The American JourneyA History of the United States, 7th Edition

By: Goldfield • Abbott • Anderson • Argersinger • Argersinger • Barney • Weir

Chapter

•The Reagan

Revolution and a

Changing World

•1981-1992

30

The Reagan Revolution and a Changing World 1981-

1992

Reagan’s Domestic Revolution

The Climax of the Cold War

Growth in the Sunbelt

Values in Collision

Conclusion

Learning Objectives

What was revolutionary about the Reagan revolution?

How and why did the Cold War come to an end?

How did growth in the Sunbelt shape national politics in the

1980s and 1990s?

What key social and cultural issues divided Americans in

the 1980s and 1990s?

Reagan’s Domestic Revolution

Reagan’s Domestic Revolution

Building on a conservative critique of American policies and

developing issues that Carter had placed on the national

agenda, Ronald Reagan presided over revolutionary

changes in U.S. government and policies.

MAP 30–1 The Election of 1980

Reagan’s Majority

Reagan had a common touch and tapped into the nostalgia

for a simpler America that appealed to a large segment of

the population.

Reagan’s Majority (cont'd)

Anti-Communist stalwarts, Christian conservatives, wealthy

entrepreneurs, opponents of big government, and

disaffected blue-collar and middle-class who deserted the

Democrats supported Reagan.

White blue-collar voters were alienated by affirmative action

and school integration.

Reagan’s Majority (cont'd)

In 1984, Reagan won reelection in a huge landslide

confirming the conservative trend among Americans.

The New Conservatism

Reagan’s domestic policy drew on conservative critiques of the New Deal-New Frontier approach government.

Edward Banfield claimed government could not solve inequality because it was rooted in human character and the basic structure of society while Charles Murray claimed welfare assistance encouraged dependency, discouraging self-improvement.

The New Conservatism (cont’d)

Free market utopians claimed free markets worked better

than government programs and government intervention

did more harm than good.

• Conservatives used new political tactics using targeted

mailings to raise funds and mobilized voters with

emotional appeals, bypassing the mass media.

Reaganomics:

Deficits and Deregulation

The Reagan Revolution was based on the Economic

Recovery and Tax and Act of 1981 that reduced personal

income tax by 25 percent over three years. The Reagan

administration also shifted funding from domestic to

military programs. Social programs would have to be

enacted at the state or local level.

Reaganomics:

Deficits and Deregulation (cont’d)

The second part of the economic agenda was deregulation.

Corporate America attacked environmental legislation as

strangulation by regulation. Reagan slashed the

Environmental Protection Agency budget.

Reaganomics:

Deficits and Deregulation (cont’d)

Reagan deregulated the banking industry and the national

economy boomed in the short-term.

Economic Recovery and Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA)

A major revision of the federal income tax system.

Reaganomics:

Deficits and Deregulation (cont’d)

Deregulation

Reduction or removal of government regulations and encouragement of

direct competition in many important industries and economic sectors.

Sagebrush Rebellion

Political movement in the western states in the early 1980s that called for

easing of regulations on the economic use of federal lands and the

transfer of some or all of those lands to state ownership.

MAP 30–2 Federal Land Ownership

Crisis for Organized Labor

Reagan launched an offensive against labor unions.

Federal agencies weakened collective bargaining.

Union membership was one million less in 1989 than in

1964.

Crisis for Organized Labor (cont'd)

Unions struggled to cope with the changing economy and

corporations demanded wage cutbacks and concessions

on working conditions. The decline of blue-collar jobs also

contributed to shrinking union membership.

Crisis for Organized Labor (cont'd)

In an era of deindustrialization, companies replaced many

workers with sophisticated machinery or shifted

production to nonunion plants.

The corporate merger mania added to instability as

manufacturing employment decline by nearly 2 million

jobs in the 1980s.

An Acquisitive Society

The new prosperity fueled lavish living by the wealthy and a

fascination with how the rich and famous lived.

Young upward mobile professionals defined themselves by

elite consumerism.

Business wheeler-dealers made themselves into media

stars of finance capitalism.

An Acquisitive Society (cont’d)

The superficial glamour of this era of acquisitiveness and

corporate greed had its underside of loneliness and

despair.

Punk rock and rap reacted to various aspects and inequities

of the 1980s.

