopes for a new era of global harmony. Instead, what one observer called a “rebellion of particularisms”—renewed emphasis on group identity and insistent demands for group recognition and power— has racked the international arena. In the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries, socialism and nationalism had united people of different backgrounds in pursuit of common goals. Now, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe, the waning of movements based on socialism and the declining power of nation- states arising from globalization seemed to unleash long- simmering ethnic and religious antagonisms. Partly in reac- tion to the global spread of a secular culture based on consumption and mass entertainment, intense religious movements attracted increasing numbers of followers— Hindu nationalism in India, orthodox Judaism in Israel, Islamic fundamentalism in much of the Muslim world, and evangelical Christianity in the United States. Like other nations, although in a far less extreme way and with little accompanying violence, the United States has experienced divisions arising from the intensification of ethnic and racial identities and religious fundamentalism.

CULTURE WARS ★ 1087

The Newest Immigrants

Because of shifts in immigration, cul- tural and racial diversity have become increasingly visible in the United States. Until the immigration law of 1965, the vast majority of twentieth- century newcomers hailed from Europe. That measure, as noted in Chapter 25, sparked a wholesale shift in immigrants’ origins. Between 1965 and 2010, nearly 38 million immi- grants entered the United States, a number larger than the 27 million during the peak period of immigra- tion between 1880 and 1924. About 50 percent came from Latin America and the Caribbean, 35 percent from Asia, and smaller numbers from the Middle East and Africa. Only 10 per- cent arrived from Europe, mostly from the war- torn Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

In 2010, the number of foreign- born persons living in the United States stood at more than 40 million, or 13 percent of the population. Although less than the peak proportion of 14 percent in 1910, in absolute numbers this repre- sented the largest immigrant total in the nation’s history. The immigrant influx changed the country’s religious and racial map. By 2010, more than 4 million Muslims resided in the United States, and the combined population of Bud- dhists and Hindus exceeded 1 million.

As in the past, many immigrants became urban residents, with New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami the most common destinations. New eth- nic communities emerged, with homes, shops, restaurants, foreign- language newspapers, radio and television stations, and ethnic professionals like busi- nessmen and lawyers. Unlike in the past, rather than being concentrated in one or two parts of city centers, immigrants quickly moved into outlying neigh- borhoods and older suburbs. The immigrant influx revitalized neighborhoods like New York City’s Washington Heights (a Dominican enclave) and Flush- ing (a center for Asian newcomers). By the turn of the century, more than half of all Latinos lived in suburbs. Orange County, California, which had been a stronghold of suburban conservatism between 1960 and 1990, elected a Latina Democrat to Congress in the late 1990s. While most immigrants settled on the East and West Coasts, some moved to other parts of the country. They brought

Erected on U.S. 5, an interstate highway running from the Mexican to Canadian borders along the Pacific Coast, this sign warns motorists to be on the lookout for people (i.e., undocumented immigrant families) crossing the road on foot. The sign’s placement north of San Diego, about thirty miles north of Mexico, illustrates how the “bor- der” had become an entire region, not simply a geographical boundary.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M

1088 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

From Bill Clinton, Speech on Signing of NAFTA (1993)

The North American Free Trade Agreement was signed by President Bill Clinton early in his first term. It created a free- trade zone (an area where goods can travel freely without paying import duties) composed of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Clinton asked Americans to accept economic globalization as an inevitable form of progress and the path to future prosperity. “There will be no job loss,” he promised. Things did not entirely work out that way.

As President, it is my duty to speak frankly to the American people about the world in which we now live. Fifty years ago, at the end of World War II, an unchallenged America was protected by the oceans and by our technological superiority and, very frankly, by the economic devastation of the people who could otherwise have been our competi- tors. We chose then to try to help rebuild our former enemies and to create a world of free trade supported by institutions which would facilitate it. . . . As a result, jobs were created, and opportunity thrived all across the world. . . .

For the last 20 years, in all the wealthy countries of the world— because of changes in the global environment, because of the growth of technology, because of increasing competition— the middle class that was created and enlarged by the wise policies of expanding trade at the end of World War II has been under severe stress. Most Ameri- cans are working harder for less. They are vulnerable to the fear tactics and the averse- ness to change that are behind much of the opposition to NAFTA. But I want to say to my fellow Americans: When you live in a time of change, the only way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change— to embrace, to move forward. . . . The only way we can recover the fortunes of the middle class in this coun- try so that people who work harder and smarter can, at least, prosper more, the only way we can pass on the American dream of the last 40 years to our children and their children for the next 40, is to adapt to the changes which are occurring.

In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow or try to resist these changes, hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday. . . . I believe that NAFTA will create 1 million jobs in the first 5 years of its impact. . . . NAFTA will generate these jobs by fostering an export boom to Mexico by tearing down tariff walls. . . . There will be no job loss.

VOICES OF FREEDOM ★ 1089

From Global Exchange, Seattle, Declaration for Global Democracy

(December 1999)

The demonstrations that disrupted the December 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle brought to public attention a widespread dissatis- faction with the effects of economic “globalization.” In this declaration, organiz- ers of the protest offered their critique.

As citizens of global society, recognizing that the World Trade Organization is unjustly dominated by corporate interests and run for the enrichment of the few at the expense of all others, we demand:

Representatives from all sectors of society must be included in all levels of trade policy formulations. All global citizens must be democratically represented in the for- mulation, implementation, and evaluation of all global social and economic policies.

Global trade and investment must not be ends in themselves, but rather the instru- ments for achieving equitable and sustainable development including protection for workers and the environment.

Global trade agreements must not undermine the ability of each nation- state or local community to meet its cit- izens’ social, environmental, cultural or economic needs.

The World Trade Organization must be replaced by a democratic and trans- parent body accountable to citizens— not to corporations.

No globalization without repre- senta tion!

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Clinton feel that free trade is necessary to American prosperity?

2. Why do the Seattle protesters feel that the World Trade Organization is a threat to democracy?

3. How do these documents reflect contradic- tory arguments about the impact of global- ization in the United States?

1090 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

54

11

7

4

3

8

58

5

4 3

3

3

5

6

8

32

10

7

11

6

9

11 18

22 12 21

8 13

11 14

7 9 13 8

25

5

23

33

3 4 4

12 4 8153

10 3

3 4

Democrat Republican Independent

Party Clinton Bush Perot

Candidate Electoral Vote

(Share) 370 (69%) 168 (31%)

Popular Vote (Share)

44,908,254 (43%) 39,102,343 (38%) 19,741,065 (19%)

I M M I G R A N T P O P U L AT I O N S I N C I T I E S A N D S TAT E S , 1 9 0 0 A N D 2 0 1 0

Maps illustrating states’ foreign-born populations and the twenty metropolitan areas with the most immigrants in 1900 and 2010. In 1900 nearly all went to the Northeast and Upper Midwest, the heartland of the industrial economy. In 2010 the largest number headed for cities in the South and West, especially California, although major cities of the Northeast also attracted many newcomers.

CULTURE WARS ★ 1091

Table 27.1 Immigration to the United States, 1961–2010

Decade Total Europe Asia Western

Hemisphere Other Areas

1961–1970 3,321,584 1,123,492 427,642 1,716,374 54,076

1971–1980 4,493,302 800,368 1,588,178 1,982,735 122,021

1981–1990 7,336,940 761,550 2,738,157 3,615,225 222,008

1991–2000 9,042,999 1,359,737 2,795,672 4,486,806 400,784

2001–2010 14,974,975 1,165,176 4,088,455 8,582,601 1,138,743

cultural and racial diversity to once- homogeneous communities in the Amer- ican heartland.

Post- 1965 immigration formed part of the worldwide uprooting of labor arising from globalization. Those who migrated to the United States came from a wide variety of backgrounds. They included poor, illiterate refugees from places of economic and political crisis— Central Americans escaping the region’s civil wars and poverty, Haitians and Cambodians fleeing repressive governments. But many immigrants were well- educated professionals from countries like India and South Korea, where the availability of skilled jobs had not kept pace with the spread of higher education. In the year 2000, more than 40 percent of all immigrants to the United States had a college education.

For the first time in American history, women made up the majority of new- comers, reflecting the decline of manufacturing jobs that had previously absorbed immigrant men, as well as the spread of employment opportunities in tradition- ally female fields like care of children and the elderly and retail sales. Thanks to cheap global communications and jet travel, modern- day immigrants retain strong ties with their countries of origin, frequently phoning and visiting home.

The New Diversity

Latinos formed the largest single immigrant group. This term was invented in the United States and includes people from quite different origins— Mexicans, Central and South Americans, and migrants from Spanish- speaking Carib- bean islands like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico (although the last group, of course, are American citizens, not immigrants). With 95 mil- lion people, Mexico in 2000 had become the world’s largest Spanish- speaking nation. Its poverty, high birthrate, and proximity to the United States made it a source of massive legal and illegal immigration. In 2000, Mexican- Americans made up a majority of the Hispanic population of the United States and nearly half the residents of Los Angeles. But almost every state witnessed an influx

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1092 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

of Mexican immigrants. In 1930, 90 percent of the Mexican population of the United States lived in states that had once been part of Mexico. Today, there is a significant Mexican- American presence in almost every state, including such places as Kansas, Minnesota, and Georgia, with very little experience, until recently, with ethnic diversity.

Numbering around 50 million in 2010, Latinos had become the largest minority group in the United States. Between 1990 and 2010, 30 million His- panics were added to the American population, half its total growth. Latinos were highly visible in entertainment, sports, and politics. Indeed, the Hispanic presence transformed American life. José was now the most common name for baby boys in Texas and the third most popular in California. Smith remained the most common American surname, but Garcia, Rodriguez, Gonzales, and other Hispanic names were all in the top fifty.

Latino communities remained far poorer than the rest of the country. A flourishing middle class developed in Los Angeles, Miami, and other cities with large Spanish- speaking populations. But most immigrants from Mexico and Central America competed at the lowest levels of the job market. The influx of legal and illegal immigrants swelled the ranks of low- wage urban workers and agricultural laborers. Latinos lagged far behind other Americans in edu- cation. In 2010, their poverty rate stood at nearly double the national figure of 15 percent. Living and working conditions among predominantly Latino farm workers in the West fell back to levels as dire as when César Chavez established the United Farm Workers union in the 1960s.

Asian- Americans also became increasingly visible. There had long been a small population of Asian ancestry in California and New York City, but only after 1965 did immigration from Asia assume large proportions. Like Latinos, Asian- Americans were a highly diverse population, including well- educated Koreans, Indians, and Japanese, as well as poor refugees from Cambodia, Viet- nam, and China. Growing up in tight- knit communities that placed great emphasis on education, young Asian- Americans poured into American colleges and universities. Once subjected to harsh discrimination, Asian- Americans now achieved remarkable success. White Americans hailed them as a “model minority.” By 2007, the median family income of Asian- Americans, $66,000, surpassed that of whites. But more than any other group, Asian- Americans clustered at opposite ends of the income spectrum. Large numbers earned either more than $75,000 per year (doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs) or under $5,000 (unskilled laborers in sweatshops and restaurants).

The United States, of course, had long been a multiracial society. But for centu- ries race relations had been shaped by the black- white divide and the experience of slavery and segregation. The growing visibility of Latinos and Asians suggested that a two- race system no longer adequately described American life. Multiracial

CULTURE WARS ★ 1093

O R I G I N O F L A R G E S T I M M I G R A N T P O P U L AT I O N S B Y S TAT E , 1 9 1 0 A N D 2 0 1 3

Pittsburgh

Rochester

Cincinnati Baltimore

New York

Minneapolis Worcester

New Haven

San Francisco

Springfield Scranton

Milwaukee Buffalo

Cleveland Philadelphia

St. Louis

Detroit Chicago

Boston

Providence

Gulf of Mexico

At lantic O cean

CANADA

MEXICO

Boston

Chicago

Las Vegas

San Francisco

Detroit

Riverside

Miami

San Jose

Tampa

Washington, D.C.

San Diego

Seattle

Phoenix

Dallas Atlanta

Sacramento Philadelphia New York

Houston

Los Angeles

Gulf of Mexico

At lantic O cean

CANADA

MEXICO

1900

2010

25.0 or higher 20.0 to 24.9 15.0 to 19.9 10.0 to 14.9 5.0 to 9.9 Less than 5.0

Percent foreign-born

25.0 or higher 20.0 to 24.9 15.0 to 19.9 10.0 to 14.9 5.0 to 9.9 Less than 5.0

Percent foreign-born

Maps depicting the birthplace of each state’s largest immigrant population in 1910 and 2013. A century ago, most immigrants hailed from Europe, and the leading country of origin varied among the states. Today, in almost every state outside the Northeast, those born in Mexico constitute the largest number of immigrants.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1094 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

imagery filled television, films, and advertising. Interracial marriage, at one time banned in forty- two states, became more common and acceptable. Among Asian- Americans, half of all marriages involved a non- Asian partner. The figure for Latinos was 30 percent. Some commentators spoke of the “end of racism” and the emergence of a truly color- blind society. Others argued that while Asians and some Latinos were being absorbed into an expanded category of “white” Ameri- cans, the black- white divide remained almost as impenetrable as ever.

One thing, however, seemed clear at the dawn of the twenty- first century: diversity was here to stay. Because the birthrate of racial minorities is higher than that of whites, the Census Bureau projected that by 2050, less than 50 per- cent of the American population would be white.

The Changing Face of Black America

Compared with the situation in 1900 or 1950, the most dramatic change in American life at the turn of the century was the absence of legal segregation and the presence of blacks in areas of American life from which they had once been almost entirely excluded. Thanks to the decline in overt discrimination and the effectiveness of many affirmative action programs, blacks now worked in unprecedented numbers alongside whites in corporate board rooms, offices, and factories. The number of black policemen, for example, rose from 24,000 to 65,000 between 1970 and 2000, and in the latter year, 37 percent of the black population reported having attended college. The economic boom of the late 1990s aided black Americans enormously; the average income of black families rose more rapidly than that of whites.

One major change in black life was the growing visibility of Africans among the nation’s immigrants. Between 1970 and 2010, more than twice as many Africans immigrated to the United States as had entered during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. For the first time, all the elements of the African diaspora— natives of Africa, Caribbeans, Central and South Amer- icans of African descent, Europeans with African roots— could be found in the United States alongside the descendants of American slaves.

Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia provided the largest number of African immi- grants, and they settled overwhelmingly in urban areas, primarily in New York, California, Texas, and the District of Columbia. Some were impoverished refu- gees fleeing civil wars in Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia, but many more were professionals— more than half the African newcomers had college educations, the highest percentage for any immigrant group. Indeed, some African coun- tries complained of a “brain drain” as physicians, teachers, and other highly skilled persons sought opportunities in the United States that did not exist in their own underdeveloped countries. While some prospered, others found it

CULTURE WARS ★ 1095

difficult to transfer their credentials to the United States and found jobs driv- ing taxis and selling African crafts at street fairs.

Most African- Americans, nonethe- less, remained in a more precarious situation than whites or many recent immigrants. In the early twenty- first century, the black unemployment rate remained double that of whites. Half of all black children lived in poverty, two- thirds were born out of wedlock, and in every index of social well- being from health to quality of housing, blacks continued to lag. Despite the continued expansion of the black middle class, a far lower per- centage of blacks than whites owned their homes or held professional and managerial jobs. Housing segregation remained pervasive. In 2010, more than one- third of the black population lived in suburbs, but mostly in predominantly black communities.

Despite the nation’s growing racial diversity, school segregation— now result- ing from housing patterns and the divide between urban and suburban school districts rather than laws requiring racial separation— was on the rise. Most city public school systems consisted overwhelmingly of minority students, large numbers of whom failed to receive an adequate education. The courts released more and more districts from desegregation orders. By 2000, the nation’s black and Latino students were more isolated from white pupils than in 1970. Nearly 80 percent of white students attended schools where they encountered few if any pupils of another race. Since school funding rested on property taxes, poor com- munities continued to have less to spend on education than wealthy ones.

