How We Got Here: The 1970s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (for Better Or Worse) - Hardcover

Frum, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465041957 ISBN 13: 9780465041954

Publisher: Basic Books, 2000

Synopsis

For many, the 1970s evoke the Brady Bunch and the birth of disco. In this first, thematic popular history of the decade, David Frum argues that it was the 1970s, not the 1960s, that created modern America and altered the American personality forever. A society that had valued faith, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, and family loyalty evolved in little more than a decade into one characterized by superstition, self-interest, narcissism, and guilt. Frum examines this metamorphosis through the rise to cultural dominance of faddish psychology, astrology, drugs, religious cults, and consumer debt, and profiles such prominent players of the decade as Werner Erhard, Alex Comfort, and Jerry Brown. How We Got Here is lively and provocative reading.

About this title

About the Author

David Frum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His writing has appeared on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs. Frum writes a twice-weekly column for Canada's National Post and broadcasts regularly on NPR's Morning Edition. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

In a new twist on the belief of many conservatives that the 1960s was the beginning of the end of a righteous and moral America, Frum, a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, aims "to describe--and to judge" the transformation of American values during the '70s. Surveying politics, legal cases and opinion polls as well as popular culture, he links what he sees as America's loss of faith in government, the rise of "sourness and cynicism" and the culture of licentiousness and divorce, among other social changes, to events in that decade. Frum can be perceptive, as when he notes that Betty Ford's confession of her drug dependencies represented a major breakthrough in the discussion of private problems by public figures or when he considers how the "language of marriage" changed as "husbands and wives" gave way to "spouses" and then "partners." Yet his insights are often undercut by scornful assertions: e.g., that Ford "may have believed she was rendering a public service," but she opened the door to a "let's talk about me!" culture; or that linguistic changes eroded the family. Until his final chapter of overt political analysis--in which he asserts that "it was better when more people showed more loyalty to family and country... talked about themselves less, [and] restrained their sexuality"--Frum writes a popular history, although his disdain for those he does not agree with constantly shows through (e.g., he belittles Jane Fonda and Meryl Steep for daring to call themselves "artists" and suggests that Steve Martin is not funny). Filled with shaky, often unfootnoted facts and a palpable dislike for social change, this attempt at evenhanded social science devolves into a polemic that is likely to infuriate all but the most conservative readers. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fun and factual popular history tracing our present-day culture to its roots in the 1970s. The 1970s? Absolutely, according to conservative analyst Frum (Dead Right, 1994; Whats Right, 1996), who here considers how very radical we Americans have become. Despite all the marches, assassinations, drugs, and music of the 1960s, Frum maintains that the 70s were more formative. A gas crisis, a crack epidemic, an economic slump, and disco aren't as sexy as hippies in the mud, but Frum persuasively demonstrates that our watershed years coincided with the Watergate era, when we retooled Detroit, launched the Information Age, and, true to the backlash reflected in the 1974 movie Death Wish, incarcerated criminals instead of blaming society. Frum crowns actor Alan Alda the 70s prototype of the newly sensitive man, echoing the tremulous emotion heard in crooners like James Taylor. He calls this vast ``shift in emotional climate a kind of global moistening''; it allowed even male politicians to weep, another effect of the women's movement. The joy of sex seems to have been discovered in 1972: ``Feminists like Germaine Greer championed promiscuity as a means to break women's `doglike' devotion to men, and the young women of the 1970s listened and obeyed.'' Virginity went out of style, even as women suddenly became police officers or bus drivers. All this put millions in day care, and divorce skyrocketed. Food turned global and had to be nutritious, a concern for health also demonstrated in new protective sports gear. Looking out for number one financially initiated our era's greed. The increase in stock investing, intensified with the Internet, began in the `70s. Before Dress Down Friday there was the 1970s jeans explosion. Today's politically correct minority visibility first emerged in the '70s. In short, its hard to spot a topic not covered here. A thoroughly enjoyable time capsule for the turn of the century. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his last two books (Dead Right; What's Right), Toronto native Frum, a prolific conservative polemicist, argued that U.S. society has been corroded by post-JFK liberalism and especially by identity politics. His thesis here is that it is the Seventies, not the Sixties, that went on to define the rest of the 20th century. Like the work of any number of similarly well-educated left-wing counterparts, Frum's writing is not calculated to attract the "undecided" or convert readers with firmly differing viewpoints. Certainly, for anyone who graduated from high school between 1975 and 1979, his painful evocation of the oil embargo, busing conflicts, and the Tehran hostage crisis will dim whatever nostalgia remains for an America innocent of AIDS or the knowledge that cocaine kills. Unfortunately, Frum spends an inordinate amount of time lampooning Sixties youth. And while only a nitpicker would note such casual errors as calling Barnard sociologist Jonathan Rieder a Yale anthropologist, other readers--the ones who won't actually bother to read it, of course--will object to his version of not-long-ago American racial warfare. On balance, a book that academic and large public libraries will want.
-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For decades, the Right blamed everything on the '60s. Frum, a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and author of Dead Right (1994) and What's Right? (1996), suggests another scapegoat: the '70s. "The social transformation of the 1970s," he urges, "left behind a country . . . more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant; less deferential, less self-confident, less united; more socially equal, less economically equal; more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual; less literate, less polite, less reticent." Americans in the '70s rebelled against the garrison state they had supported since the Depression; Frum feels the era's unique components--Vietnam, desegregation, inflation, and technology--explain "the abrupt, convulsive, and often hysterical form" this rebellion took. "A people once collectivist, censorious, calculating, conformist, taciturn, obedient, puritanical, and self-confident," Frum maintains, "has mutated in the space of three and a half decades into a people that is individualist, permissive, emotional, enterprising, garrulous, rebellious, hedonistic, and guilt-ridden. Some of this change is for the better, some for the worse, but it's all puzzling and often uncomfortable." Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465041957
• ISBN 13: 9780465041954
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448