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CHAPTER 26 The Conservative Turn, 1969–1988
This chapter considers American history from the Nixon administration to the Reagan years, when conservatism
prevailed in American politics and society. Introduced by the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater as a
reminder of the conservative tides of the 1960s, the chapter begins with Richard Nixon’s presidency, revealing that
his domestic policies were not reflective of a staunch conservative agenda. Nixon’s expansion of the welfare state
and commitment to the environment surprised many conservatives. Likewise, Nixon approached the Cold War in a
new way, reducing tensions between the United States and the communist world through a policy of détente.
However, in the Third World, American foreign policy remained committed to supporting pro-American
dictatorships. The end of the Vietnam War came in 1973, but the Watergate scandal tarnished Nixon’s foreign
policy successes. Unable to withstand the spending of the 1960s, the increasing inflation, and the oil embargoes, the
American economy stagnated in the 1970s while inflation soared. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan
II. President Nixon
A. Nixon’s Domestic Policies
1. Having won the presidency by a very narrow margin, Nixon moved toward the political center on many
issues. His victory signaled the growing power of the conservative Sunbelt in national politics.
2. The Nixon administration created a host of new federal agencies.
3. Nixon spent lavishly on social services and environmental initiatives.
B. Nixon and Welfare
1. Perhaps Nixon’s most startling initiative was his proposal for a Family Assistance Plan.
a. The plan would have replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a guaranteed
annual income, but it failed in Congress.
C. Nixon and Race
1. To consolidate support in the white South, Nixon nominated to the Supreme Court conservative
2. The Nixon administration also pursued affirmative action programs to upgrade minority employment.
a. Philadelphia Plan
3. Trade unions of skilled workers strongly opposed the Philadelphia Plan.
D. The Burger Court
1. Warren Burger was expected to lead the justices in a conservative direction but surprised many of his
supporters.
2. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, busing was used as a tool to achieve
3. In San Antonio v. Rodriguez, a 5–4 Court majority ruled that the Constitution did not require equality of
school funding.
E. The Court and Affirmative Action
1. Many whites came to view affirmative action programs as a form of reverse discrimination.
F. The Rights of the Disabled
1. Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibited discrimination based on disability in
federal programs.
2. Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
a. It banned discrimination against persons with disabilities by state and local governments and private
employers and required public accommodations.
G. The Continuing Sexual Revolution
2. The number of divorces in 1975 exceeded the number of first-time marriages.
3. Women made inroads into areas from which they had long been excluded in the 1970s.
4. The gay and lesbian movement expanded greatly during the 1970s and became a major concern of the
right.
H. Nixon and Détente
1. Conservatives viewed Nixon’s foreign policy as dangerously soft on communism.
2. Nixon and Henry Kissinger continued their predecessors’ policy of attempting to undermine
governments deemed dangerous to American strategic or economic interests.
a. Chile
3. In his relations with the major communist powers, however, Nixon fundamentally altered Cold War
policies.
III. Vietnam and Watergate
A. Nixon and Vietnam
1. Nixon ran for president in 1968, declaring that he had a secret plan to end the war.
a. Vietnamization
2. Anti-war protests climaxed in 1970.
3. Public support for the war was rapidly waning.
a. My Lai Massacre
B. The End of the Vietnam War
2. Vietnam was a military, political, and social disaster.
C. The 1972 Election
2. In the primaries, Shirley Chisholm, a Brooklyn congresswoman, became the first black woman to seek
the presidency.
4. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and Nixon won in a landslide.
D. Watergate
2. The Watergate break-in was covered up by the White House.
a. Nixon’s tapes
E. Nixon’s Fall
1. In August 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that Nixon be impeached for
conspiracy to obstruct justice.
4. Liberals, who had despised Nixon throughout his career, celebrated his downfall.
a. Foundations of liberalism were weakened.
IV. The End of the Golden Age
A. The Decline of Manufacturing
2. In 1971, for the first time in the twentieth century, the United States experienced a merchandise trade
deficit.
3. Nixon took the United States off the gold standard.
B. Stagflation
1. The United States experienced two oil shocks in the 1970s.
a. Oil embargo
3. America experienced stagflation.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) highlights part of environmentalist Barry
Commoner’s The Closing Circle, a warning against environmental pollution.
C. The Beleaguered Social Compact
1. Faced with declining profits and rising overseas competition, corporations eliminated well-paid
2. In some manufacturing centers, political and economic leaders welcomed the opportunity to remake
their cities as financial, information, and entertainment hubs.
3. Jobs, investment, and population increasingly flowed toward the nonunion, low-wage states of the
Sunbelt.
a. 96 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas occurred in the South and West.
D. Labor on the Defensive
1. Always a junior partner in the Democratic coalition, the labor movement found itself forced onto the
defensive.