The Spread of Imprisonment

During the 1960s, the nation’s prison population declined. But in the 1970s, with urban crime rates rising, politicians of both parties sought to convey the image of being “tough on crime.” They insisted that the judicial system should focus on locking up criminals for long periods rather than rehabilitating them. They treated drug addiction as a violation of the law rather than as a disease. State governments greatly increased the penalties for crime and reduced the possibility of parole. Successive presidents launched “wars” on the use of illegal

Despite the ups and downs of unemployment, the rate for non-whites remains persistently higher than that for whites.

F I G U R E   2 7 . 1 U N E M P L O Y M E N T R AT E B Y S E X A N D R A C E ,

1 9 5 4 – 2 0 0 0

White male

Non-white male

Non-white female

P er

ce nt

ag e

of p

op ul

at io

n

0

4

8

12

16

20

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 20001995

Year

White female

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1096 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

drugs. As a result, the number of Americans in prison rose dramatically, most of them incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses.

During the 1990s, thanks to the waning of the crack epidemic and more effective urban police tactics, crime rates dropped dramatically across the country. But because of the sentencing laws of the previous two decades, this did nothing to stem the increase of the prison population. In 2011, it reached 2.3 million, ten times the figure of 1970. Several million more individuals were on parole, on probation, or under some other kind of criminal supervision. These figures dwarfed those of every other Western society.

As the prison population grew, a “ prison- industrial complex” emerged. Struggling communities battered by deindustrialization saw prisons as a source of jobs and income. Between 1990 and 1995, the federal government and the states constructed more than 200 new prisons. In 2008, five states spent more money on their prison systems than on higher education. Convict labor, a practice the labor movement had managed to curtail in the late nineteenth century, revived in the late twentieth. Private companies in Oregon “leased” prisoners for three dollars per day. A call to Trans World Airlines for a flight reservation was likely to be answered by a California inmate.

The Burden of Imprisonment

Members of racial minorities experienced most strongly the paradox of grow- ing islands of unfreedom in a nation that prided itself on liberty. In 1950, whites accounted for 70 percent of the nation’s prison population and non- whites 30 percent. By 2010, these figures had been reversed. One reason was that severe penalties faced those convicted of using or selling crack, a particularly potent form of cocaine concentrated among the urban poor, while the use of powder cocaine, the drug of choice in suburban America, led to far lighter sentences.

The percentage of the black population in prison stood five times higher than the proportion for white Americans. More than one- quarter of all black men could expect to serve time in prison at some time during their lives. A crim- inal record made it very difficult for ex- prisoners to find jobs. Partly because so many young men were in prison, blacks had a significantly lower rate of mar- riage than other Americans. Their children became “prison orphans,” forced to live with relatives or in foster homes.

Blacks convicted of crimes were also more likely than whites to receive the death penalty. In 1972, the Supreme Court had temporarily suspended states’ use of this punishment. But the Court soon allowed it to resume, despite evidence of racial disparities in its application. Even as western Europe and other countries abolished the death penalty, the United States executed over 1,400 persons between 1977 and 2015. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had

CULTURE WARS ★ 1097

described executions as common in Europe but rare in America. By the early twenty- first century, the United States ranked with China, Iran, and Saudi Ara- bia as the nations that most often executed their citizens. The 2.2 million Amer- icans in prison in 2015 represented one- fifth of the entire world’s inmates and far exceeded the number in any other country.

The continuing frustration of urban blacks exploded in 1992 when an all- white suburban jury found four Los Angeles police officers not guilty in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, even though an onlooker had captured their assault on videotape. The deadliest urban uprising since the New York draft riots of 1863 followed. Some fifty- two people died, and property damage approached $1 billion. Many Latino youths, who shared blacks’ resentment over mistreatment by the police, joined in the violence. The uprising suggested that despite the civil rights revolution, the nation had failed to address the plight of the urban poor.

The Continuing Rights Revolution

Reflecting the continued power of the rights revolution, in 1990, newly orga- nized disabled Americans won passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This far- reaching measure prohibited discrimination in hiring and pro- motion against persons with disabilities and required that entrances to public buildings be redesigned so as to ensure access for the disabled.

Some movements that were descended from the late 1960s achieved great visibility in the 1990s. Prominent among these was the campaign for gay rights, which in the last two decades of the century increasingly turned its attention to combating acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a fatal disease spread by sexual contact, drug use, and transfusions of contaminated blood. AIDS first emerged in the early 1980s. It quickly became epidemic among homosexual men. The gay movement mobilized to promote “safe sex,” prevent discrimina- tion against people suffering from AIDS, and press the federal government to devote greater resources to fighting the disease. The Gay Men’s Health Crisis organized educational programs and assistance to those affected by the dis- ease, and demanded that drug companies put AZT, a drug with some success in treating AIDS, on the market. A more radical group, ACT UP, disrupted a mass at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest what it called the Catho- lic Church’s prejudices against gays. By 2000, even though more than 400,000 Americans had died of AIDS, its spread among gays had been sharply curtailed. But in other parts of the world, such as Africa, the AIDS epidemic remained out of control.

Gay groups also played an increasing role in politics. In cities with large gay populations, such as New York and San Francisco, politicians vied to attract their votes. Overall, the growth of public tolerance of homosexuality was

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1098 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

among the most striking changes in American social attitudes in the last two decades of the century. In the second decade of the twenty- first century, this would lead to the remarkably rapid acceptance of the right of gay Americans to form legal marriages.

Native Americans in the New Century

Another social movement spawned by the 1960s that continued to flourish was the American Indian movement. The Indian population reached over 5 million (including people choosing more than one race) in the 2010 census, a sign not only of population growth but also of a renewed sense of pride that led many Indians for the first time to identify themselves as such to census enumerators. Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Native American Rights Fund, estab- lished in 1971, some tribes embarked on a campaign for restitution for past injustices. In 2001, for example, a New York court awarded the Cayuga Nation $248 million for illegal land seizures two centuries earlier.

The legal position of Indians as American citizens who enjoy a kind of quasi- sovereignty still survives in some cases. Notable examples are the lucra- tive Indian casinos now operating in states that otherwise prohibit gambling. In 2011, Indian casinos took in over $27 billion, making some tribes very rich. One such group is the Pequot tribe of Connecticut. In 1637, as the result of a brief, bloody war, Puritan New Englanders exterminated or sold into slavery most of the tribe’s members. The treaty that restored peace decreed that the tribe’s name should be wiped from the historical record. Today, the few hun- dred members of the Pequot tribe operate Foxwoods, reputedly the world’s larg- est casino. However, because of the recession that began in 2007, Foxwoods’ receipts plummeted and its survival remains uncertain.

Half of today’s Indians live in five western states (California, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, and Washington). Although some tribes have reinvested casino profits in improved housing and health care and college scholarships for Native American students, most Indian casinos are marginal operations whose low- wage jobs as cashiers, waitresses, and the like have done little to relieve Indian poverty. Native Americans continue to occupy the lowest rung on the economic ladder. At least half of those living on reservations have incomes below the poverty line.

Multiculturalism

The new face of American society went hand in hand with one of the most striking developments of the 1990 s— the celebration of group difference and demands for group recognition. Multiculturalism became the term for a new awareness of the diversity of American society, past and present, and for

CULTURE WARS ★ 1099

vocal demands that jobs, education, and politics reflect that diversity. As the numbers of minority and female stu- dents at the nation’s colleges and uni- versities rose, these institutions moved aggressively to diversify their faculties and revise the traditional curriculum.

One sign of multiculturalism could be seen in the spread of academic pro- grams dealing with the experience of specific groups— Black Studies, Latino Studies, Women’s Studies, and the like. Literature departments added the writ- ings of female and minority authors to those of white men. Numerous scholars now taught and wrote history in ways that stressed the experiences of diverse groups of Americans, rather than a com- mon national narrative.

The Identity Debate

Among some Americans, the height- ened visibility of immigrants, racial minorities, and inheritors of the sexual revolution inspired not celebration of pluralism but alarm over perceived cultural fragmentation. Conservatives, and some traditional liberals as well, decried “identity politics” and multicultural- ism for undermining a common sense of nationhood.

Increased cultural diversity and changes in educational policy inspired harsh debates over whether immigrant children should be required to learn English and whether further immigration should be discouraged. These issues entered politics most dramatically in California, whose voters in 1994 approved Proposi- tion 187, which denied undocumented immigrants and their children access to welfare, education, and most health services. A federal judge soon barred imple- mentation of the measure on the grounds that control over immigration policy rests with the federal government. By 2000, twenty- three states had passed laws establishing English as their official language (similar to measures enacted in the aftermath of World War I). The 1996 law that abolished welfare also barred most immigrants who had not become citizens from receiving food stamps.

But efforts to appeal to prejudice for political gain often backfired. In Cali- fornia, Republicans’ anti- immigrant campaigns inspired minorities to mobilize

This work by the contemporary Eastern Band Cherokee artist Shan Goshorn, entitled Unin- tended Legacy, reproduces historical docu- ments that are woven into a basket (a traditional Native American craft) such as the names and images of Indian children and adults at a typical boarding school. That history, she suggests, still affects Indian life today.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1100 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

politically and offended many white Americans. In 2000, Republican presiden- tial candidate George W. Bush emphasized that his brand of conservatism was multicultural, not exclusionary.

Cultural Conservatism

Immigration occupied only one front in what came to be called the Culture Wars— battles over moral values that raged throughout the 1990s. The Chris- tian Coalition, founded by evangelical minister Pat Robertson, became a major force in Republican politics. It launched crusades against gay rights, abortion, secularism in public schools, and government aid to the arts. Pat Buchanan’s Republican convention speech of 1992 calling for a “religious war for the soul of America,” mentioned earlier, alarmed many voters. But cultural conserva- tives hailed it as their new rallying cry.

It sometimes appeared during the 1990s that the country was refighting old battles between traditional religion and modern secular culture. In an echo of the 1920s, a number of localities required the teaching of creationism, a religious alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The battles of the 1960s seemed to be forever unresolved. Many conservatives railed against the erosion of the nuclear family, the changing racial landscape produced by immigration, and what they considered a general decline of traditional values. Cultural conservatives were not satisfied with a few victories over what they considered immorality, such as the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which barred gay couples from spou- sal benefits provided by federal law. (The Supreme Court would declare the law unconstitutional in 2013.)

Family Values in Retreat

The censuses of 2000 and 2010 showed family values increasingly in disarray. Half of all marriages ended in divorce (70 percent on the West Coast). In 2010, more than 40 percent of births were to unmarried women, not only sexually active teenagers, but growing numbers of professional women in their thirties and forties as well. For the first time, fewer than half of all households consisted of married couples, and only one- fifth were “traditional” families— a wife, hus- band, and their children. More than half of all adults were single or divorced. Two- thirds of married women worked outside the home. The pay gap between men and women, although narrowing, persisted. In 2010, the weekly earn- ings of women with full- time jobs stood at 82 percent of those of men— up from 63 percent in 1980. In only two occupational categories did women earn more than men— postal service clerks and special education teachers.

Although dominated by conservatives, the Supreme Court, in Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania (1992), reaffirmed a woman’s right to

CULTURE WARS ★ 1101

terminate a pregnancy. The decision allowed states to enact mandatory waiting periods and anti- abortion counseling, but it overturned a requirement that the husband be given notification before the proce- dure was undertaken. “At the heart of liberty,” said the Court, “is the right to . . . make the most intimate and per- sonal choices” without outside inter- ference. In effect, Casey repudiated the centuries- old doctrine that a husband has a legal claim to control the body of his wife.

The Antigovernment Extreme

At the radical fringe of conservatism, the belief that the federal government posed a threat to American freedom led to the creation of private mili- tias who armed themselves to fend off oppressive authority. Groups like Aryan Nation, Posse Comitatus, and other self- proclaimed “Christian patri- ots” spread a mixture of racist, anti- Semitic, and antigovernment ideas. Private armies, like the Militia of Montana, vowed to resist enforcement of fed- eral gun control laws. For millions of Americans, owning a gun became a prime symbol of liberty. “We’re here because we love freedom,” declared a participant in a 1995 Washington rally against proposed legislation banning semiauto- matic assault weapons.

Many militia groups employed the symbolism and language of the American Revolution, sprinkling their appeals with warnings about the dangers of government tyranny drawn from the writings of Thomas Jef- ferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine. They warned that leaders of both major parties formed part of a conspiracy to surrender American sover- eignty to the United Nations, or to some shadowy international conspiracy. Although such organizations had been growing for years, they burst into the national spotlight in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh, a member of the militant

F I G U R E   2 7 . 2 W O M E N I N T H E PA I D W O R K F O R C E , 1 9 4 0 – 2 0 1 0

2008 2050

13%

15%

66%

4% 3%

13%

30%

46%

8%

5%

Non-Hispanic white Asian

Other

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Hispanic

By 2000, women represented nearly half of the American workforce, and unlike in the nineteenth century, a majority of women working outside the home were married.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

1102 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

anti government movement, exploded a bomb at a federal office building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 persons, including numerous children at a day- care center. McVeigh was captured, convicted, and executed. The bombing alerted the nation to the danger of violent antigovernment right- wing groups.

I M P E A C H M E N T A N D T H E E L E C T I O N O F 2 0 0 0 The unusually intense partisanship of the 1990s seemed ironic, given Clinton’s move toward the political center. Republicans’ intense dislike of Clinton could only be explained by the fact that he seemed to symbolize everything conser- vatives hated about the 1960s. As a college student, the president had smoked marijuana and participated in antiwar demonstrations. He had married a fem- inist, made a point of leading a multicultural administration, and supported gay rights. Clinton’s popularity puzzled and frustrated conservatives, rein- forcing their conviction that something was deeply amiss in American life. From the very outset of his administration, Clinton’s political opponents and scandal- hungry media stood ready to pounce. Clinton himself provided the ammunition.

The Impeachment of Clinton

Sexual misconduct by public officials had a long history. But in the 1980s and 1990s, scrutiny of politicians’ private lives became far more intense than in the past. Gary Hart, as noted in the previous chapter, had been driven from the 1988 campaign because of an extramarital liaison. In 1991, Senate hearings on the nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, became embroiled in dramatic charges of sexual harassment leveled against Thomas by law professor Anita Hill. To the outrage of feminists, the Senate narrowly confirmed him. Nonetheless, because of her testimony, Americans became more aware of the problem of sexual harassment in and out of the workplace, and complaints shot up across the country.

From the day Clinton took office, charges of misconduct bedeviled him. In 1998, it became known that Clinton had carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Kenneth Starr, the special counsel who had been appointed to investigate a previous scandal, shifted his focus to Lewinsky. He issued a lengthy report containing almost pornographic details of Clinton’s sexual acts with the young woman and accused the president of lying when he denied the affair under oath. In December 1998, the Republican- controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction

IMPEACHMENT AND THE ELECTION OF 2000 ★ 1103

of justice. He became the second president to be tried before the Senate. Early in 1999, the vote took place. Neither charge mustered a simple majority, much less than the two- thirds required to remove Clinton from office.

Karl Marx once wrote that historical events occur twice— first as trag- edy, the second time as farce. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 had revolved around some of the most momentous questions in American history— the Reconstruction of the South, the rights of the former slaves, rela- tions between the federal government and the states. Clinton’s impeachment had to do with what many considered to be a juvenile escapade. Polls suggested that the obsession of Kenneth Starr and members of Congress with Clinton’s sexual acts appalled Americans far more than the president’s irresponsible behavior. Clinton’s continuing popularity throughout the impeachment con- troversy demonstrated how profoundly traditional attitudes toward sexual morality had changed.

The Disputed Election

Had Clinton been eligible to run for reelection in 2000, he would probably have won. But after the death of FDR, the Constitution had been amended to limit presidents to two terms in office. Democrats nominated Vice President Al Gore to succeed Clinton (pairing him with Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Jewish vice- presidential nominee). Republicans chose George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and son of Clinton’s predecessor, as their candidate, with former secretary of defense Dick Cheney as his running mate.

