A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (149 page)

New industrial evangelists like Iacocca, even had they been in the majority, constituted only half the equation for turning American business around. Labor, led by the hardscrabble union bosses who had achieved great gains at tremendous cost in the 1950s and 1960s, still acted as though it spoke for a majority of working Americans. By the 1970s, however, the unions were losing members at precipitous rates. Trade unions had formed a critical part of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition, and the most important organizations—the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters—were able to demand exceptionally high wages for their members in the automobile, steel, and trucking industries. By 1970, a typical line worker in Detroit commanded $22 an hour, owned two cars, a boat, and a vacation home on a lake, or the equivalent of the earnings of a midlevel attorney in 2002. Miners and truckers, as well as those working in manufacturing jobs, had substantially higher incomes than many professionals and received better benefits than people in almost any income category.
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Unionized employees routinely made between $10,000 and $12,000 per year with overtime. New homes sold for about $23,000, meaning that a worker dedicating 30 percent of his income to a mortgage could own a house in six or seven years, which compared quite closely to a 1990s professional earning a $70,000 salary and supporting a $150,000 mortgage.
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Equally as valuable as cash, during the salad days of steadily increasing auto sales, auto and steel unions negotiated generous benefit and pension packages, adding to the real value of their contracts. Leaders such as George Meany of the AFL-CIO and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters wielded tremendous influence, not only over the Democratic Party, but also over the nation’s economy.

“Big Steel” and the auto companies, of course, did not just absorb these expenses, but passed them on to consumers, which added to inflation. American manufactured products, especially textiles, steel, autos, and electronics, rose in price relative to foreign competition. In steel alone, the cost of labor was six times that of foreign competitors.
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Sometime in the early 1970s, prices exceeded the threshold that most consumers were willing to pay in order to remain loyal to American-made products, and buyers began to switch to foreign goods. Recapturing formerly loyal customers is twice as difficult as holding them. Japanese and European manufacturers, who were turning out lower-priced quality goods, gained millions of new American customers in the 1970s. For the first time, “Made in Japan” was not viewed as a sign of cheap, shoddy goods, but as a mark of quality. Foreign competitors increased their steel production by some 700 million net tons, and builders scrambled to replace expensive American steel with fiberglass, aluminum, plastics, ceramics, and concrete.

American steel companies took the biggest hit of all. The industry had seen its international market share fall 20 percent since the Korean War, when U.S. steelmakers claimed 60 percent of the world’s sales. Worse, only one new steel plant—a Bethlehem facility in Indiana—was constructed between 1950 and 1970. At the same time, Japan gave birth to fifty-three new integrated steel companies, most of them with brand-new efficient mills, and Japanese assets in steel plants rose 23 percent between 1966 and 1972, compared to an investment in American plants of only 4 percent. The overall output of U.S.-made steel barely changed between 1948 and 1982, leading many steel executives to try to diversify their companies. Layoffs began with the expectation that they would be temporary. Then weeks stretched into months and into years. By 1980, it was clear that after years of sounding unheeded warnings, the wolf had finally come, and the industry would never return to its 1960s peak.
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This was the last gasp of organized union power in manufacturing America. From 35 percent of the American workforce in 1960, union membership entered a downward spiral, to 27 percent of the workforce in 1990. That did not tell the whole story, however, because the hard-core industrial unions had plunged even more sharply than the total, which was kept afloat only by the two largest unions in America, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). By 1980, AFSCME had twice the membership of the United Steel Workers.
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Thus, it became eminently clear why organized labor had a commitment to a permanently large and growing government and to public schools: those employees—operating outside the free market—now represented unions’ only hope of long-term survival.

The ensuing recession shattered the underlying premises of Keynesian economics once and for all. According to the prevailing Phillips Curve theory, an economy could not have both high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. This stemmed from the notion that inflation resulted from government spending for new jobs. It was all poppycock. The government could not create wealth in the 1970s any more than it could in the 1930s. More accurately, a bizarre expectations game occurred—“taxflation”—wherein businesses sensed that when new government programs were announced, their taxes would go up, and they responded by hiking prices merely in anticipation of the new taxes.

Gerald Ford possessed none of the qualities needed to deal with any aspect of the sinking economy. As a progressive (so called moderate) Republican, he sympathized with much of the Great Society spending. As a caretaker president, he did not possess the public support to force OPEC to increase production or lower prices. And, as a Nixon appointee, he faced a hostile and rogue Congress out to destroy all vestiges of the modern Republican Party much the way the Radical Republicans in Reconstruction had hoped to kill the Democratic Party. All Ford had in his favor was honesty, but his lack of imagination left him helpless in the face of further business declines. Having no desire for tax cuts that might revive the economy—and blocked by a spendthrift Congress that would not enact tax cuts anyway—Ford launched a campaign that was almost comedic in design. He sought to mobilize public support to hold down prices by introducing
win
(Whip Inflation Now) buttons.

The damage done to the American economy by almost a decade of exorbitant social spending, increasing environmental and workplace regulations, and Keynesian policies from the Johnson-Nixon administrations cannot be overstated. Yet just as government almost never gets the credit when economic growth occurs, so too its overall impact on the nation’s business health must be tempered with the appreciation for the poor planning and lack of innovation in the corporate sector. All that, combined with the impact of greedy union demands in heavy industry, made any foolish policies of government relatively insignificant. Perhaps worst of all, inflation had eroded earnings, creating new financial pressures for women to work.