Mass Media and Fragmented Culture

Cable television reflected both the fragmentation of

American society and its increasing dependence on

instant communication.

Vast quantities of information were more easily available

and packaged for a subdivided marketplace of specialized

consumers.

Poverty amid Prosperity

Federal tax and budget changes had different effects on the

rich and poor. The top one percent increased their share

of private wealth from 31 to 37 percent. The bottom 20

percent experienced a tax hike. Middle-class families saw

their security decrease.

Poverty amid Prosperity (cont'd)

Corporate downsizing and automation reduced many low-

paying office jobs and hit middle managers in the late

1980s.

The poverty rate increased from a low of 11 percent in 1973

to a 13 to 15 percent.

Women earned less than men and constituted two-thirds of

poor adults by the end of the 1980s.

Poverty amid Prosperity (cont'd)

A variety of forces tripled the number of permanent

homeless.

FIGURE 30–1 Changes in Real Family Income,

1947–1979 and 1980–1990

FIGURE 30–2 Comparison of Men’s and

Women’s Earnings, 1960–2003

Consolidating the Revolution:

George H. W. Bush

George Bush won the 1988 election.

Bush believed Americans wanted government to leave them

alone. His major legislation was a bill that shifted federal

priorities from highway building to mass transit. He also

supported the Americans with Disabilities Act to prevent

discrimination against people with physical handicaps.

Consolidating the Revolution:

George H. W. Bush (cont'd)

Bush’s lack of leadership left continuing economic crime,

and healthcare problems.

Americans with Disabilities Act

Legislation in 1992 that banned discrimination against physically

handicapped persons in employment, transportation, and public

accommodations.

The Climax of the Cold War

Confronting the Soviet Union

In 1980, the Soviet Union was supporting Marxist regimes

in civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and

Afghanistan.

Reagan’s willingness to confront the Soviet Union reflected

conservative beliefs that the Soviets were monolithic and

bent on world conquest.

Confronting the Soviet Union (cont'd)

The focus was on central Europe, and Reagan began

deploying missiles in Europe that escalated the nuclear

arms race.

Confronting the Soviet Union (cont'd)

Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, also

called Star Wars.

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

President Reagan’s program, announced in 1983, to defend the United

States against nuclear missile attack with untested weapons systems

and sophisticated technologies; also known as “Star Wars.”

Risky Business:

Foreign Policy Adventures

The Reagan Doctrine said that Soviet-influenced

governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America needed to

be eliminated if the United States was to win the Cold

War.

Central America became the focus of a secret CIA foreign

policy against Nicaragua.

Risky Business:

Foreign Policy Adventures (cont'd)

The United States war on drugs included an invasion of

Panama.

Reagan’s intervention in the Middle East failed as a terrorist

bomb killed 241 Marines in Lebanon.

The Iran-Contra Affair ended in a scandal of illegality and

unconstitutional actions. Oliver North lied to Congress.

Risky Business:

Foreign Policy Adventures (cont'd)

In Asia, the United States helped install democratic

governments in the Philippines and South Korea.

Reagan Doctrine

The policy assumption that Soviet-influenced governments in Asia,

Africa, and Latin America needed to be eliminated if the United States

was to win the Cold War.

Embracing Perestroika

Mikhail Gorbachev began the thaw in the Cold War with his

glasnost and perestroika policies that opened up the

Soviet Union and restructured the Soviet economy.

Embracing Perestroika (cont’d)

Reagan had the vision to embrace the new Soviet position.

He met with Gorbachev and negotiated the Intermediate

Nuclear Force Agreement that was the first true nuclear

disarmament treaty.

Glasnost

Russian for “openness,” applied to Mikhail Gorbachev’s encouragement

of new ideas and easing of political repression in the Soviet Union.

Embracing Perestroika (cont’d)

Perestroika

Russian for “restructuring,” applied to Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to

make the Soviet economic and political systems more modern,

flexible, and innovative.

Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement (INF)

Disarmament agreement between the United States and the Soviet

Union under which an entire class of missiles would be removed and

destroyed and on-site inspections would be permitted for verification.

Crisis and Democracy in Eastern Europe

Bush pushed the pro-democratic transformation of Eastern

Europe.

The East Germans opened the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the

end of 1989, new democratic, non-Communist

governments had emerged in several eastern European

governments.