The election proved to be one of the closest in the nation’s history. The out- come remained uncertain until a month after the ballots had been cast. Gore won the popular vote by a tiny margin— 540,000 of 100 million cast, or one- half of 1 percent. Victory in the electoral college hinged on which candidate had carried Florida. There, amid widespread confusion at the polls and claims of irregularities in counting the ballots, Bush claimed a margin of a few hundred votes. In the days after the election, Democrats demanded a hand recount of the Florida ballots for which machines could not determine a voter’s intent. The Florida Supreme Court ordered the recount to proceed.

As in the disputed election that ended Reconstruction (a contest in which Florida had also played a crucial role), it fell to Supreme Court justices to decide the outcome. On December 12, 2000, by a 5-4 vote, the Court ordered a halt to the recounting of Florida ballots, allowing the state’s governor Jeb Bush (George W. Bush’s brother) to certify that the Republican candidate had carried the state and had therefore won the presidency.

The decision in Bush v. Gore was one of the oddest in Supreme Court his- tory. In the late 1990s, the Court had reasserted the powers of the states within

How did a divisive political partisanship affect the election of 2000?

1104 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

the federal system. Now, however, it overturned a decision of the Florida Supreme Court interpreting the state’s election laws. The majority justified their decision by insisting that the “equal protection” clause of the Four- teenth Amendment required that all ballots within a state be counted in accordance with a single standard, something impossible given the wide variety of machines and paper ballots used in Florida. Perhaps recognizing that this new constitutional princi- ple threatened to throw into question results throughout the country— since

many states had voting systems as complex as Florida’ s— the Court added that it applied only in this single case.

The most remarkable thing about the election of 2000 was not so much its controversial ending as the even division of the country it revealed. Bush and Gore each received essentially half of the popular vote. The final count in the electoral college stood at 271-266, the narrowest margin since 1876. The Senate ended up divided 50-50 between the two parties. But these figures concealed deep political and social fissures. Bush carried the entire South and nearly all the states of the trans- Mississippi farm belt and Rockies. Gore won almost all the states of the Northeast, Old Northwest, and West Coast. Res- idents of urban areas voted overwhelmingly for Gore. Rural areas went just as solidly for Bush. Members of racial minorities gave Gore large majorities, while white voters preferred Bush. The results also revealed a significant “gender gap.” Until the 1960s, women had tended to vote disproportionately Republi- can. In 2000, women favored Gore by 11 percent, while men preferred Bush by the same margin.

A Challenged Democracy

Coming at the end of the “decade of democracy,” the 2000 election revealed troubling features of the American political system at the close of the twenti- eth century. The electoral college, devised by the founders to enable the coun- try’s prominent men rather than ordinary voters to choose the president, gave the White House to a candidate who did not receive the most votes— an odd result in a political democracy. A country that prided itself on modern tech- nology had a voting system in which citizens’ choices could not be reliably

GERMANY

GERMANY GERMANY

GERMANY (D.C.)

IRELAND

GERMANY

GERMANY

GERMANY

SWEDEN NORWAY

NORWAY

GERMANY

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JAPAN

MEXICO

CUBA

CANADA

CANADA

CANADA CANADARUSSIA/

USSR

RUSSIA/ USSR

U.K.

U.K.

U.K.

U.K.U.K.

U.K.

ITALY

ITALY

ITALY

ITALYAUSTRIA

PHILIPPINES

PHILIPPINES

MEXICO MEXICO INDIA

MEXICO

MEXICO

MEXICO ETHIOPIA

CANADA CANADA CANADA

DOMINICAN REP.

CHINA

CHINA

JAMAICA

EL SALVADOR EL SALVADOR (D.C.)

CUBA

1910

2013

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THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11 ★ 1105

determined. Counting both congressional and presidential races, the campaign cost more than $1.5 billion, mostly raised from wealthy individuals and corpo- rate donors. This reinforced the widespread belief that money dominated the political system. The implications for democracy of the ever- closer connection between power in the economic marketplace and power in the marketplace of politics and ideas would be widely debated in the early twenty- first century.

Evidence abounded of a broad dis engagement from public life. As govern- ments at all levels competed to turn their activities over to private contractors, and millions of Americans walled themselves off from their fellow citizens by taking up residence in socially homogeneous gated communities, the very idea of a shared public sphere seemed to dissolve. Nearly half the eligible voters did not bother to go to the polls, and in state and local elections, turnouts typi- cally ranged between only 20 and 30 percent. More people watched the tele- vised Nixon- Kennedy debates of 1960 than the Bush- Gore debates of 2000, even though the population had risen by 100 million. Both candidates sought to occupy the political center and relied on public- opinion polls and media con- sultants to shape their messages. Major issues like health care, race relations, and economic inequality went virtually unmentioned during the campaign. And no one discussed the issue that would soon come to dominate Bush’s presidency— the threat of international terrorism.

T H E A T T A C K S O F S E P T E M B E R 1 1 September 11, 2001, a beautiful late- summer morning, began with the sun rising over the East Coast of the United States in a crystal- clear sky. But Septem- ber 11 soon became one of the most tragic dates in American history.

Around 8 AM, hijackers seized control of four jet airliners filled with passen- gers. They crashed two into the World Trade Center in New York City, igniting infernos that soon caused these buildings, which dominated the lower Manhat- tan skyline, to collapse. A third plane hit a wing of the Pentagon, the country’s military headquarters, in Washington, D.C. On the fourth aircraft, passengers who had learned of these events via their cell phones overpowered the hijack- ers. The plane crashed in a field near Pittsburgh, killing all aboard. Counting the nineteen hijackers, more than 200 passengers, pilots, and flight attendants, and victims on the ground, around 3,000 people died on September 11. The vic- tims included nearly 400 police and firefighters who had rushed to the World Trade Center in a rescue effort and perished when the “twin towers” collapsed. Relatives and friends desperately seeking information about the fate of those lost in the attacks printed thousands of “missing” posters. These remained in

Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001?

1106 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

public places in New York and Wash- ington for weeks, grim reminders of the lives extinguished on September 11.

The Bush administration quickly blamed Al Qaeda, a shadowy terror- ist organization headed by Osama bin Laden, for the attacks. A wealthy Islamic fundamentalist from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden had joined the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. He had developed a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and received American funds to help build his mountain bases. But after the Gulf War of 1991, his anger increasingly turned against the United States. Bin Laden was especially outraged by the presence of American military bases in Saudi Arabia and by American support for Israel in its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. More generally, bin Laden and his followers saw the United States, with its religious pluralism, consumer culture, and open sexual mores, as the antithesis of the rigid values in which they believed. He feared that American influence was corrupting Saudi Arabia,

Islam’s spiritual home, and helping to keep the Saudi royal family, which failed to oppose this development, in power.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, terrorist groups who held the United States and other Western countries responsible for the plight of the Palestinians had engaged in hijackings and murders. After the Gulf War, Osama bin Laden declared “war” on the United States. Terrorists associated with Al Qaeda exploded a truck- bomb at the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six per- sons, and set off blasts in 1998 at American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which more than 200 persons, mostly African embassy workers, died. Thus, a ris- ing terrorist threat was visible before September 11. Nonetheless, the attack came as a complete surprise. With the end of the Cold War in 1991, most Americans felt more secure, especially within their own borders, than they had for decades.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, gave new prominence to ideas deeply embedded in the American past— that freedom was the central quality of

The twin towers of the World Trade Center after being struck by hijacked airplanes on Septem- ber 11, 2001. Shortly after this photograph was taken, the towers collapsed.

American life, and that the United States had a mission to spread freedom throughout the world and to fight those it saw as freedom’s enemies. The attacks and events that followed also lent new urgency to questions that had recurred many times in American history: Should the United States act in the world as a republic or an empire? What is the proper balance between liberty and security? Who deserves the full enjoyment of American freedom? None had an easy answer.

C H A P T E R R E V I E W

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why was the year 1989 one of the most momentous in the twentieth century?

2. Describe the different visions of the U.S. role in the post– Cold War world as identified by President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton.

3. Explain Clinton’s political strategy of combining social liberalism with conservative economic ideas.

4. What are the causes and consequences of the growing “ prison- industrial complex”?

5. Identify the factors that, in the midst of 1990s prosperity, increased the levels of inequality in the United States.

6. What are the similarities and differences between immigration patterns of the 1990s and earlier?

7. What main issues gave rise to the Culture Wars of the 1990s?

8. Assess the role of the Supreme Court in the presidential election of 2000.

9. What is globalization, and how did it affect the United States in the 1990s?

KEY TERMS

new world order (p. 1073)

Gulf War (p. 1074)

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” (p. 1076)

North American Free Trade Agreement (p. 1076)

Contract with America (p. 1077)

Oslo Accords (p. 1079)

Rwandan genocide (p. 1079)

ethnic cleansing (p. 1079)

Balkan crisis (p. 1079)

globalization (p. 1081)

Americans with Disabilities Act (p. 1097)

multiculturalism (p. 1098)

Culture Wars (p. 1100)

Defense of Marriage Act (p. 1100)

family values (p. 1100)

Bush v. Gore (p. 1103)

Why did Al Qaeda attack the United States on September 11, 2001?

CHAPTER REVIEW ★ 1107

1108 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy

Go to QIJK To see what you know— and learn what you’ve missed— with personalized feedback along the way.

Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps, author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more.

What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S What were the major policy elements of the war on terror in the wake of September 11, 2001?

How did the war in Iraq unfold in the wake of 9/11?

How did the war on terror affect the economy and American liberties?

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

What kinds of change did voters hope for when they elected Barack Obama?

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

What were the prevailing ideas of American freedom at the beginning of the 21st century?

A N E W C E N T U R Y A N D N E W C R I S E S

★ C H A P T E R 2 8 ★

The presidential election of 2008 produced not only a great political sur-prise but a historic moment in American history. Whatever one’s opin-ion of Barack Obama’s policies, there is no question that in view of the nation’s racial history, the election of the first African- American president was an enormously important symbolic turning point.

A little- known forty- seven- year- old senator from Illinois when the campaign began in 2007, Obama owed his success both to his own exceptional skills as a speaker and campaigner and to the evolution of American politics and society.

★ 1109

1110 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

Obama’s life story exemplified the enormous changes the United States had undergone since 1960. Without the civil rights movement, his election would have been inconceivable. He was the product of an interracial marriage, which ended in divorce when he was two years old, between a Kenyan immigrant and a white American woman. When Obama was born in 1961, their marriage was still illegal in many states. He attended Harvard Law School, and worked in Chicago as a community organizer before going into politics. He also wrote two best- selling books about his upbringing in Indonesia (where his mother worked as an anthropologist) and Hawaii (where his maternal grandparents helped to raise him) and his search for a sense of identity given his complex background. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and first gained national attention with an eloquent speech at the Democratic national con- vention that year. His early opposition to the Iraq War won the support of the Democratic Party’s large antiwar element; his race galvanized the support of black voters; and his youth and promise of change appealed to the young.

Obama recognized how the Internet had changed politics. He established an email list containing the names of millions of voters with whom he could communicate instantaneously, and used web- based networks to raise enor- mous sums of money in small donations. His campaign put out videos on popular Internet sites. With its widespread use of modern technology and mas- sive mobilization of new voters, Obama’s was the first political campaign of the twenty- first century. But his election also rested on the deep unpopularity of his predecessor, George W. Bush, because of the seemingly endless war he launched in Iraq and the collapse of the American economy in 2008.

T H E W A R O N T E R R O R Bush before September 11

Before becoming president, George W. Bush had been an executive in the oil industry and had served as governor of Texas. He had worked to dissociate the Republican Party from the harsh anti- immigrant rhetoric of the mid- 1990s and had proven himself an effective proponent of what he called “compassionate con- servatism.” Nonetheless, from the outset Bush pursued a strongly conservative agenda. In 2001, he persuaded Congress to enact the largest tax cut in American his- tory. With the economy slowing, he promoted the plan as a way of stimulating renewed growth. In keeping with the “ supply- side” economic outlook embraced twenty years earlier by Ronald Reagan, most of the tax cuts were directed toward the wealthiest Americans, on the assumption that they would invest the money they saved in taxes in economically productive activities.

THE WAR ON TERROR ★ 1111

In foreign policy, Bush emphasized American freedom of action, unrestrained by international treaties and institutions. To great controversy, the Bush administra- tion announced that it would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which sought to combat global warming— a slow rise in the earth’s temperature that scientists warned could have disastrous effects on the world’s climate. Global warming is caused when gases released by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil remain in the upper atmosphere, trapping heat reflected from the earth. Evi- dence of this development first surfaced in the 1990s, when scientists studying layers of ice in Greenland concluded that the earth’s temperature had risen significantly during the past century.

Today, most scientists consider global warming a serious situation. Climate change threatens to disrupt long- established patterns of agriculture, and the melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps because of rising tempera- tures may raise ocean levels and flood coastal cities. Since, at the time, the United States burned far more fossil fuel than any other nation, Bush’s repudiation of the treaty, on the grounds that it would weaken the Amer- ican economy, infuriated much of the world, as well as environmentalists at home.

“They Hate Freedom”

September 11 transformed the international situation, the domestic political environ- ment, and the Bush presidency. An outpour- ing of popular patriotism followed the attacks, all the more impressive because it was spontaneous, not orchestrated by the government or private organizations. Throughout the country, people demonstrated their sense of resolve and their sympathy for the victims by dis- playing the American flag. Public trust in government rose dramatically, and

2001 U.S. enters war in Afghanistan

USA Patriot Act

2002 Bush identifies “axis of evil”

Department of Homeland Security established

2003 Iraq War begins

2005 Hurricane Katrina hits the Gulf Coast

2007 Great Recession begins

2008 Federal bailout of banks and companies

Barack Obama elected

2009 Federal stimulus package

Tea Party movement develops

Sonia Sotomayor named to Supreme Court

2010 Affordable Care Act

Gulf oil spill

2011 Arab Spring

Osama bin Laden killed

Occupy Wall Street movement

2012 Obama reelected

2013 Edward Snowden revelations

2015 Supreme Court declares constitutional right to gay marriage

U.S. reestablishes relations with Cuba

What were the major policy elements of the war on terror in the wake of September 11, 2001?

1112 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

public servants like firemen and police- men became national heroes. After two decades in which the dominant language of American politics centered on deregulation and individualism, the country experienced a renewed feeling of common social purpose.

The Bush administration benefited from this patriotism and identification with government. The president’s pop- ularity soared. Bush seized the oppor- tunity to give his administration a new direction and purpose. Like presidents before him, he made freedom the rally- ing cry for a nation at war.

On September 20, 2001, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. His speech echoed the words of FDR, Tru- man, and Reagan: “Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human free- dom . . . now depends on us.” The coun- try’s antagonists, Bush went on, “hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion,

our freedom of speech, our freedom to assemble and disagree with each other.” In later speeches, he repeated this theme. Why did terrorists attack the United States? the president repeatedly asked. His answer: “Because we love freedom, that’s why. And they hate freedom.”

The Bush Doctrine

Bush’s speech announced a new foreign policy principle, which quickly became known as the Bush Doctrine. The United States would launch a war on ter- rorism. Unlike previous wars, this one had a vaguely defined enemy— terrorist groups around the world that might threaten the United States or its allies— and no predictable timetable for victory. The American administration would recog- nize no middle ground in the new war: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush demanded that Afghanistan, ruled by a group of Islamic fun- damentalists called the Taliban, surrender Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, who had established a base in the country. When the Taliban refused, the United States on October 7, 2001, launched air strikes against its strongholds.

“Is This the End?” by the artist Owen Freeman, offers a warning about global warming, one of whose consequences in coming decades will be a rise in sea levels, flooding many low- lying coastal communities.

