Restless giant
by Robert Philbin
[ bookreviews ]
One senses a mood change bristling across America these days, a sort of fin de siècle sense of the bigger wheel turning - an era ending, or perhaps more probably, we are aware of major shifts in the political substratum now underway.
This month, conservative Rep John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, a war veteran and leading adviser on defense issues, called for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. House Republicans moved to kill his bill with a frantically organized partisan vote clearly intended to quash Mr Murtha's opinions, rather argue them in the public sphere. Last week, a sleepy conservative Republican hamlet in rural Pennsylvania booted out an all-Republican school board and replaced it with an all Democratic one to crush the Intelligent Design movement from influencing the community's public school system.
GOP ascendancy to this kind of raw power began in earnest with the rise of Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War, then blossomed with the elections of 1994, which gave the GOP virtual control of the government. Republicans soon controlled both houses of Congress, most State legislatures and Governorships, and, by the year 2000, five Republican justices of the US Supreme Court awarded the presidency, won in popular vote by Vice President Al Gore, to Texas Governor George W Bush.
Restless Giant is a sweeping encyclopedic history of the US from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, by James T Patterson [1]. The book (the latest in the Oxford History of the United States series) provides a 27-year context which informs our understanding of both American conservatism's rise to power as well as the contemporary fissures we witness today. It is well written, balanced, and certainly documents how America got where it is today and where it might be going in the near future.
The book provides a crisp assessment of the years between the resignation of Richard Nixon and the election of George W Bush and Patterson's smoothly crafted narrative weaves together social, cultural, political, economic, and international developments over time, administration by administration. He also explores, through separate chapters, larger trends and issues like race, multiculturalism, the culture wars, in an easy reading overview with sources for deeper reading as well.
The two American figures who loom large over the last quarter of twentieth century are of course Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and Mr Patterson is thorough and balanced in dealing with the successes and failures of each man and his administration. We see, for example, how Reagan, boosted by a resurgent Religious Right set in motion by Jimmy Carter's 'born again' 1976 Presidential campaign, ushered in a widespread conservative revolution; but as Patterson notes, even as the Right was ascendant politically, it never reversed more liberal trends which remain essentially part of the greater American cultural dialectic.
While the dark underbelly of Reagan's foreign affairs and intelligence legacy still play out in today's controversies, Patterson has a field day with Mr Clinton's dark side. Recalling Monica Lewinsky's appearance on 20/20 with Barbara Walters, he writes:
An estimated 70 million Americans watched... No single network 'news' program had ever been seen by so many people. ABC demanded and received record payments... for commercials. And what commercials! These included Victoria's Secret lingerie, the Oral-B deluxe toothbrush and a promo for the movie 'Cleopatra' that included the voice-over: 'When she was 20, she seduced the most powerful leader in the world.' A Maytag ad boasted of its product, 'It actually has the power to remove stains.'
Patterson traces how the end of the Cold War presented Americans with confusing new developments around the world and, as we quickly discovered - in Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq - the breakdown of monolithic communism made it even more difficult to manage the outcome of global events.
Patterson explores a range of cultural, social, and economic trends and issues and he elucidates how the persistence of racial tensions, high divorce rates, alarm over crime, and urban decay all led many commentators to portray the era he covers as one of decline. But Restless Giant offers a refreshingly positive perspective on those times, arguing that often unmet expectations caused many to view the era negatively, when in fact Americans were in many ways better off than they thought, better off than they ever were before in that century.
For example, by 2000, most Americans lived more comfortably than they had in the 1970s, and though bigotry and discrimination were far from extinct, a powerful rights consciousness had been established to insured that these were, according to Patterson, less pervasive in American life than at any time in the past.
Patterson's method is to move from administration to administration, from one issue and trend to the next, presenting a balanced collection of facts and opinions in a fast reading format. He reaches no conclusions, advocates no particular point of view, indicates no clear stance or emotional reaction to the subject reviewed.
This is a weakness, in my read.
It's not even quite clear, for example, what the title Restless Giant is supposed to imply beyond the obvious which could apply equally to any number of nations in the world today. Many excellent commentaries have praised Patterson for weaving cultural minutiae into his narrative (discussing television shows like the Dan Quail-Murphy Brown fiasco, for example), but I confess to finding this mélange at times tedious and distracting from the narrative flow of an otherwise excellent read.
But this is minor criticism to the more important read of Restless Giant - as prelude to America's current state of domestic and global affairs.
Patterson concisely captures a critical period of American history, illuminating the hard road we Americans have traveled from the dismal days of the needlessly prolonged Vietnam War and its aftermath - Watergate - through the hotly contested election of 2000.
Because of Patterson's work, we are better informed and more able to confront a growingly contentious domestic and global future in these new days of transition.
Notes
1 James T Patterson is Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. A highly respected historian of contemporary America, he is the author of Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974, which won a Bancroft Prize, and Brown v Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. [Back]
