In late 1979, the Soviet Union, in hopes of maintaining a friendly and stable government in neighboring Afghanistan, undertook an invasion of that country. At about the same time, Islamic militants in Iran invaded the American embassy in Tehran and proceeded to hold a group of American diplomats and their families hostage for over a year. These two events seemed to support conservative contentions regarding the decline of the United States in world affairs. Moreover, they combined with a surge in U.S. inflation and unemployment, bringing to fruition a reaction against the welfare state that had been growing since the late 1960s. The new conservatives drew their strength from resentments of both middle-class and working-class Americans, mostly white, who believed themselves threatened by militant blacks, liberated women, and liberal intellectuals. Hit by the economic stagnation and high unemployment, they felt ignored by those who sought to remedy past and present racial injustice through affirmative action programs in employment. Deeply religious, they resented the trend toward public secularism, especially regarding education. Culturally traditionalist, they fought against the changed roles and increased liberation of women symbolized by the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and the removal of restrictions on abortion. Militantly nationalist, they agreed with those who believed America's decline was the result of poor leadership and a failure of nerve.

Under a new president, Ronald Reagan, the 1980s thus saw a resumption of the rhetoric of the Cold War reminiscent of an earlier period. For years Reagan had been a critic of accommodation with either the Soviets or the Chinese, had supported the Vietnam War, and had opposed the liberal consensus. He promised to reverse the pattern of government spending established since World War II, reduce taxes, balance the federal budget, increase military spending, and restore America's place in the world. Referring to the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire," Reagan doubled military spending over five years from its 1980 level. Along with his successor George Bush, he dispatched American forces to Grenada in the Caribbean, Panama in Central America, and to Lebanon and the Persian Gulf. Increased support also went to authoritarian anti-Communist governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as to conservative anti-Communist insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan.

When communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet state disintegrated in the early l990s, Reagan and most Americans were quick to claim victory in the Cold War, and with some justification. The Soviet Union had failed to keep its promise of a better life without capitalism. The market system and political democracy proved to have greater appeal and staying power than many had believed. Many Americans argued that Reagan's accelerated military spending and confrontational tactics had worked, that they had pushed the Soviet Union into political and economic bankruptcy and had exposed its weak-nesses for all to see.

Yet the 1980s exposed weaknesses in the American economy as well. It stagnated, and the national debt more than tripled. Once the world's leading creditor, the United States now became the world's leading debtor, with much of that debt held by inter-ests in Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. The U.S. dollar now competed with the yen, the mark, and the franc. At home, average incomes of Americans declined. Relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs were replaced with lower-paying service positions, resulting in lowered expectations, especially for young people. By the end of the decade, economic expansion came to a virtual halt. Moreover, the abrupt end of the Cold War meant sharp reductions in military spending and severe dislocations in many parts of the economy. All of this contributed to the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992. As a baby boomer who had actively protested the Vietnam War, Clinton was the first American president to be born after World War II. It would be his task to define America's place in the world at the end of the twentieth century.

If the "American Century" had not turned out precisely as promised by Albert J. Beveridge and Henry Luce, surely no other nation could lay claim to it. But America now faced painful paradoxes. For three hundred years economic growth had been the key to prosperity and had offset the inequalities of wealth and income to which Socialist critics had called attention. Now growth was slow, and even the idea of unlimited growth was challenged by environmentalists. But without economic growth, the division between the haves and have-nots would surely become more painful.

In a world that was multipolar, America was still the only superpower. If its economy was increasingly penetrated by foreigners, never had the rest of the world been so influenced by Americans. Asian-built cars and trucks might crowd America's highways, but McDonald's restaurants generated huge lines in Moscow, American rock music was heard in Bombay, Coca-Cola was still being sold in Caracas, and American communications satellites literally circled the world. Despite the agony of the Vietnam War and over twenty years of declining economic expecta-tions, Americans were as successful as ever in ex-porting their culture to distant places.

But what was that culture? Americans were no longer sure. Defined at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christianity, such a conception was even less accurate at the century's end. The proportion of Americans of white European background was de-clining; the role of African Americans in American history and politics was now widely recognized; and the political and economic power of new arrivals from Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia was growing. Thus many proclaimed America to be multicultural, a unique mixture of many ethnic and religious heritages in which none could or should receive preference. Others, aware of the lesson of the Tower of Babel, insisted on defining and promoting common culture beneficial to all.

Most Americans have believed, or have tried to 'believe, that diversity brings strength~ But are there limits to that diversity? The early 20th-century poet, William Butler Yeats, had once written with foreboding that "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ..." Might this description be applied to the late twentieth-century United States? Of all the challenges Americans have faced in "their" century, this might prove the greatest.

Return to the syllabus.
Return to the History Department.