AN AMERICAN EMPIRE? ★ 1113

Bush gave the war in Afghanistan the name “Enduring Freedom.” By the end of the year, the combination of American bombing and ground com- bat by the Northern Alliance (Afghans who had been fighting the Taliban for years) had driven the regime from power. A new government, friendly to and dependent on the United States, took its place. It repealed Taliban laws deny- ing women the right to attend school and banning movies, music, and other expressions of Western culture but found it difficult to establish full control over the country. U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan at least into 2017, making the war the longest in American history.

The “Axis of Evil”

Like the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, September 11 not only plunged the United States into war but also transformed American foreign pol- icy, inspiring a determination to reshape the world in terms of American ideals and interests. To facilitate further military action in the Middle East, the United States established military bases in Central Asia, including former republics of the Soviet Union like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Such an action would have been inconceivable before the end of the Cold War.

The toppling of the Taliban, Bush repeatedly insisted, marked only the beginning of the war on terrorism. In his State of the Union address of Janu- ary 2002, the president accused Iraq, Iran, and North Korea of harboring ter- rorists and developing “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, and biological— that posed a potential threat to the United States. He called the three countries an “axis of evil,” even though no evidence connected them with the attacks of September 11 and they had never cooperated with one another (Iraq and Iran, in fact, had fought a long and bloody war in the 1980s).

A N A M E R I C A N E M P I R E ? The “axis of evil” speech and National Security Strategy sent shock waves around the world. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, a wave of sym- pathy for the United States had swept across the globe. Most of the world sup- ported the war in Afghanistan as a legitimate response to the terrorist attacks. By late 2002, however, many persons overseas feared that the United States was claiming the right to act as a world policeman in violation of international law.

Critics, including leaders of close American allies, wondered whether divid- ing the world into friends and enemies of freedom ran the danger of repeat- ing some of the mistakes of the Cold War. Anti- Americanism in the Middle East, they argued, reached far beyond bin Laden’s organization and stemmed not simply from dislike of American freedom but, rightly or wrongly, from

How did the war in Iraq unfold in the wake of 9/11?

1114 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

opposition to specific American policies— toward Israel, the Palestinians, and the region’s corrupt and undemocratic regimes.

Charges quickly arose that the United States was bent on establishing itself as a new global empire. Indeed, September 11 and its aftermath highlighted not only the vulnerability of the United States but also its overwhelming strength. In every index of power— military, economic, cultural— the United States far outpaced the rest of the world. Its defense budget exceeded that of the next twenty powers combined. The United States was the only country that maintained military bases throughout the world and deployed its navy on every ocean. It was not surprising that in such circumstances many American policymakers felt that the country had a responsibility to impose order in a dangerous world, even if this meant establishing its own rules of international conduct.

Confronting Iraq

These tensions became starkly evident in the Bush administration’s next ini- tiative. The Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein had survived its defeat in the Gulf War of 1991. Hussein’s opponents charged that he had flouted United Nations resolutions barring the regime from developing new weapons.

From the outset of the Bush administration, a group of conservative policy- makers including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz were determined to oust Hussein from power. They insisted that the oppressed Iraqi people would welcome an American army as liberators and quickly establish a democratic government, allowing for the early departure of American soldiers. This group seized on the opportunity presented by the attacks of September 11 to press their case, and President Bush adopted their outlook. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who believed the conquest and stabilization of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and should not be undertaken without the support of America’s allies, found himself marginalized in the administration.

Even though Hussein was not an Islamic fundamentalist, and no known evidence linked him to the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Bush admin- istration in 2002 announced a goal of “regime change” in Iraq. Hussein, administration spokesmen insisted, must be ousted from power because he had developed an arsenal of chemical and bacterial “weapons of mass destruction” and was seeking to acquire nuclear arms. American newspaper and television journalists repeated these claims with almost no independent investigation. Early in 2003, despite his original misgivings, Secretary of State Powell deliv- ered a speech before the UN outlining the administration’s case. He claimed

AN AMERICAN EMPIRE? ★ 1115

that Hussein possessed a mobile chemical weapons laboratory, had hidden weapons of mass destruction in his many palaces, and was seeking to acquire uranium in Africa to build nuclear weapons. (Every one of these assertions later turned out to be false.)

The Iraq War

Foreign policy “realists,” including members of previous Republican adminis- trations like Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under the first Presi- dent Bush, warned that the administration’s preoccupation with Iraq deflected

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Asmara

Addis Ababa

Djibouti

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Manama

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Damascus

Tel Aviv Amman

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Ankara

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-Gulf War, 1990 -Iraq War, 2003–

-Civil war, 2011– -War against Taliban and Terrorists, 2001–

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-American embassy occupied, 1979–1981

-Recognition, 1948 -Camp David Accords, 1978 -Wye Memorandum, concerning peace with the Palestinians, 1998

-Suez crisis, 1956 -Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, 1974–1975 -Camp David accords, 1978

KAZAKHSTAN

UZBEKISTAN

TURKMENISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

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PAKISTAN INDIA

TAJIKISTAN

KYRGYZSTAN

CHINA

UKRAINE MOLDOVA

ROMANIA

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GREECE GEORGIA

ARMENIA AZERBAIJAN

SYRIA

JORDAN

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CYPRUS

EGYPT

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Caspian Sea

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Territory under full Palestinian control Palestinian Authority responsible for social and civil services only Gaza Strip and West Bank territory under full Israeli control Jewish settlements Israeli military bases

U . S .   P R E S E N C E I N T H E M I D D L E E A S T, 1 9 6 7 – 2 0 1 5

Since World War II, the United States has become more and more deeply involved in the affairs of the Middle East, whose countries are together the world’s largest exporter of oil. Note that the ISIS- controlled territory shown here is as of the end of 2015.

How did the war in Iraq unfold in the wake of 9/11?

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attention from its real foe, Al Qaeda, which remained capable of launching terrorist attacks. They insisted that the United States could not unilaterally transform the Middle East into a bastion of democracy, as the administration claimed was its long- term aim.

The decision to begin the Iraq War split the Western alliance and inspired a massive antiwar movement throughout the world. In February 2003, between 10 million and 15 million people across the globe demonstrated against the impending war. There were large- scale protests in the United States, which brought together veterans of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era and a diverse group of young activists united in the belief that launching a war against a nation because it might pose a security threat in the future violated international law and the UN Charter.

Both traditional foes of the United States like Russia and China and tradi- tional allies like Germany and France refused to support a “preemptive” strike against Iraq. Unable to obtain approval from the United Nations for attacking Iraq, the United States went to war anyway in March 2003, with Great Britain as its sole significant ally. President Bush called the war “Operation Iraqi Free- dom.” Its purpose, he declared, was to “defend our freedom” and “bring freedom to others.” The Hussein regime proved no match for the American armed forces, with their precision bombing, satellite- guided missiles, and well- trained soldiers. Within a month, American troops occupied Baghdad. After hiding out for several months, Hussein was captured by American forces and subse- quently put on trial before an Iraqi court. Late in 2006, he was found guilty of ordering the killing of many Iraqis during his reign, and was sentenced to death and executed.

Another Vietnam?

Soon after the fall of Baghdad, a triumphant President Bush appeared on the deck of an aircraft carrier beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” But after the fall of Hussein, everything seemed to go wrong. Rather than parades welcoming American liberators, looting and chaos followed the fall of the Iraqi regime. An insurgency quickly developed that targeted Ameri- can soldiers and Iraqis cooperating with them. Sectarian violence soon swept throughout Iraq, with militias of Shiite and Sunni Muslims fighting each other. (Under Hussein, Sunnis, a minority of Iraq’s population, had dominated the government and army; now, the Shiite majority sought to exercise power and exact revenge.) Despite holding a number of elections in Iraq, the United States found it impossible to create an Iraqi government strong enough to impose order on the country.

With no end in sight to the conflict, comparisons with the American expe- rience in Vietnam became commonplace. In both wars, American policy was

THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11 AT HOME ★ 1117

made by officials who had little or no knowledge of the countries to which they were sending troops and dis- trusted State Department experts on these regions, who tended to be skep- tical about the possibility of achieving quick military and long- term political success.

The World and the War

The war marked a new departure in American foreign policy. The United States had frequently intervened uni- laterally in the affairs of Latin Ameri- can countries. But outside the Western Hemisphere it had previously been reluctant to use force except as part of an international coalition. And while the United States had exerted enor- mous influence in the Middle East since World War II, never before had it occupied a nation in the center of the world’s most volatile region.

Rarely in its history had the United States found itself so isolated from world public opinion. Initially, the war in Iraq proved to be popular in the United States. Many Americans believed the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11 and had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. The realiza- tion that in fact Hussein had no such weapons discredited the administration’s rationale for the war. By early 2007, polls showed that a large majority of Amer- icans considered the invasion of Iraq a mistake, and the war a lost cause.

T H E A F T E R M A T H O F S E P T E M B E R 1 1 A T H O M E Security and Liberty

Like earlier wars, the war on terrorism raised anew the problem of balancing security and liberty. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Congress rushed to pass the USA Patriot Act, a mammoth bill (it ran to more than 300 pages) that

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Party Obama McCain

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I S R A E L , T H E W E S T B A N K , A N D G A Z A S T R I P

How did the war on terror affect the economy and American liberties?

1118 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

few members of the House or Senate had actually read. It conferred unprece- dented powers on law- enforcement agencies charged with preventing the new, vaguely defined crime of “domestic terrorism,” including the power to wire- tap, spy on citizens, open letters, read e- mail, and obtain personal records from third parties like universities and libraries without the knowledge of a suspect. Unlike during World Wars I and II, with their campaigns of hatred against German- Americans and Japanese- Americans, the Bush administration made a point of discouraging anti- Arab and anti- Muslim sentiment. Nonetheless, at least 5,000 foreigners with Middle Eastern connections were rounded up, and more than 1,200 arrested. Many with no link to terrorism were held for months, without either a formal charge or a public notice of their fate. The administra- tion also set up a detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for persons captured in Afghanistan or otherwise accused of terrorism. More than 700 persons, the nationals of many foreign countries, were detained there.

In November 2001, the Bush administration issued an executive order authorizing the holding of secret military tribunals for noncitizens deemed to have assisted terrorism. In such trials, traditional constitutional protec- tions, such as the right of the accused to choose a lawyer and see all the evidence, would not apply. A few months later, the Justice Department declared that American citizens could be held indefinitely without charge and not allowed to see a lawyer, if the government declared them to be “enemy combatants.” Attorney General John Ashcroft declared that criti- cism of administration policies aided the country’s terrorist enemies.

The Power of the President

In the new atmosphere of heightened security, numerous court orders and reg- ulations of the 1970s, inspired by abuses of the CIA, FBI, and local police forces, were rescinded, allowing these agencies to resume surveillance of Americans without evidence that a crime had been committed. Some of these measures were authorized by Congress, but the president implemented many of them unilaterally, claiming the authority to ignore laws that restricted his power as commander- in- chief in wartime. Thus, soon after September 11, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on Ameri- cans’ telephone conversations without a court warrant, a clear violation of a law limiting the NSA to foreign intelligence gathering.

The majority of Americans seemed willing to accept the administration’s contention that restraints on time- honored liberties were necessary to fight terrorism. Others recalled previous times when wars produced limitations on civil liberties and public officials equated political dissent with lack of

THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11 AT HOME ★ 1119

patriotism: the Alien and Sedition Acts during the “ quasi- war” with France in 1798, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the severe repression of free speech and persecution of German- Americans during World War I, Japanese- American internment in World War II, and McCarthy- ism during the Cold War. These episodes underscored the fragility of principles most Americans have learned to take for granted— civil liberties and the ideal of equality before the law, regardless of race and ethnicity. The debate over lib- erty and security seemed certain to last as long as the war on terrorism itself.

The Torture Controversy

Officials of the Bush administration also insisted in the aftermath of Septem- ber 11 that the United States need not be bound by international law in pur- suing the war on terrorism. They were especially eager to sidestep the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention against Torture, which regu- late the treatment of prisoners of war and prohibit torture and other forms of physical and mental coercion. In January 2002, the Justice Department pro- duced a memorandum stating that these rules did not apply to captured mem- bers of Al Qaeda as they were “unlawful combatants,” not members of regularly constituted armies.

Amid strong protests from Secretary of State Powell and senior military offi- cers who feared that the new policy would encourage the retaliatory mistreat- ment of American prisoners of war, in April 2003 the president prohibited the use of torture except where special permission had been granted. Nonetheless, the Defense Department approved methods of interrogation that most observ- ers considered torture. In addition, the CIA set up a series of jails in foreign countries outside the traditional chain of military command and took part in the “rendition” of suspects— that is, kidnapping them and spiriting them to prisons in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and former communist states of eastern Europe, where torture is practiced.

In this atmosphere and lacking clear rules of behavior, some military personnel— in Afghanistan, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and at Guantánamo— beat prisoners who were being held for interrogation, subjected them to elec- tric shocks, let them be attacked by dogs, and forced them to strip naked and lie atop other prisoners. Photographs of the maltreatment of prisoners, cir- culated by e- mail, became public. Their exposure around the world in news- papers, on television, and on the Internet undermined the reputation of the United States as a country that adheres to standards of civilized behavior and the rule of law.

The full extent of the torture policy did not become known until 2014, when a Senate committee released a scathing report stemming from a long

How did the war on terror affect the economy and American liberties?

1120 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

investigation. It revealed a pattern of brutality and deception, while conclud- ing that no useful information had been obtained from tortured prisoners. It detailed how doctors and psychologists, in violation of their professions’ ethics, had supervised instances of torture and how the CIA had lied to President Bush and Congress about the extent of the program. Torture, it concluded, did not arise from the actions of a few “bad apples” but was systematically employed at secret U.S. prisons around the world.

The Economy under Bush

During 2001, the economy slipped into a recession— that is, it contracted rather than grew. Growth resumed at the end of the year, but, with businesses reluc- tant to make new investments after the overexpansion of the 1990s, it failed to generate new jobs. The sectors that had expanded the most in the previous decade contracted rapidly. The computer industry slashed more than 40 per- cent of its jobs during the first two years of the Bush presidency. But 90 percent of the jobs lost during the recession of 2001–2002 were in manufacturing. Despite the renewed spirit of patriotism, deindustrialization continued. Textile firms closed southern plants and shifted production to cheap- labor factories in China and India. Maytag, a manufacturer of washing machines, refrigerators, and other home appliances, announced plans to close its factory in Galesburg, Illinois, where wages averaged fifteen dollars per hour, to open a new one in Mexico, where workers earned less than one- seventh that amount.

Even after economic recovery began, the problems of traditional industries continued. Employment in steel— 520,000 in 1970—dropped to 120,000 by 2004. Late in 2005, facing declining profits and sales, major companies moved to eliminate the remnants of the post– World War II “social contract,” in which industries provided manufacturing workers with both high- paying jobs and the promise that they would be provided for in old age. Many eliminated or sharply reduced pensions and health benefits for retired workers. Bush became the first president since Herbert Hoover to see the economy lose jobs over the course of a four- year term.

T H E W I N D S O F C H A N G E The 2004 Election

With Bush’s popularity sliding because of the war in Iraq and a widespread sense that many Americans were not benefiting from economic growth, Democrats in 2004 sensed a golden opportunity to retake the White House. They nominated

THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1121

as their candidate John Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts and the first Cath- olic to run for president since John F. Kennedy in 1960. A decorated combat veteran in Vietnam, Kerry had joined the antiwar movement after leaving the army. The party hoped that Kerry’s military experience would insulate him from Republican charges that Democrats were too weak- willed to be trusted to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks, while his antiwar cre- dentials in Vietnam would appeal to voters opposed to the invasion of Iraq.

Kerry proved a surprisingly ineffective candidate. An aloof man who lacked the common touch, he failed to generate the same degree of enthusiasm among his supporters as Bush did among his. Bush won a narrow victory, with a margin of 2 percent of the popular vote and thirty- four electoral votes. The results revealed a remarkable electoral stability. Both sides spent tens of millions of dollars in advertising and mobilized new voters— nearly 20 million since 2000. But in the end, only three states voted differently than four years earlier— New Hampshire, which Kerry carried, and Iowa and New Mexico, which swung to Bush.