In 1990, Germany reunified.

Crisis and Democracy in Eastern Europe (cont’d)

The Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended.

Controlling Nuclear

Weapons: Four Decades of

Effort

Why Did the Cold War End?

The Persian Gulf War

After Iraq invaded Kuwait, President Bush led a United

Nations coalition that ultimately fought the Gulf War that

liberated Kuwait but did not topple the Iraqi government.

Operation Desert Storm

Code name for the successful offensive against Iraq by the United States

and its allies in the Persian Gulf War (1991).

The Persian Gulf War (cont'd)

Persian Gulf War

War (1991) between Iraq and a U.S.-led coalition that followed Iraq’s

invasion of Kuwait and resulted in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from

that country.

MAP 30–3 The Persian Gulf War

Growth in the Sunbelt

Growth in the Sunbelt

The rise in military and defense spending from the late

1970s to the early 1990s fueled the growth of the Sunbelt.

The Sunbelt was a region of conservative voting habits and

reflected the leading economic trends of the 1970s and

1980s.

Sunbelt

The states of the American South and Southwest.

MAP 30–4 Fast-Growing and Shrinking

Metropolitan Areas, 1990–2000

The Defense Economy

Defense spending underwrote the expansion of American

science and technology. California’s Silicon Valley grew

with military sales long before it turned to consumer

markets.

The space component of the aerospace industry was

equally dependent on the defense economy.

Americans from Around the World

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 transformed

the ethnic mix of the United States and helped stimulate

the sunbelt boom.

Immigration reform opened America to Mediterranean

Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Mexico supplied the largest group of new Americans.

Americans from Around the World (cont'd)

The West Indies and Central America tended to settle on

the East Coast.

Asians accounted for nearly half of all arrivals in 1990.

Recent immigrants found both economic possibilities and

problems.

Americans from Around the World (cont'd)

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Federal legislation that replaced the national quota system for

immigration with overall limits of 170,000 immigrants per year from the

Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 per year from the Western

Hemisphere.

MAP 30–5 Religious Geography of the United

States

TABLE 30–1 Major Racial and Ethnic Minorities

in the United States

Old Gateways and New

The new immigration most affected coastal and border

cities.

Southern and western cities became gateways for

immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

Miami became the economic capitol of the Caribbean.

TABLE 30–2 Global Cities

The Graying of America

Retirees were another factor in the rise of the sunbelt.

Retired Americans changed the social geography of the

United States. Much of the growth in the South and

Southwest was money earned in the Northeast and

Midwest and transferred by retirees.

Values in Collision

Women’s Rights and Public Policy

In Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court accorded women

abortion rights.

The Equal Rights Amendment and Roe v. Wade opened

sharp debates on women’s rights and abortion.

Women’s Rights and Public Policy (cont'd)

In 2000, six of every ten women were working or looking for

work. The number of working women increased as 1970s

inflation and declining wages in the 1980s eroded income.

Women’s Rights and Public Policy (cont'd)

The shift to service jobs also stimulated an increase in

working women.

Roe v. Wade

U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973 that disallowed state laws

prohibiting abortion during the first three months (trimester) of

pregnancy and established guidelines for abortion in the second and

third trimesters.

AIDS and Gay Activism

The Stonewall Revolt began the gay rights movement.

The AIDS outbreak changed the character of life in gay

communities.

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)

A complex of deadly pathologies resulting from infection with the human

immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Churches in Change

Mainline Protestant denomination struggled after 1970 as

evangelical Protestant churches experienced growth.

By the 1970s, televangelism reached 20 percent of

American households.

Another important change was the Americanization of the

Catholic Church.

Culture Wars

Family values and beliefs have sparked disputes between

liberal and conservatives.

Theological differences within Protestantism contributed to

the divisions on social issues.

Culture Wars (cont'd)

The cultural conflict transcended the historic division among

Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, focusing on divisions

between liberals and conservatives.

Conservatives initiated the culture wars because of fears

related to sexual indulgence, though evidence is mixed on

the sexual revolution. Censorship is another aspect of the

culture wars.

Conclusion

Conclusion

American sought stability in the 1980s but the decade

witnessed transformations that redirected American life.

Many of the changes were connected to national policy

issues.

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War.

Prosperity alternated with recession and shifted the balance

between regions.