E. The Ford and Carter Administrations
2. In domestic policy, Ford’s presidency lacked significant accomplishment.
a. Whip Inflation Now (WIN)
4. Carter ran for president as an outsider, making a virtue of the fact that he had never held federal office.
5. Carter had more in common with Progressives of the early twentieth century than with more recent
liberals.
F. Carter and the Economic Crisis
2. Carter also believed that expanded use of nuclear energy could help reduce dependence on imported oil.
a. Three Mile Island
G. The Emergence of Human Rights Politics
1. Under Carter, promoting human rights became a centerpiece of American foreign policy for the first
time.
3. Carter cut off aid to the brutal military dictatorship governing Argentina.
5. Carter’s emphasis on pursuing peaceful solutions to international problems and his willingness to think
outside the Cold War framework yielded important results.
6. Both conservative Cold Warriors and foreign policy realists severely criticized Carter’s emphasis on
human rights.
H. The Iran Crisis and Afghanistan
1. The Iranian revolution marked a shift in opposition movements in the Middle East from socialism and
Arab nationalism to religious fundamentalism.
2. The president announced the Carter Doctrine in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
V. The Rising Tide of Conservatism
A. The Religious Right
2. Evangelical Christians had become more and more alienated from a culture that seemed to them to
trivialize religion and promote immorality.
a. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
B. The Battle over the Equal Rights Amendment
1. The ERA aroused unexpected protest from those who claimed it would discredit the role of wife and
homemaker.
C. The Abortion Controversy
1. Pro-life advocates believe that life begins at conception and abortion is nothing less than murder.
3. The abortion issue draws a bitter, sometimes violent line through American politics.
D. The Tax Revolt
2. Economic decline also broadened the constituency receptive to demands for lower taxes.
E. Conservatism in the West
2. The Sagebrush Rebellion in Nevada argued that certain decision-making power should be given over to
the states.
F. The Election of 1980
1. Reagan appealed skillfully to the white backlash.
a. Emphasized states’ rights
3. Jimmy Carter’s reputation improved after he left the White House.
VI. The Reagan Revolution
A. Reagan and American Freedom
1. An excellent public speaker, his optimism and affability appealed to large numbers of Americans.
2. Reagan reshaped the nation’s agenda and political language more effectively than any president since
Franklin Roosevelt.
B. Reagan’s Economic Policies
1. Economic freedom for Reagan meant curtailing the power of unions, dismantling regulations, and
radically reducing taxes.
C. Reagan and Labor
1. Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers inspired many private employers to launch anti-union
offensives.
2. Reaganomics, as critics dubbed the administration’s policies, initially produced the most severe
recession since the 1930s.
D. The Problem of Inequality
2. Deindustrialization and the decline of the labor movement had a particularly devastating impact on
minority workers.
3. When the national unemployment rate reached 8.9 percent at the end of 1981, the figure for blacks
exceeded 20 percent.
E. The Second Gilded Age
2. Taxpayers footed the bill for some of the consequences.
a. Savings and Loan (S&L) scandal
3. During Reagan’s presidency, the national debt increased to $2.7 trillion.
F. Reagan and Immigration Reform
1. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
a. The act, the most significant reform of immigration policy since 1965, aimed to reduce the number
of undocumented immigrants, primarily from Mexico.
G. Conservatives and Reagan
1. Reagan left intact core elements of the welfare state and did little to advance the social agenda of the
Christian Right.
H. The War on Crime and Drugs
1. Reagan championed a strand of thought about freedom, favored by social conservatives, that
emphasized law and order to secure “freedom from fear.”
2. Reagan built on initiatives begun during the Nixon administration.
a. Nixon had called for increased spending on policing and law enforcement, and an expansion of the
nation’s prisons.
3. In 1973, Nixon declared an “all-out war on the global drug menace,” but with little result.
I. Reagan and the Cold War
1. In foreign policy, Reagan breathed new life into the rhetorical division of the world into a free West and
unfree East.
J. The Iran-Contra Affair
1. Reagan denied knowledge of the illegal proceedings, but the Iran-Contra affair undermined confidence
that he controlled his own administration.
K. Reagan and Gorbachev
1. In his second term, Reagan softened his anticommunist rhetoric and established good relations with
Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.
a. Glasnost and perestroika
L. Reagan’s Legacy
2. By 1988, “liberal” was a term of political abuse.
M. The Election of 1988
1. The 1988 election seemed to show politics sinking to new lows.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Discuss the Supreme Court under Warren Burger. Was it a liberal or conservative court? How significant were
its major rulings?
• Discuss why conservatives were disappointed with Richard Nixon’s domestic policy and with his foreign
policy.