Bush’s Second Term

In his second inaugural address, in January 2005, Bush outlined a new Ameri- can goal—“ending tyranny in the world.” Striking a more conciliatory tone than during his first administration, he promised that the United States would not try to impose “our style of government” on others and that it would in the future seek the advice of allies. He said nothing specific about Iraq but tried to shore up falling support for the war by invoking the ideal of freedom. In his first inau- gural, in January 2001, Bush had used the words “freedom,” “free,” or “liberty” seven times. In his second, they appeared forty- nine times. Again and again, Bush insisted that the United States stands for the worldwide triumph of freedom.

But the ongoing chaos in Iraq, coupled with a spate of corruption scandals surrounding Republicans in Congress and the White House, eroded Bush’s stand- ing. Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff was convicted of perjury in connection with an investigation of the illegal “leak” to the press of the name of a CIA oper- ative whose husband had criticized the manipulation of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq. He was the first White House official to be indicted while hold- ing office since Orville Babcock, Grant’s chief of staff, in 1875. Bush’s popularity continued to decline. At one point in 2006, his approval rating fell to 31 percent.

Hurricane Katrina

A further blow to the Bush administration’s standing came in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore near New Orleans. Situated below sea level between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans has always been vulnerable to flooding. For years, scientists had predicted a

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

1122 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

catastrophe if a hurricane hit the city. But the federal government ignored requests to strengthen its levee system. When the storm hit on August 29 the levees broke, and nearly the entire city, with a population of half a million, was inundated. Nearby areas of the Loui- siana and Mississippi Gulf Coast were also hard hit.

The natural disaster quickly became a man- made one, with inept- itude evident from local government to the White House. The mayor of New Orleans had been slow to order an evac- uation, fearing this would damage the city’s tourist trade. When he finally instructed residents to leave, a day before the storm’s arrival, he neglected to provide for the thousands who did not own automobiles and were too poor to find other means of transpor- tation. The Federal Emergency Man- agement Agency (FEMA) had done almost no preparation. When the pres- ident finally visited the city, he seemed unaware of the scope of devastation. If

the Bush administration had prided itself on anything, it was competence in dealing with disaster. Katrina shattered that image.

The New Orleans Disaster

For days, vast numbers of people, most of them poor African- Americans, remained abandoned amid the floodwaters. Bodies floated in the streets and people died in city hospitals and nursing homes. By the time aid began to arrive, damage stood at $80 billion, the death toll was around 1,500, and two- thirds of the city’s population had been displaced. The televised images of misery in the streets of New Orleans shocked the world and shamed the country.

Hurricane Katrina shone a bright light on both the heroic and the less praiseworthy sides of American life. Where government failed, individual cit- izens stepped into the breach. People with boats rescued countless survivors from rooftops and attics, private donations flowed in to aid the victims, and neighboring states like Texas opened their doors to thousands of refugees.

Residents of New Orleans, stranded on a rooftop days after flood waters engulfed the city, fran- tically attempt to attract the attention of rescue helicopters.

THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1123

Like the publication of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), the hurricane’s aftermath alerted Amer- icans to the extent of poverty in the world’s richest country. Generations of state and local policies pursuing economic growth via low- wage, nonunion employment and low investment in education, health, and social welfare had produced a large impoverished population in the South. Nearly 30 percent of New Orleans’s population lived in poverty.

Battle over the Border

The attacks of September 11 and subsequent war on terror threw into sharp relief the status of American borders and borderlands, especially in the South- west. The existence of the borderland embracing parts of the United States and Mexico, with people enjoying well- developed connections with communities in both countries, has always been a source of tension and insecurity in the eyes of many Americans. Fears of terrorists crossing the border merged with older worries about undocumented immigration and the growth of Hispanic culture in the Southwest. When the Swedish vodka- maker Absolut posted an advertise- ment in Mexico showing the pre- 1848 map of Mexico and the United States, the ad angered enough Americans (who saw it on the Internet) that the company withdrew it.

The Bush and Obama administrations greatly accelerated efforts to police the border. By 2013, the number of U.S. Border Patrol officers stood at 20,000, making it the nation’s second largest police force after the New York City Police Department, and 400,000 undocumented immigrants were being deported annually, far more than in the past. Latino communities experi- enced the southwestern borderlands as increasingly militarized, since the “bor- der” stretched far inland and persons accused of having entered the coun- try illegally— almost all of them from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—could be apprehended many miles north of Mexico. None- theless, some Americans in the region, claiming that the federal government was not doing enough to enforce the border’s status as a dividing line, set up unofficial militias to police the area. Ironically, a major result of tighter con- trols over border crossing was to reduce

In 2015, the artist JR took photographs of immi- grants and affixed them to the walls of New York City buildings and to other public places. This image is of Kamola Akilova, from Uzbekistan. The purpose, according to the artist, is to take immigrants out of the shadows and make people aware of their presence in the city.

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

1124 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

back- and- forth migration. Given the diminishing chance of aliens, legal or not, visiting their original homes and then returning, more and more simply stayed put after entering the United States.

In the continuing political debate over immigration, as in other issues of the day, long- standing political divi- sions continue to simmer. Who has the right to determine the status of millions of undocumented workers— the president, Congress, the states, the courts, or private employers?

In the spring of 2006, the immigra- tion issue suddenly burst again onto

the center stage of politics. As we have seen, the Hart- Celler Act of 1965 led to a radical shift in the origins of those entering the United States, and espe- cially the rapid growth of the Hispanic population. Many of these newcomers bypassed traditional immigrant destinations and headed for areas in the Mid- west, small- town New England, and the Upper South. Racial and ethnic diver- sity was now a fact of life in the American heartland.

Alongside legal immigrants, undocumented newcomers made their way to the United States, mostly from Mexico. At the end of 2005, it was estimated, there were 11 million illegal aliens in the United States, 7 million of them members of the workforce. Economists disagree about their impact. It seems clear that the presence of large numbers of uneducated, low- skilled workers pushes down wages at the bottom of the economic ladder, especially affect- ing African- Americans. On the other hand, immigrants both legal and illegal receive regular paychecks, spend money, and pay taxes. They fill jobs for which American workers seem to be unavailable because the wages are so low. It is estimated that more than one- fifth of construction workers, domestic workers, and agricultural workers are in the United States illegally.

In 1986, the Reagan administration granted amnesty— that is, the right to remain in the United States and become citizens— to 3 million illegal immi- grants. During the 1990s, conservatives in states with significant populations of illegal immigrants, especially California, called for a tough crackdown on their entry and rights within the United States. As governor of Texas, by contrast, George W. Bush managed to win Hispanic support and downplayed the immi- gration issue. But in 2006, with many Americans convinced that the United States had lost control of its borders and that immigration was in part responsi- ble for the stagnation of real wages, the House of Representatives approved a bill

Members of the Texas Minutemen patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border. Claiming that the federal government was failing to prevent undocu- mented immigrants from entering the United States, vigilantes tried to do so on their own.

THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1125

making it a felony to be in the country illegally and a crime to offer aid to illegal immigrants.

The response was utterly unexpected: a series of massive demonstrations in the spring of 2006 by immigrants— legal and illegal— and their support- ers, demanding the right to remain in the country as citizens. In cities from New York to Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Nashville experienced the largest public demon- stration in its history, a march of more than 10,000 mostly Hispanic immigrants. All Congress could agree on, however, was a measure to build a 700-mile wall along part of the U.S.-Mexico border. The immigration issue was at a stalemate, where it remains today, its ultimate resolution impossible to predict.

Islam, America, and the “Clash of Civilizations”

The events of September 11, 2001 placed new pressures on religious liberty. Even before the terrorist attacks, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington had published a widely noted book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), which argued that with the Cold War over, a new global conflict impended between Western and Islamic “civilizations.”

Many readers, including politicians, interpreted Huntington, not entirely correctly, as reducing politics and culture to a single characteristic— in this case, religion— forever static, divorced from historical development. (“Islam,” in fact, consists of well over a billion people, in very different countries ranging from South Asia to the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.) None- theless, in the aftermath of September 11, the formula that pitted a freedom- loving United States against militant, authoritarian Muslims became widely popular as a way of making sense of the terrorist attacks.

What did this mean for the nearly 5 million Americans who practiced the Muslim religion? President Bush insisted that the war on terror was not a war against Islam. But many Americans found it difficult to separate the two, even though most American Muslims were as appalled by the terrorist attacks as their fellow countrymen. Some critics claimed that Islam was fundamentally incompatible with American life— a position reminiscent of prejudice in the nineteenth century against Catholics and Mormons.

The Constitution and Liberty

As in the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives proved far more successful in imple- menting their views in economic and foreign policy than in the ongoing cul- ture wars. Two significant Supreme Court decisions in June 2003 revealed how the largely conservative justices had come to accept that the social revolution that began during the 1960s could not be undone.

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

1126 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

In two cases arising from challenges to the admissions policies of the Uni- versity of Michigan, the Supreme Court issued its most important rulings on affirmative action since the Bakke case twenty- five years earlier. A 5-4 majority upheld the right of colleges and universities to take race into account in admis- sions decisions. Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued that such institutions have a legitimate interest in creating a “diverse” student body to enhance education. O’Connor was strongly influenced by briefs filed by corporate executives and retired military officers. In today’s world, they argued, the United States cannot compete in the global economy or maintain effective armed services without drawing its college- trained business and mili- tary leaders from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In the second decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, a 6-3 majority declared uncon- stitutional a Texas law making homosexual acts a crime. The majority opinion overturned the Court’s 1986 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had upheld a similar Georgia law. The Lawrence decision paved the way for an even more momentous Supreme Court ruling in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, which over- turned state laws barring marriages for same- sex couples. Public opinion on this question had evolved with remarkable rapidity, especially among younger Americans. In 2003, two- thirds of Americans opposed legalizing such mar- riages; by the time of the 2015 ruling, over 60 percent were in favor.

Both decisions relating to gay Americans, written by Justice Anthony Ken- nedy, repudiated the conservative view that constitutional interpretation must rest either on the “original intent” of the founders and authors of constitutional amendments or on a narrow reading of the document’s text. Instead, Kennedy, generally a conservative, reaffirmed the liberal view of the Constitution as a living document whose protections expand as society changes. “The nature of injustice is such,” he wrote in Obergefell, “that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protect- ing the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

The Court and the President

Nor did the Supreme Court prove receptive to President Bush’s claim of author- ity to disregard laws and treaties and to suspend constitutional protections of individual liberties. In a series of decisions, the Court reaffirmed the rule of law both for American citizens and for foreigners held prisoner by the United States.

In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in 2004, the Court considered the lawsuit of Yasir Hamdi, an American citizen who had moved to Saudi Arabia and been captured in Afghanistan. Hamdi was imprisoned in a military jail in South Carolina

THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1127

without charge or the right to see a lawyer. The Court ruled that he had a right to a judicial hearing. “A state of war,” wrote Sandra Day O’Connor for the 8-1 majority, “is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” Even Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court’s most promi- nent conservative, rejected the president’s claim of authority to imprison a cit- izen at will as antithetical to “the very core of liberty.” After claiming in court that Hamdi was so dangerous that he could not even be allowed a hearing, the administration allowed him to return to Saudi Arabia on condition that he relinquish his American citizenship.

By the time the next significant case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, came before the Court in 2006, President Bush had appointed two new justices— Chief Justice John Roberts, to replace William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, and Samuel Alito Jr., who succeeded the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor. The Court was clearly becoming more conservative. But in June 2006, by a 5-3 margin (with Roberts not participating because he had ruled on the case while serving on an appeals court), the justices offered a stinging rebuke to the key presumptions of the Bush administration— that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to pris- oners captured in the war on terrorism, that the president can unilaterally set up secret military tribunals in which defendants have very few if any rights, and that the Constitution does not apply at Guantánamo prison. Congress, the majority noted, had never authorized such tribunals, and they clearly violated the protections afforded to prisoners of war by the Geneva Conventions, which, the Court declared, was the law of the land.

In June 2008, the Supreme Court rebuffed the Bush administration’s strat- egy of denying detainees at Guantánamo Bay the normal protections guaran- teed by the Constitution. Written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the 5-4 decision in Boumediene v. Bush affirmed the detainees’ right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. “The laws and Constitution are designed,” Kennedy wrote, “to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” Security, he added, con- sists not simply in military might, but “in fidelity to freedom’s first principles,” including freedom from arbitrary arrest and the right of a person to go to court to challenge his or her imprisonment.

The Midterm Elections of 2006

With President Bush’s popularity having plummeted because of the war in Iraq and the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Congress beset by scandal after scan- dal, and public- opinion polls revealing that a majority of Americans believed the country to be “on the wrong track,” Democrats expected to reap major gains in the congressional elections of 2006. They were not disappointed. In a sweeping repudiation of the administration, voters gave Democrats control of

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

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both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994. In January 2007, Demo- crat Nancy Pelosi of California became the first female Speaker of the House in American history.

In January 2009, as Bush’s presidency came to an end, only 22 percent of Americans approved of his performance in office— the lowest figure since such polls began in the mid- twentieth century. Indeed, it was difficult to think of many substantive achievements during Bush’s eight years in office. His foreign policy alienated most of the world, leaving the United States militarily weak- ened and diplomatically isolated. Because of the tax cuts for the wealthy that he pushed through Congress during his first term, as well as the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the large budget surplus he had inherited was trans- formed into an immense deficit. The percentage of Americans living in poverty and those without health insurance rose substantially during Bush’s presidency.

The Housing Bubble

At one point in his administration, Bush might have pointed to the economic recovery that began in 2001 as a major success. But late in 2007, the economy entered a recession. And in 2008, the American banking system suddenly found itself on the brink of collapse, threatening to drag the national and world econ- omies into a repeat of the Great Depression.

The roots of the crisis of 2008 lay in a combination of public and private policies that favored economic speculation, free- wheeling spending, and get- rich- quick schemes over more traditional avenues to economic growth and personal advancement. For years, the Federal Reserve Bank kept interest rates at unprecedented low levels, first to help the economy recover from the burst- ing of the technology bubble in 2000 and then to enable more Americans to borrow money to purchase homes. The result was a new bubble, as housing prices rose rapidly. Consumer indebtedness also rose dramatically as people who owned houses took out second mortgages, or simply spent to the limits on their credit cards. In mid- 2008, when the median family income was around $50,000, the average American family owed an $84,000 home mortgage, $14,000 in auto and student loans, $8,500 to credit card companies, and $10,000 in home equity loans.

All this borrowing fueled increased spending. An immense influx of cheap goods from China accelerated the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States (which continued their decline despite the overall economic recovery) but also enabled Americans to keep buying, even though for most, household income stagnated during the Bush years. Indeed, China helped to finance the American spending spree by buying up hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of federal bonds— in effect loaning money to the United States so that it could pur- chase Chinese- made goods. Banks and other lending institutions issued more

THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1129

and more “subprime” mortgages— risky loans to people who lacked the income to meet their monthly payments. The initially low interest rates on these loans were set to rise dramatically after a year or two. Banks assumed that home prices would keep rising, and if they had to foreclose, they could easily resell the prop- erty at a profit.

Wall Street bankers developed complex new ways of repackaging and sell- ing these mortgages to investors. Insurance companies, including the world’s largest, American International Group (AIG), insured these new financial prod- ucts against future default. Credit rating agencies gave these securities their highest ratings, even though they were based on loans that clearly would never be repaid. Believing that the market must be left to regulate itself, the Federal Reserve Bank and other regulatory agencies did nothing to slow the speculative frenzy. Banks and investment firms reported billions of dollars in profits, and rewarded their executives with unheard- of bonuses.

The Great Recession

In 2006 and 2007, overbuilding had reached the point where home prices began to fall. More and more home owners found themselves owing more money than their homes were worth. As mortgage rates reset, increasing num- bers of borrowers defaulted— that is, they could no longer meet their monthly mortgage payments. The value of the new mortgage- based securities fell pre- cipitously. Banks suddenly found themselves with billions of dollars of worth- less investments on their books. In 2008, the situation became a full- fledged crisis, as banks stopped making loans, business dried up, and the stock mar- ket collapsed. Once above 14,000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged to around 8,000—the worst percentage decline since 1931. Lehman Brothers, a venerable investment house, recorded a $2.3 billion loss and went out of exis- tence, in history’s biggest bankruptcy. Leading banks seemed to be on the verge of failure. With the value of their homes and stock market accounts in free fall, Americans cut back on spending, leading to business failures and a rapid rise in unemployment. By the end of 2008, 2.5 million jobs had been lost— the most in any year since the end of World War II.

In the last three months of 2008, and again in the first three of 2009, the gross domestic product of the United States decreased by 6 percent— a remarkably steep contraction. Even worse than the economic meltdown was the meltdown of con- fidence as millions of Americans lost their jobs and/or their homes and saw their retirement savings and pensions, if invested in the stock market, disappear. In April 2009, the recession that began in December 2007 became the longest since the Great Depression.

In the Great Recession, the mortgage crisis affected minorities the most. Many had been steered by banks into subprime mortgages even when they had

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M

1130 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

From Opinion of the Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)

In 2015, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment establishes a constitutional right to marriage for gay Americans. The ruling reflected a remarkably rapid shift in public opinion regarding gay marriage in the previous few years. Written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the majority opinion included a powerful exposition of the meaning of freedom in the early twenty- first century.

From their beginning to their most recent page, annals of human history reveal the tran- scendent importance of marriage. . . . Rising from the most basic human needs, mar- riage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations. . . .

The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. That institution— even as confined to opposite- sex relations— has evolved over time. For example, mar- riage was once viewed as an arrangement by the couple’s parents based on political, religious, and financial concerns; but by the time of the Nation’s founding it was under- stood to be a voluntary contract between a man and a woman. . . . As the role and status of women changed, the institution further evolved. Under the centuries- old doctrine of coverture, a married man and woman were treated by the State as a single, male- dominated legal entity. As women gained legal, political, and property rights, and as society began to understand that women have their own equal dignity, the law of cover- ture was abandoned. . . .

New dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations, often through perspectives that begin in pleas of protests. . . .

This dynamic can be seen in the Nation’s experiences with the rights of gays and lesbians. Until the mid- 20th century, same- sex intimacy long had been condemned as immoral by the state itself in most Western nations. . . . Only in recent years have psy- chiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable. . . .

The identification and protection of fundamental rights is an enduring part of the judicial duty to interpret the Constitution. . . . The nature of injustice is such that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal structure, a claim to liberty must be addressed. . . .

The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and . . . couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.

VOICES OF FREEDOM ★ 1131

From Barack Obama, Eulogy at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (2015)

In the summer of 2015, the nation was shocked by the murder of nine black parish- ioners in a black church in Charleston by a white supremacist gunman. President Obama traveled to the city to deliver a eulogy for one of the victims, Clementa Pinck- ney, the church’s pastor and a member of the South Carolina Senate. His speech reflected on the history of race relations and the condition of black America fifty years after the height of the civil rights revolution.

The church is and always has been the center of African American life . . . a place to call our own in a too- often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships. . . .

There’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, . . . a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slav- ery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes. . . . A sacred place, this church, not just for blacks, not just for Christians but for every American who cares about the steady expansion. . . . of human rights and human dignity in this country, a foundation stone for liberty and justice for all. . . .

We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history, but he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress . . . , an act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. . . .

For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the pres- ent. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty . . . or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal-justice system and leads us to make sure that that system’s not infected with bias. . . .

None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight. . . . Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again. . . . That’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prej- udice that still infects our society. . . . What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free, too.

QUESTIONS

1. How does Justice Kennedy believe we should understand the meaning of freedom?

2. Why does President Obama believe that the freedom of some Americans is intercon- nected with the freedom of others?

3. What do these documents suggest about how much has changed in American life in the past half- century and how much has not changed?

1132 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

the assets and income to qualify for more traditional, lower- cost loans. As a result, foreclosures were highest in minority areas, and the gains blacks, Asians, and Hispanics had made in home ownership between 1995 and 2004 now eroded. In 2012, Wells Fargo Bank, the nation’s largest home mort- gage lender, agreed to pay $175 mil- lion to settle claims that its brokers had charged higher fees to blacks and Hispanics who borrowed money to purchase homes during the housing bubble than to whites with compara- ble incomes, and pushed the minori- ties into risky subprime mortgages.

“A Conspiracy against the Public”

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wrote: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the

conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” This certainly seemed an apt description of the behavior of leading bankers and investment houses whose greed helped to bring down the American economy. Like the scandals of the 1920s and 1990s, those of the Bush era damaged confidence in the eth- ics of corporate leaders. Indeed, striking parallels existed between these three decades— the get- rich- quick ethos, the close connection between business and government, the passion for deregulation, and widespread corruption.

Damaged by revelations of corporate misdeeds, the reputation of stockbro- kers and bankers fell to lows last seen during the Great Depression. One poll showed that of various social groups, bankers ranked third from the bottom in public esteem— just above prostitutes and convicted felons. Resentment was fueled by the fact that Wall Street had long since abandoned the idea that pay should be linked to results. By the end of 2008, the worst year for the stock market since the Depression, Wall Street firms had fired 240,000 employees. But they also paid out $20 billion in bonuses to top executives. Even the exec- utives of Lehman Brothers, a company that went bankrupt (and, it later turned out, had shortchanged New York City by hundreds of millions of dollars in

These graphs offer a vivid visual illustration of the steep decline in the American economy in 2008 and the first part of 2009, and the slow recovery to 2012.

F I G U R E   2 8 . 1 P O RT R A I T O F A R E C E S S I O N

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THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1133

corporate and other taxes), received $5.7 billion in bonuses in 2007 and 2008. In 2010, Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street banking and investment firm, paid a fine of half a billion dollars to settle charges that it had knowingly marketed to clients mortgage- based securities it knew were bound to fail, and then in effect bet on their failure. (This was like a real- estate agency selling an unsuspecting customer a house with faulty wiring and then taking out insurance so that the agency would be paid when the house burned down.)

Overall, during the next few years, an incredible litany of malfeasance by the world’s largest banks became public. Between 2009 and 2015, major banks, American and foreign, were forced by their respective governments to pay fines totaling in excess of $100 billion for such actions as facilitating tax evasion by wealthy clients, fixing foreign currency exchange rates and international inter- est rates to boost their own profits, often at the expense of their customers, and misleading regulators about their activities. Yet bank profits are so large that the institutions accepted these fines as simply a minor cost of doing business. Even when J. P. Morgan Chase and Citibank pleaded guilty to felony conspir- acy charges, no meaningful punishment followed. No individual executive was charged with a crime, and the Securities and Exchange Commission granted waivers from penalties that are supposed to punish criminal behavior, such as being barred from certain kinds of financial transactions.

It was also revealed that Bernard Madoff, a Wall Street investor who claimed to have made enormous profits for his clients, had in fact run a Ponzi scheme in which investors who wanted to retrieve their money were paid with funds from new participants. Madoff sent fictitious monthly financial statements to his clients but he never actually made stock purchases for them. When the scheme collapsed, Madoff ’s investors suffered losses amounting to around $50 billion. In 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 150 years in prison. In some ways, Madoff ’s scheme was a metaphor for the Amer- ican economy at large over the previous decade. Its growth had been based on borrowing from others and spending money people did not have. The popular musical group Coldplay related what had happened:

I used to rule the world. . . . I discovered that my castles stand On pillars of salt and pillars of sand.

The Collapse of Market Fundamentalism

The crisis exposed the dark side of market fundamentalism— the ethos of dereg- ulation that had dominated world affairs for the preceding thirty years. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank from 1987 to 2006, had steered

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

1134 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

the American economy through crises ranging from the stock market collapse of 1987 to the terrorist attacks of 2001. Greenspan had presided over much of the era of deregulation, artificially low interest rates, and excessive borrowing and spending. He and his successors had promoted the housing bubble and saw all sorts of speculative behavior flourish with no governmental intervention. In effect, they allowed securities firms to regulate themselves.

In 2008, Greenspan admitted to Congress that there had been a “flaw” in his long- held conviction that free markets would automatically produce the best results for all and that regulation would damage banks, Wall Street, and the mortgage market. He himself, he said, was in a state of “shocked disbelief,” as the crisis turned out to be “much broader than anything I could have imag- ined.” Greenspan’s testimony seemed to mark the end of an era. Every president from Ronald Reagan onward had lectured the rest of the world on the need to adopt the American model of unregulated economic competition, and berated countries like Japan and Germany for assisting failing businesses. Now, the American model lay in ruins and a new role for government in regulating eco- nomic activity seemed inevitable.

Bush and the Crisis

In the fall of 2008, with the presidential election campaign in full swing, the Bush administration seemed unable to come up with a response to the crisis. In keeping with the free market ethos, it allowed Lehman Brothers to fail. But this immediately created a domino effect, with the stock prices of other banks and investment houses collapsing, and the administration quickly reversed course. It persuaded a reluctant Congress to appropriate $700 billion to bail out other floundering firms. Insurance companies like AIG, banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, and giant financial companies like the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (popularly known as Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), which insured most mortgages in the country, were so interconnected with other institutions that their col- lapse would drive the economy into a full- fledged depression. Through the federal bailout, taxpayers in effect took temporary ownership of these compa- nies, absorbing the massive losses created by their previous malfeasance. Giant banks and investment houses that received public money redirected some of it to enormous bonuses to top employees. But despite the bailout, the health of the banking system remained fragile.

The crisis also revealed the limits of the American “safety net” compared with other industrialized countries. In western Europe, workers who lose their jobs typically receive many months of unemployment insurance amounting to a significant percentage of their lost wages. In the United States, only one- third

THE WINDS OF CHANGE ★ 1135

of out- of- work persons even qualify for unemployment insurance, and it runs out after a few months. The abolition of “welfare” (the national obligation to assist the neediest Americans) during the Clinton administration left the American safety net a patchwork of a few national programs like food stamps, supplemented by locally administered aid. The poor were dependent on aid from the states, which found their budgets collapsing as revenues from prop- erty and sales taxes dried up. Hard- pressed for cash, states used their ability to turn away applicants, greatly enhanced by the welfare reform of the 1990s, to save money. In 2012, only one in five poor children received cash aid, the lowest percentage in half a century.

The 2008 Campaign

In 2008, Barack Obama faced Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, in the general election. At age seventy- two, McCain was the oldest man ever to run for president. He surprised virtually everyone by choosing as his running mate Sarah Palin, the little- known governor of Alaska, in part as an attempt to woo Democratic women disappointed at their party’s rejection of Hillary Clinton, who had sought the Democratic nomination. Palin quickly went on the attack, accusing Democrats of being unpatriotic, lacking traditional values, and not representing the “real America.” This proved extremely popular with the Republican Party’s conservative base. But her performances in speeches and interviews soon made it clear that she lacked familiarity with many of the domestic and foreign issues a new administration would confront. Her selec- tion raised questions among many Americans about McCain’s judgment.

But the main obstacles for the McCain campaign were President Bush’s low popularity and the financial crisis that reached bottom in September and Octo- ber. Obama’s promise of change seemed more appealing than ever. On elec- tion day, he swept to victory with 53 percent of the popular vote and a large majority in the electoral college. His election redrew the nation’s political map. Obama carried not only Democratic strongholds in New England, the mid- Atlantic states, the industrial Midwest, and the West Coast but also states that had been reliably Republican for years. He cracked the solid South, winning Vir- ginia, North Carolina, and Florida. He did extremely well in suburbs through- out the country. He even carried Indiana, where Bush had garnered 60 percent of the vote in 2004, but which now was hard hit by unemployment. Obama put together a real “rainbow” coalition, winning nearly the entire black vote and a large majority of Hispanics (who helped him to carry Colorado, Nevada, and Florida). He did exceptionally well among young voters. Obama carried every age group except persons over sixty- five. Thus, he was elected even though he received only 43 percent of the nation’s white vote.

What events eroded support for President Bush’s policies during his second term?

1136 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

Obama’s victory seemed to mark the end of a political era that began with Richard Nixon and his “southern strategy.” In the wake of the Iraq War, the eco- nomic meltdown, and the enthusiasm aroused by Obama’s candidacy, Republi- can appeals to patriotism, low taxes, and resentment against the social changes sparked by the 1960s seemed oddly out of date. Democrats not only regained the presidency but also ended up with 60 of the 100 seats in the Senate and a large majority in the House. In an increasingly multiethnic, multiracial nation, winning a majority of the white vote no longer translated into national vic- tory. Republicans would have to find a way to appeal to the voters of the new America.

Obama’s First Inauguration

Few presidents have come into office facing as serious a set of problems as Barack Obama. The economy was in crisis and the country involved in two wars. But Americans, including many who had not voted for him, viewed Obama’s election as a cause for optimism. Two days after his victory, a poll found two- thirds of Americans describing themselves as proud of the result, and 60 percent excited at the prospect of an Obama administration.

On January 20, 2009, a day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and more than forty- five years after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Obama was inaugu- rated as president. More than 1 million people traveled to Washington to view the historic event. In his inaugural address (see the full text in the Appendix), Obama offered a stark rebuke to eight years of Bush policies and, more broadly, to the premises that had shaped government policy since the election of Reagan. He promised a foreign policy based on diplomacy rather than unilateral force, pledged to protect the environment, spoke of the need to combat income inequal- ity and lack of access to health care, and blamed a culture of “greed and irresponsi- bility” for helping to bring on the economic crisis. He promised to renew respect for the Constitution. Unlike Bush, Obama said little about freedom in his speech, other than to note that the country could enjoy liberty and security at the same time rather than having to choose between them. Instead of freedom, he spoke of community and responsibility. His address harked back to the revolutionary- era ideal of putting the common good before individual self- interest.

O B A M A I N O F F I C E In many ways, Obama’s first policy initiatives lived up to the promise of change. In his first three months, he announced plans to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, barred the use of torture, launched a diplomatic initiative to repair relations with the Muslim world, reversed the previous

OBAMA IN OFFICE ★ 1137

A cartoon in the Boston Globe suggests the progress that has been made since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger.

administration’s executive orders lim- iting women’s reproductive rights, and abandoned Bush’s rhetoric about a God- given American mission to spread freedom throughout the world. When Supreme Court justice David Souter announced his retirement, Obama named Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman in the Court’s history, to replace him. He also appointed his rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state.

Obama’s first budget recalled the New Deal and Great Society. Break- ing with the Reagan- era motto, “Gov- ernment is the problem, not the solution,” it anticipated active government support for health- care reform, clean energy, and public education, paid for in part by allowing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy to expire in 2010. He pushed through Congress a “stimulus” package amounting to nearly $800 billion in new government spending— for construction projects, the extension of unem- ployment benefits, and aid to the states to enable them to balance their bud- gets. The largest single spending appropriation in American history, the bill was meant to pump money into the economy in order to save and create jobs and to ignite a resumption of economic activity.

A year into his presidency, in the spring of 2010, Obama had to deal with one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. An oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico owned by British Petroleum (BP) exploded, spewing millions of gallons of oil into the sea. The oil washed up on the beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, killing marine life, birds, and other animals and devastating the Gulf tourist industry. It took months to stop the oil from rushing into the Gulf, and much longer to restore the beaches.

The Gulf oil spill illustrated some of the downsides of globalization and deregulation. The government agency charged with inspections was so cozy with the oil industry that it allowed the companies to set their own safety stan- dards and looked the other way in the face of BP’s long record of cutting corners, safety violations, and accidents. The rig that exploded had been built in South Korea and was operated by a Swiss company under contract to BP. Primary responsibility for safety rested not with the United States but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a tiny, impoverished nation in the Pacific Ocean, where the rig was registered. Thus, BP enjoyed freedom from the effective oversight that might have prevented the disaster.