• Discuss the historical significance of Watergate.
• What caused capitalism’s golden age to end?
• Debate the advantages and disadvantages of the Equal Rights Amendment.
• Identify and analyze the key groups that combined to create the new conservative coalition.
• What challenges did Presidents Ford and Carter encounter in the White House?
• How did Ronald Reagan define economic freedom?
• Ronald Reagan stated that government was the problem and not the solution to the nation’s woes. How did
Reagan reduce the size of the government? How did Reagan expand the reach of government?
• How did immigration, crime, and drug policies change under President Reagan?
• How did the United States lose the war in Vietnam?
• Describe the revolution in disability rights in the late twentieth century.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Christian Right
www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/chr_rght.htm
An essay on the Christian Right with a link to additional online sources. Part of the National Humanities Center’s Teacher
Serve.
Energy Crisis
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/tmi.html
The PBS American Experience series film Meltdown at Three Mile Island is an eye-opening documentary. This website
includes the teacher’s guide, time line, biographies, and maps.
The American Experience series from PBS has a film on the life of Jimmy Carter. An article on his life is also available.
https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/
The official site for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum contains an education section of online resources for
teachers.
Ronald Reagan
www.millercenter.virginia.edu/academic/americanpresident/reagan
The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia hosts this website on President Reagan.
Watergate
https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/watergate
This National Archives site provides a plethora of online resources on the Watergate hearings.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Battista, Andrew. “Unions and Cold War Foreign Policy in the 1980s: The National Labor Committee, the AFL-CIO, and Central
America.” Diplomatic History 26, no. 3 (2002): 419–452.
Berman, William. America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Bush. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Bernardoni, James. The New Hollywood: What the Movies Did with the Freedoms of the Seventies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
Buckley, William F., Jr. God and Man at Yale. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1977.
Clymer, Kenton. “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and Cambodia.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 2 (2003): 245–278.
Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009.
Critchlow, Donald. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Nielsen, Kim E. A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.
Palermo, Joseph A. The Eighties. New York: Pearson, 2012.
Ribuffo, Leo. “Conservativism and American Politics.” Journal of the Historical Society 3, no. 2 (2003): 163–175.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Schulzinger, Robert. Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Shultz, George. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State. New York: Scribner, 1993.
Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. Hartford, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010.
Werth, Barry. 31 Days: Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon, and a Government in Crisis. New York: Random House, 2007.
Wicker, Tom. One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1991.
Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. New York: Harper, 2009.
Wilson, William Julius. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Group Activity: The Controversy over Busing—Pasadena, 1970
In the 1970s, federal courts began to prescribe ways to achieve the desegregation that the United States Supreme Court had
mandated in 1954, and most asked school districts to mix students from different neighborhoods by transporting them to
schools in other parts of town. This practice of busing raised objections from the very beginning and escalated into riot-like
confrontations in some of the nation’s allegedly most liberal cities, such as Boston.
The video in this Instructor’s Guide activity is a September 14, 1970, news report on what was the largest busing program
outside the South at the time, as well as a bill signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan banning busing in the state of
California.
Early Controversy over Busing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vwra-krMEvlU
1. What objections did Ronald Reagan raise to the busing of students? How did he characterize the order of the federal
judge?
2. For what reasons did the Pasadena residents interviewed in the report object to busing? Do these arguments resonate
with what you have learned about the rise of modern conservatism in the 1970s?
3. Discuss the recall of the Board of Supervisors of the Pasadena School District. What does this grassroots protest
suggest about the relationship between conservatism and activism in the 1970s?
4. How would you describe the ethnic diversity of the students, and how did they respond to the busing? How did most
parents react to the busing policy?
1. Let students research the broader history of busing, with a special emphasis on the events in Boston. What differences
do they note, and how can they explain them?
2. Research southern oral histories for perspectives on busing at the website listed below. How did southern views on
busing and federal court intervention differ from reactions in Pasadena, California, or Boston?
1. The resistance to the busing initiative in Pasadena was far less violent than in Charlotte or Boston. Divide students into
groups of five to eight and ask them to discuss possible reasons for this. If they are reluctant to speculate, help them see
the difference between the multiethnic diversity apparent in the Pasadena footage and the historical black-white divisions
in cities like Boston. Urge them to recall the results of their research on the socioeconomic data of Pasadena, which was
quite prosperous. By contrast, what did their research reveal about the conditions of blacks and working-class whites in
Boston in 1974?
3. Ask students to discuss whether busing was an effort to expand freedom or to reduce it. If it appears to them that it’s
both, can they come up with different definitions of the expanding versus the shrinking freedom?
4. If students disagree with the costs and disadvantages of busing, what alternative solutions can they think of?
2. Class Debate: Watergate Hearings