What kinds of change did voters hope for when they elected Barack Obama?

1138 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

The Health Care Debate

For most of Obama’s first year in office, congressional debate revolved around a plan to restructure the nation’s health- care system so as to provide insur- ance coverage to the millions of Americans who lacked it, and to end abusive practices by insurance companies, such as their refusal to cover patients with existing illnesses. After months of increasingly bitter debate, in March 2010, Congress passed a sweeping health- care bill that required all Americans to purchase health insurance and most businesses to provide it to their employ- ees. It also offered subsidies to persons of modest incomes so they could afford insurance, and required insurance companies to accept all applicants. The measure aroused strong partisan opposition. Claiming that it amounted to a “government takeover” of the health- care industry (even though plans for a government- run insurance program had been dropped from the bill), every Republican in Congress voted against the bill.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, Republicans remained bitterly opposed to the new law, and vowed to repeal it when they could. Indeed, in Octo- ber 2013, in an effort to get the president to abandon the health- care law, the Republican- dominated Congress shut down the federal government— a tactic that, as during the Clinton administration, backfired. By 2015, what came to be known as Obamacare proved to be a remarkably successful pol- icy. Sixteen million uninsured Americans had obtained medical coverage under its provisions, most of them less affluent Americans who received some sort of government subsidy. The number of uninsured would have been even lower except that twenty- three Republican- controlled states refused to expand Medicaid coverage for their poorest residents, as the new law made possible, even though nearly all the cost would have been covered by the fed- eral government. Moreover, despite a general conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the justices twice rejected challenges to the constitutionality of Obamacare.

Financial Reform

Another significant measure, enacted in July 2010, was a financial regulatory reform law that sought to place under increased federal oversight many of the transactions that had helped create the economic crisis. Although the details remained to be worked out through specific regulations, the law represented a reversal of the policies of the past fifty years that had given banks a free hand in their operations. But it did not require a breakup of banks deemed “too big to fail,” and left open the possibility of future taxpayer bailouts of these institu- tions. Moreover, officials responsible for issuing new regulations watered them down when banks complained.

OBAMA IN OFFICE ★ 1139

Taken together, the measures of Obama’s first year and a half in office saw the most dramatic domestic reform legislation since the Great Society of the 1960s. “Change”—the slogan of his election campaign— was significant, but did not go far enough for many of his supporters. The health- care bill failed to include a “public option,” in which the government itself would offer medical insurance to those who desired it (much like Medicare for elderly Americans). Obama chose his economic advisers from Wall Street, who underestimated the depth of the crisis and continued the Bush administration policy of pouring taxpayer money into the banks and assuming responsibility for many of their debts. Little was done to help home owners facing foreclosure. During 2008 and 2009, the economy lost 8 million jobs. It would take a long time to recover them.

The Problem of Inequality

In 2014 and 2015, the economic recovery finally gathered momentum, although growth remained weak by historic standards. Nonetheless, consumer spending and confidence were on the rise, unemployment was falling, home sales were rising, and the stock market reached record highs. The one exception to these favorable trends, however, was a significant one— Americans’ wages remained stagnant. In fact, because of the growing number of low- paid jobs, the continuing decline in the power of unions, and the rising value of stocks, owned primarily by upper- income Americans, virtually the entire benefit of the recovery that began in 2009 went to the top 1 percent of earners, while the real incomes of most families declined, deepening the long- term trend toward greater and greater economic inequality. In 2013, the top 10 percent of Amer- icans received nearly half the total income. Meanwhile, the percentage of families in the middle class continued to shrink while those living in poverty continued to grow.

At the bottom of the social scale, Americans employed by some of the coun- try’s largest corporations, including McDonald’s and Wal- Mart, received piti- ably low wages, at or just slightly above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (a figure lower, in income adjusted for inflation, than fifty years before). Many of these workers were assigned to “flexible” schedules, which means that they did not even know the number of hours they would work each week until a few days prior, making planning for child care and other obligations almost impossible. Nearly three- quarters of people helped by programs designed for the poor, such as food stamps and Medicaid, include a working member, so in effect taxpayers are subsidizing the low- wage policies of highly profitable cor- porations by enabling their employees to survive. McDonald’s had a helpful website to assist its workers in making ends meet. It urged them to try to have two full- time jobs, spend no more than twenty dollars per month on health insurance, and break food into small pieces so that it would seem to go further.

What kinds of change did voters hope for when they elected Barack Obama?

1140 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

The Occupy Movement

The problem of inequality burst into public discussion in 2011. On Septem- ber 17, a few dozen young protesters unrolled sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park, in the heart of New York City’s financial district. They vowed to remain— to Occupy Wall Street as they put it— as a protest against growing economic inequality, declining opportunity, and malfeasance by the banks.

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of people camped out in the park and thousands took part in rallies organized by the Occupy movement. Similar encampments sprang up in cities across the country. Using social media and the Internet, the Occupy movement spread its message far and wide. Although the technology was new, the movement bore some resemblance to previous efforts at social change, including the sit- down strikes of the 1930s and the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. In the spring of 2012, public authorities began to evict the protesters and the movement seemed to dissipate. But its language, especially the charge that “the 1 per- cent” (the very richest Americans) dominated political and economic life, had entered the political vocabulary. The Occupy movement tapped into a wide- spread feeling of alienation, especially among the young, a sense that society’s rules have been fixed in favor of those at the top.

And it spurred a movement among low- paid workers, especially in fast- food establishments, demanding a rise in the hourly minimum wage. States and cities are allowed to establish higher minimum- wage rates than the fed- eral government and many do so, although some large states, including Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania, make no such provision. In 2014, Seattle and Los Angeles raised their minimums to $15 per hour. New York State followed in 2015 by announcing a $15 minimum for workers in fast- food restaurants. The vast University of California system also adopted $15 as the minimum wage for all nonacademic workers on its campuses. What began as a quixotic movement of the least empowered workers against some of the country’s most prominent corporations had achieved some remarkable successes.

Rising inequality had profound social consequences. The United States was by far the world’s most unequal developed economy. In a variety of social sta- tistics, it was falling further and further behind other advanced countries. More than one- fifth of American children lived in poverty in 2015, the highest figure in the industrialized world. In 1980, the United States ranked thirteenth among advanced countries in life expectancy at birth; in 2015 it ranked twenty- ninth. In a reversal of the historic pattern, the size of the American middle class con- tinued to shrink, average family income and the number of low- income stu- dents graduating from college trailed that of several other countries, and social mobility— the opportunity for people to move up the economic ladder— stood at a lower level in the United States than in western Europe.

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY ★ 1141

T H E O B A M A P R E S I D E N C Y The Continuing Economic Crisis

Although the recession officially ended in mid- 2009, economic growth was so anemic that unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout Obama’s first term in office.

The deep recession and feeble recovery exacerbated structural trends long under way. Manufacturing employment, which once offered a route into the middle class for those (mostly men) with limited educations, rebounded from its low point of 2009 but remained several million jobs lower than in 2000. Job growth was concentrated at either the high or low end of the pay scale. The financial sector laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, but the incomes of

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

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those who kept their jobs remained extremely high. The fastest- growing job cat- egories, however, were those that paid low wages. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2012 projected that over the next decade, the largest areas of job growth would be in office work, sales, food preparation and service, child care, home health aides, and janitors— every one of which paid less than the median annual wage. The median income of a male full- time worker in 2010 was lower, adjusted for inflation, than in 1973. Rising income inequality afflicted coun- tries across the globe, but among industrialized nations the United States had the highest rate of all.

African- Americans suffered most severely from the recession. Unlike other Americans, blacks tended to own few if any stocks, so did not benefit when the stock market recovered many of its recession losses. All their family wealth was in their homes, and so the collapse of the housing bubble devastated their economic status. In 2012, the median family wealth of white families was $110,000, that of black only $6,300. Black unemployment remained nearly double that of whites, as did the poverty rate. Two- thirds of all black children lived in low- income families. While the civil rights movement had produced a dramatic increase in the number of well- paid black professionals (like Obama himself, a lawyer), ordinary African- Americans had achieved economic gains by moving into jobs in manufacturing and government (the latter account- ing for 20 percent of black employment), the two sectors hardest hit by the recession.

Postracial America?

Despite this grim reality, Obama’s election spurred discussions among politi- cal commentators and ordinary Americans that the nation had finally put the legacy of racial inequality behind it. Talk proliferated of a new, “postracial” America, in which racial differences no longer affected public policy or pri- vate attitudes. In 2013, the Supreme Court employed this very logic in a 5-4 decision that invalidated the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a mile- stone of the civil rights era. Since states identified in the law, most of them in the Old South, no longer discriminated on the basis of race, the majority declared, they should no longer be required to gain permission from the Jus- tice Department before changing their election laws. The decision unleashed a flood of laws, such as limits on early voting and requiring voters to possess state- issued identification. These measures were intended to limit the right to vote for poor people of all races, many of whom do not possess driver’s licenses or other official IDs.

A series of events involving the death of unarmed black men at the hands of police or other authorities also suggested that any self- congratulation about the

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY ★ 1143

end of racial inequality was premature. In 2012, Trayvon Martin, a black teen- ager walking through a Florida neighborhood to visit his father, was accosted by George Zimmerman, a white member of the “neighborhood watch.” An altercation followed in which Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. Subse- quently, a jury acquitted Zimmerman of all charges related to the incident. In 2014, Eric Garner, a forty- four- year- old black man selling cigarettes on the street in Staten Island, a borough of New York City, died after being wrestled to the ground and choked by police. Although “choke holds” were illegal, a grand jury declined to bring charges. In ensuing months other such incidents followed including the shooting death by a Cleveland police officer of a twelve- year- old black child who was playing with a toy pistol in a park, the death of a twenty- five- year- old black man in Baltimore while in a police van after being arrested for carrying a small knife (legal in Maryland), and the fatal shooting in the back of a black man who ran from police after a traffic stop in North Charleston, South Carolina. In Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, Michael Brown, an unarmed black eighteen- year- old, was shot in disputed circumstances by a white police officer, whom a grand jury subsequently cleared of potential charges. In Baltimore and North Charleston, by contrast, local district attorneys moved to indict the police implicated in these cities’ deaths.

This cascade of events spurred the emergence of a national movement, Black Lives Matter, which demanded that police practices be changed and

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

Heavily armed police confront a resident of Ferguson, Missouri, during demonstrations there.

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officers who used excessive force be held accountable. It gave public voice to the countless African- Americans who had experienced disrespect, harassment, or violence at the hands of police. The movement used social media and current technology to organize protests and disseminate videos of encounters between black persons and the police. The impact of these images had precedents, notably in the role of television in bringing the war in Vietnam and violent reactions to civil rights demonstrators to national awareness in the 1960s. But the creation of such images was now democratized— most of the videos that spurred outrage were taken by bystanders with cell phones. The Black Lives Matter movement was less an articulation of specific policy demands than a broad claim to black humanity. In this sense, it had historical precedents in abolitionism, with its slogan “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” and in “I Am a Man,” the defiant claim of Memphis refuse collectors during their 1968 strike, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

In Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s death inspired weeks of sometimes violent street demonstrations. These led to the deployment of state police and National Guardsmen dressed in battle gear and armed with assault rifles and armored personnel carriers, as if equipped for a war zone overseas— a sign of how polic- ing had become increasingly militarized since the 1960s. The death of Brown and the others, at the very least, suggested that half a century after the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s, many police departments still relied on excessive force in dealing with black men, and that the criminal justice system remained mired in racism. In Ferguson, investigations after the death of Michael Brown revealed that the almost entirely white police, city government, and local judiciary reg- ularly preyed on black residents, seeing them not as citizens to be served and protected but as a source of revenue to balance the local budget. Blacks were hauled into court to pay fines for non- existent driving violations, jaywalking, even walking on the sidewalks too close to the street. Sometimes jail terms ensued for those unable to pay the fine. Over ninety percent of such arrests in Ferguson—which were entirely discretionary—were of black men and women. Nationally, public reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement revealed a sharp divide between white and black Americans. In public opinion polls, over eighty percent of blacks but just thirty percent of whites agreed with the state- ment that blacks are victims of discriminatory treatment by the police.

Obama and the World

The most dramatic achievement of Obama’s presidency in foreign affairs was fulfillment of his campaign promise to end American involvement in the Iraq War. At the end of 2011, the last American combat soldiers came home, although a few hundred advisers remained. Nearly 5,000 Americans and, according to

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY ★ 1145

the estimates of U.S. and Iraqi analysts, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them civilians, had died during this eight- year conflict. The war had cost the United States nearly $2 trillion, an almost unimaginable sum. Whether it would produce a stable, democratic Iraq remained to be seen.

At the same time, Obama contin- ued many of the policies of the Bush administration. Obama dramatically increased the American troop presence in Afghanistan, while pledging to with- draw American forces by the end of 2014 although he failed to meet this deadline. Here again, the long- term outcome remained uncertain, given the Taliban’s resurgence and the unpopularity of the corruption- plagued American- backed Afghan government. Indeed, by 2012, polls showed that a large majority of Americans felt the war was a mistake and wanted it to end.

Like many of his predecessors, Obama found that criticizing presidential power from outside is one thing, dismantling it another. He reversed his pre- vious promise to abolish the military tribunals Bush had established and to close the military prison at Guantánamo, Cuba. And in 2011 he signed a four- year extension of key provisions of the USA Patriot Act originally passed under Bush. In May 2011, to wide acclaim in the United States, Obama authorized an armed raid into Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, who had been hiding there for years. More controversially, Obama claimed the right to order the assassination of American citizens in foreign countries if evidence indicated their connection with terrorism. And in 2011 he sent the air force to participate in a NATO campaign that assisted rebels who overthrew Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. But an endless civil war followed, not the restoration of democracy. Obama did not seek congressional approval of the action, deeming it unnecessary. In fact, throughout Obama’s presidency, Amer- ican troops or planes were involved in combat as part of an expanded war on terror not only in Afghanistan but also in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. Amer- ican Special Forces were involved in efforts to suppress the drug trade in Hon- duras and Colombia.

In 2014, Obama abandoned the half- century- old policy of isolating Cuba, and moved to resume diplomatic relations with the island nation. The policy of isolation had long outlived its Cold War origins and had made the United

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other members of Obama’s national security team receiving an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden at the White House on May 1, 2011.

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

1146 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

States seem petty and vindictive in the eyes of Latin Americans. In the follow- ing year, the administration, in conjunction with the European Union, Russia, and China, worked out an arrangement with Iran to ensure that that nation’s nuclear energy program was confined to peaceful purposes and did not lead to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. This was a remarkable achievement in view of the decades of hostility between the United States and Iran dating back to the hostage crisis of 1979–1981. Also in 2015, the United States played a major role in the forging of an agreement committing every country in the world to reduce emissions (notably from the burning of coal and oil) that con- tributed to global warming. All told, Obama’s conduct of foreign affairs proved to be considerably more bellicose than both his supporters and opponents had expected.

Events overseas presented new challenges and opportunities for the Obama administration. Beginning in 2011, to the surprise of almost everyone, popular revolts swept the Middle East. The uprisings brought millions of people into the streets, and toppled long- serving dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Freedom emerged as the rallying cry of those challenging autocratic govern- ments. “I’m in Tahrir Square,” one demonstrator yelled into his cellphone while standing at the epicenter of the Egyptian revolution. “In freedom, in freedom, in freedom.” Once again, the tension between the ideals of freedom and democracy and American strategic interests posed a difficult challenge for policymakers. After some hesitation, the United States sided with those seek- ing the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long- serving dictator and a staunch American ally. It then stood on the sidelines throughout 2011 and 2012 as Egypt lurched from popular uprising to military rule, to electoral victory by the Muslim Brotherhood, a previously illegal Islamic group, with the final outcome of the revolution always in doubt. When a military coup in 2014 ousted the elected president and instituted a regime even more repressive than Mubarak’s, the Obama administration suspended shipments of military equip- ment to Egypt, but soon resumed them. In general, like his predecessors during the Cold War, Obama used “human rights” as a political weapon, condemning abuses by adversaries like China while remaining largely silent in the face of serious abuses by allies in the “war on terror” such as Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia.

The Rise of ISIS

In his second term, Obama faced a new crisis when the self- proclaimed Islamic State took control of parts of Iraq, Syria, and Libya. ISIS, as it was called, con- ducted campaigns of exceptional brutality, beheading prisoners of war and driving religious minorities out of territory it conquered. The videos of these

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acts posted by ISIS on social media horrified most of the world but also attracted recruits to the organization. ISIS also sponsored terror attacks out- side the Middle East. In 2015 over 100 persons were killed in a series of coor- dinated attacks in Paris. A few weeks later, two followers of ISIS in the United States killed fourteen people in San Bernardino, California. As 2015 ended, fear of terrorism in the United States reached a point not seen since the attacks of September 11, 2001. It remained to be seen whether the rampages of ISIS would draw the United States into further combat in the Middle East.

Another area in which Obama continued the policies initiated during the Bush administration’s war on terror was governmental surveillance, both domestic and overseas. The extent of such activity became known in 2013 when Edward Snowden, a former employee of the National Security Agency, released documents online that detailed NSA programs that monitored virtu- ally all telephone, instant messaging, and email traffic in the United States, tracked the location of numerous American cellphones, and spied on the pri- vate communications of world leaders, including close allies of the United States such as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and French president François Hollande. The government also secretly worked with major Internet and communications companies like AT&T and Verizon to gain access to the private data of their users. Of course, the overwhelming majority of the people subject to government surveillance had no connection to terrorism or to any crime at all. The Obama administration responded by charging Snowden with violating the Espionage Act of 1917—a law passed during the height of World War I hysteria over security. To avoid prosecution, Snowden took up residence in Russia. But his revelations rekindled the age- old debate over the balance between national security and Americans’ civil liberties and offered another example of how, whichever party is in power, the balance always seems to shift in favor of the former. In 2015, Congress approved a measure curtailing the government’s sweeping surveillance of phone records. But much of the gov- ernment’s prying into Americans’ communications continued.

The Republican Resurgence

In nearly all midterm elections in American history, the party in power has lost seats in Congress. But Democrats faced more serious difficulties than usual in the midterm elections of 2010. Grassroots Republicans were ener- gized by hostility to Obama’s sweeping legislative enactments. The Tea Party, named for the Boston Tea Party of the 1770s and inspired by its opposition to taxation by a far- away government, mobilized grassroots opposition to the administration. The Tea Party appealed to a long- established American fear of overbearing federal power, as well as to more recent anxieties, especially about

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

1148 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises

immigration. Some supporters advocated repealing the provision of the Four- teenth Amendment granting automatic citizenship to all persons born in the United States. For a time, some activists denied that Obama was legally presi- dent at all, claiming that he had been born in Africa, not in the United States. (In fact, he was born in Hawaii.) With their opponents energized and their own supporters demoralized by the slow pace of economic recovery, Democrats suf- fered a severe reversal. Republicans swept to control of the House of Represen- tatives and substantially reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate. The outcome at the national level was political gridlock that lasted for the remain- der of Obama’s presidency. Obama could no longer get significant legislation through Congress.

Tea Party– inspired conservative gains at the state level in 2010 unleashed a rash of new legislation. Several states moved to curtail abortion rights. In Wisconsin, the legislature and Governor Scott Walker rescinded most of the bargaining rights of unions representing public employees. Workers and their supporters responded by occupying the state Capitol building for weeks, and then gathering petitions to force a recall election for Governor Walker in 2012, in which he succeeded in winning reelection. In Ohio, however, a similar anti- union law was repealed in a popular referendum.

New conservative legislatures also took aim at undocumented immigrants. Alabama, which has no land border with a foreign country and a small popula- tion of immigrants compared with other states, enacted the harshest measure, making it a crime for illegal immigrants to apply for a job, and for anyone to transport them, even to a church or hospital. During the contest for the Repub- lican presidential nomination in early 2012, candidates vied with each other to demonstrate their determination to drive illegal immigrants from the coun- try. Oddly, all this took place at a time when illegal immigration from Mexico, the largest source of undocumented workers, had ceased almost completely because of stricter controls at the border and the drying up of available jobs because of the recession. Despite the fact that the Obama administration had deported far more illegal immigrants than its predecessor, these measures asso- ciated the Republican Party with intense nativism in the minds of many His- panic voters.

The 2012 Campaign

Despite the continuing economic crisis, sociocultural issues played a major role in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, as candi- dates vied to win the support of the evangelical Christians who formed a major part of the party’s base. The front- runner was Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Romney had made a fortune directing Bain Capital, a firm that

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY ★ 1149

specialized in buying up other companies and then reselling them at a profit after restructuring them, which often involved firing large numbers of employ- ees. But the party’s powerful conservative wing disliked Romney because of his moderate record (as governor he had instituted a state health- care plan remark- ably similar to Obama’s 2011 legislation) and a distrust of his Mormon faith among many evangelical Christians.

Romney spent the primary season attempting to demonstrate his conser- vative views and reaffirming his adherence to Christian beliefs. Issues long thought settled such as women’s access to birth control suddenly roiled Amer- ican politics. Eventually, using his personal fortune to outspend his rivals by an enormous amount, Romney emerged as the Republican candidate, the first Mormon to win a major party’s nomination— a significant moment in the his- tory of religious toleration in the United States. He chose as his running mate Congressman Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, a favorite of the Tea Party and a Roman Catholic. For the first time in its history, the Republican Party’s ticket did not contain a traditional Protestant.

President Obama began the 2012 campaign with numerous liabilities. The enthusiasm that greeted his election had long since faded as the worst economic slump since the Great Depression dragged on, and voters became fed up with both the president and Congress because of the intensity of partisanship and legislative gridlock in Washington. The war in Afghanistan was increasingly unpopular and Obama’s signature health- care law under ferocious assault by Republicans.

Nonetheless, after a heated campaign, Obama emerged victorious, win- ning 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, and 51 percent of the popular vote to his opponent’s 47 percent. At the same time, while Democrats gained a few seats in the House and Senate, the balance of power in Washington remained unchanged. This set the stage for continued partisan infighting and political gridlock during Obama’s second term.

Obama’s victory stemmed from many causes, including an extremely effi- cient “get out the vote” organization on election day, and Romney’s weaknesses as a campaigner. Romney never managed to shed the image of a millionaire who used loopholes to avoid paying taxes (his federal tax rate of 14 percent was lower than that of most working- class Americans) and who held ordinary people in contempt (an off- the- cuff remark that 47 percent of the people would not vote for him because they were “victims” dependent on government pay- ments like Medicare and Social Security severely weakened his campaign). But more important, as in 2008, the result reflected the new diversity of the American population in the twenty- first century. Romney won 60 percent of the white vote, which in previous elections would have guaranteed victory. But Obama carried over 90 percent of the black vote and over 70 percent of Asians

What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?

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and Hispanics. Nonetheless, as fre- quently happens in midterm elections, the party that did not hold the White House, in this case the Republicans, made significant gains, strengthening its hold on the House in 2014 and tak- ing control of the Senate.

The 2012 election reflected the new diversity in other ways as well. Hawaii elected Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu to serve in Congress, and the first Bud- dhist, Mazie K. Hirono, to the Senate. And for the first time, popular referen- dums in Maine and Maryland registered approval of gay marriage, bringing to nine the number of states where such marriages were now lawful.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the 2012 election was the unprec- edented amount of money spent on the campaign. In 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court had overturned federal restrictions on political contributions by corporations. At the same time, “political action committees” were allowed to spend as much money as they wished supporting or denigrating candidates for office so long as they did not coordinate their activities with the candidates’ campaigns. Meanwhile, the Rom- ney and Obama campaigns themselves raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars from individual donors. All this resulted in an election that cost, for presi- dential and congressional races combined, some $6 billion.

F R E E D O M I N T H E T W E N T Y- F I R S T C E N T U R Y The century that ended in 2000 witnessed vast human progress and unimag- inable human tragedy. It saw the decolonization of Asia and Africa, the emer- gence of women into full citizenship in most parts of the world, and amazing advances in science, medicine, and technology. Thanks to the spread of new products, available at ever- cheaper prices, it brought more improvement in the daily conditions of life to more human beings than any other century in history. Worldwide life expectancy in the twentieth century rose from forty to sixty- seven years, and the literacy rate increased from 25 percent to 80 percent. This was the first century in which the primary economic activity for most of mankind moved beyond the acquisition of basic food, clothing, and shelter. But

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T H E P R E S I D E N T I A L E L E C T I O N O F 2 0 1 2

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the twentieth century also witnessed the death of uncounted millions in wars and genocides and the widespread degradation of the natural environment, the underside of progress.

Exceptional America

In the early twenty- first century, people in the United States lived longer and healthier lives compared with previous generations, and they enjoyed a level of material comfort unimagined a century before. In 1900, the average annual income was $3,000 in today’s dollars. The typical American had no indoor plumbing, had no telephone or car, and had not graduated from high school. As late as 1940, one- third of American households did not have running water. In 2013, health conditions had improved so much that the average life expectancy for men had risen to seventy- six and for women to eighty- one (from forty- six and forty- eight in 1900). More than 21 million Americans attended college in 2014, more than three times the figure for 1960.

In 2010, more than one American in seven was older than sixty- five. Cer- tain to continue rising in the twenty- first century, this figure sparked worries about the future cost of health care and the economic stability of the Social Security system. But it also suggested that people would enjoy far longer and more productive periods of retirement than in the past. On the other hand, poverty, income inequality, and infant mortality in the United States consider- ably exceeded that of other economically advanced countries, and fewer than 10 percent of workers in private firms belonged to unions, a figure not seen since the nineteenth century.

Many of the changes affecting American life, such as the transformed role of women, the better health and longer lifespan of the population, the spread of suburbanization, and the decline of industrial employment, have taken place in all economically advanced societies. In other ways, however, the United States at the dawn of the twenty- first century differed sharply from other devel- oped countries. Prevailing ideas of freedom in the United States seemed more attuned to individual advancement than to broad social welfare. In 2003, when asked whether it was more important for the government to guarantee freedom from want or freedom to pursue individual goals, only 35 percent of Americans selected freedom from want, as opposed to 58 percent in Germany, 62 percent in France and Great Britain, and 65 percent in Italy. The United States was a far more religious country. Sixty percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “Religion plays a very important part in my life,” while the comparable figure was 32 percent in Britain, 26 percent in Italy, and only 11 percent in France. One in three Americans said he or she believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and half that the United States enjoys “special protection from God.” Religion and

What were the prevailing ideas of American freedom at the beginning of the 21st century?

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nationalism reinforced one another far more powerfully in the United States than in the more secular nations of western Europe.

Other forms of American exceptionalism had a darker side. Among advanced countries, the United States has by far the highest rate of murder using guns. In 2012, the last year for which comparative statistics are available, there were 9,146 murders with guns in the United States, as opposed to 158 in Germany, 173 in Canada, and 11 in Japan.

Indeed, in the last years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty- first, the United States was the scene of a horrifying number of mass murders, often committed at schools. In 1999, two students killed twelve stu- dents and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado. In 2007, a student at Virginia Tech University shot and killed thirty- two people. Five years later, a lone gunman killed twenty children aged five and six, and seven adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the 1950s, schools across the country had conducted drills to enable students to survive a nuclear attack. Now they trained pupils in seeking shelter if a gunman entered the building. There were also mass killings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo- rado, and at the Washington Navy Yard. In 2015, a gunman influenced by racist Internet sites murdered nine black participants in a Bible study group, includ- ing the minister, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charles- ton. Other countries also experienced instances of mass violence, but not with the frequency of the United States. While each of these events led to calls for stricter regulations on the purchase of firearms, the strong commitment of many Americans to the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms, coupled with the remarkable power of the National Rifle Association, one of the country’s most influential lobbies, ensured that no new regulations were enacted.

The United States continued to lag behind other countries in providing social rights to its citizens. In Europe, workers are guaranteed by law a paid vacation each year and a number of paid sick days. American employers are not required to offer either to their workers. Only four countries in the world have no national provision for paid maternity leave after a woman gives birth to a child: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and the United States. And as noted in the previous chapter, the United States has by far the world’s highest rate of imprisonment.

Varieties of Freedom

In the early twenty- first century, Americans were increasingly tolerant of diver- gent personal lifestyles, cultural backgrounds, and religious persuasions. They enjoyed a degree of freedom of expression unmatched in virtually any country in the world. Thanks to the rights revolution and the political ascendancy of

FREEDOM IN THE TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY ★ 1153

antigovernment conservatives, the dominant definition of freedom stressed the capacity of individuals to realize their desires and fulfill their potential unrestricted by authority. Other American traditions— freedom as economic security, freedom as active participation in democratic government, freedom as social justice for those long disadvantaged— seemed to be in eclipse. Amer- icans sought freedom within themselves, not through social institutions or public engagement.

It was an irony of early twenty- first- century life that Americans enjoyed more personal freedom than ever before but less of what earlier generations called “industrial freedom.” Globalization— which treated workers at home and abroad as interchangeable factors of production, capable of being uprooted or dismissed without warning— seemed to render individual and even national sovereignty all but meaningless. Since economic liberty has long been associ- ated with economic security, and rights have historically been linked to dem- ocratic participation and membership in a nation- state, these processes had ominous implications for traditional understandings of freedom. It remained to be seen whether a conception of freedom grounded in access to the consumer marketplace and the glorification of individual self- fulfillment unrestrained by government, social citizenship, or a common public culture could provide an adequate way of comprehending the world of the twenty- first century.

Learning from History

“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk.” Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and this saying suggests that the meaning of events only becomes clear once they are over. It is still far too soon to assess the full impact of September 11 on American life and the long- term consequences of the changes at home and abroad it inspired.

As of the end of 2015, the world seemed far more unstable than anyone could have predicted when the Cold War ended. An end to the war on terror seemed as remote as ever. The future of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, indeed, the entire Middle East, remained uncertain, and Pakistan, traditionally the closest ally of the United States in that volatile region, experienced serious political insta- bility. No settlement of the long- standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors seemed in sight. Other regions of the world also presented daunting problems for American policymakers. North Korea had acquired nuclear weap- ons and refused international pressure to give them up. China’s rapidly grow- ing economic power posed a challenge to American predominance. Relations with Russia, which was supporting a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, were at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

No one could predict how any of these crises, or others yet unimagined, would be resolved. But the United States, it seemed clear, would remain

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involved in the affairs of every region of the world. The country had more than 1,000 military bases of one kind or another around the globe, with at least some American soldiers stationed in 175 countries. A study by Amer- ican intelligence agencies predicted that by 2025 the United States would remain the world’s most powerful nation, but that its economic and military predominance would have declined significantly. A “multipolar world,” with countries like China and India emerging as major powers, would succeed the era of unquestioned American dominance. The consequences of these changes remain to be seen.

What is clear is that as in the past, freedom remains central to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. Americans continue to debate contemporary issues in a political landscape shaped by ideas of free- dom. Indeed, freedom remains, as it has always been, an evolving concept, its definition open to disagreement, its boundaries never fixed or final. Freedom is neither self- enforcing nor self- correcting. It cannot be taken for granted, and its preservation requires eternal vigilance, especially in times of crisis.

More than half a century ago, the African- American poet Langston Hughes urged Americans both to celebrate the freedoms they enjoy and to remember that freedom has always been incomplete:

There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say. On my heartstrings freedom sings All day everyday.

There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. If you had known what I know You would know why.

C H A P T E R R E V I E W

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. How did the foreign policy initiatives of the George W. Bush administration depart from the policies of other presidents since World War II?

2. How did the September 11 attacks transform Americans’ understanding of their security? How did the response compare with that after Pearl Harbor?

3. What are the similarities and differences between America’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001?