Sex, the Church, and the Collapse of Marriage

By the mid-1970s, women’s entry into the workforce was being championed by the twentieth-century feminist movement. Armed with the Pill, feminists targeted the seeming lack of fairness in the job market, which punished women for dropping out of the market for several years to have children. But where their rhetoric failed to change corporations, the Pill changed women. By delaying childbirth, the Pill allowed women to enter professional schools in rapidly growing numbers.
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Paradoxically, the Pill placed more pressure on women to protect themselves during sex. And rather than liberating women for a career in place of a family, feminism heaped a career
on top of a family.
Women’s workloads only grew, and the moral burden on women to resist the advances of males expanded geometrically. Equally ironic, as women entered the workforce in greater numbers, increasing the expectation that young married women would work, the “expectations index” for couples soared. Newlyweds saw larger houses with bigger mortgages and more upscale cars as the norm because, after all, they had two incomes. This created a feedback loop that forced women to remain in the labor force after childbearing, and in many cases, after they wished to leave their jobs outside the home.

With all biological consequences removed from engaging in pre-or extramarital sex, the only barrier remaining was religion. But the church had seen much of its moral authority shattered in the 1960s, when on the one hand, large numbers of white Christians had remained mute during the civil rights struggles, and on the other, liberal-leftist elements in the church had associated themselves with communist dictators. In either case, the church (as many saw it) had allied itself with oppression against liberty.

When it came to sex, traditional Christianity had appeared hypocritical. Wives who dutifully served their families had to deal with alcoholic husbands and domestic abuse. (It is crucial to understand that perception is reality, and while the vast majority of husbands loved and served their wives, the fact that
any
domestic abuse occurred without comment from the local pulpit or a visit from the pastor or priest was unacceptable.) The more traditional and fundamentalist churches that preached against divorce and railed against premarital sex, said little to nothing about spouse or child abuse in their own congregations. At the other extreme, churches attempting to reach out to women and portray themselves as modern opened their pulpits to female ministers but ignored the moral necessity of demanding chastity and commitment from Christians in sexual matters. The former group preached piety and practiced unacceptable toleration of sin, while the latter celebrated its toleration, but ignored holiness.

For all their failures to stand up for women’s and civil rights, the hard-line fundamentalist churches nevertheless continued to grow throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, if for no other reason than it was clear they stood for clear and unwavering principles. Liberal Protestant denominations, on the other hand, shrank at shocking rates, despite their new inclusion policies. American Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and United Church of Christ all lost members from 1960 to 1975. Although people claimed that they stayed home on Sunday because they thought churches were behind the times, those churches most behind the times seemed to thrive.
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Southern Baptists nearly doubled in numbers of churches between 1958 and 1971. Even more astounding, televangelist Oral Roberts, a charismatic faith healer, reached 2.3 million viewers in a single broadcast, a number that nearly equaled the entire estimated Sunday attendance of
all
the Methodist churches in the nation! When one combined the audiences of the top eight televised ministries during a single broadcast—virtually all of them outside the mainstream—they matched that of the estimated church attendance of the top six denominations combined.
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Indeed, one scholar, looking at these viewing trends, concluded that the numbers “reveal a previously unmapped dimension of religion in America, a basic fundamentalist orientation that cuts across denominational lines.”
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Transcending denominational differences went so far as to see Protestants and Catholics beginning to share similar worship experiences. The Roman Catholic Church had modernized with its Vatican II (1962–65) Council, making such changes as having the priest face the congregation for mass (which now was said in English, not Latin). Nevertheless, the Catholic Church at midcentury witnessed a stunning decline, not only in members, but in clergy. American nuns decreased in number by 14,000 in the last half of the sixties, and by 1976, 45,000 priests and nuns had abandoned the cloth. (Among the vanguard order, the Jesuits, recruitment numbers plummeted by 80 percent in the 1990s.) Although American Catholicism revived in the latter part of the twentieth century because of immigration, it still had difficulty attracting young men to its seminaries and women to its convents. A subculture of homosexuality began to permeate the orders, driving out heterosexual men who vowed to remain celibate, creating what was called the “gaying and graying” of the Church. (In 2002, this exploded as a full-scale scandal when several lawsuits were brought against many priests for sexual abuse and pedophilia, threatening to bankrupt the Boston Catholic Church. But the Church claimed to be unaware of these offenses.) One subgroup within the Catholic Church, however, the Catholic Charismatic movement, nevertheless showed strong gains. It did so because it intersected with the Protestant “faith movement” with spiritual expressions such as speaking in tongues, healing, and other supernatural outpourings.

Clearly a major split had occurred in the American church from 1960 to 1975, and it did so rather rapidly. In 1962, for example, some 31 percent of those polled said that religion was losing its influence, almost twice as many as had answered the question affirmatively five years earlier.
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At nearly the same time, the Federal Communications Commission had begun allowing television and radio stations to use paid programming to fulfill their public service broadcasting requirements. This silenced the mainstream liberal churches, which suddenly found that despite a decade’s worth of monopoly over the airwaves, they could no longer generate enough funds to purchase airtime.
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Instead, the so-called fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations “dominated the airwaves, having ‘honed their skills at the fringes of the industry.’”
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Indeed, Pentecostal denominations—and even nondenominational congregations led by individual charismatic (in all senses of the word!) leaders—soared in membership. Oral Roberts, the best known of the “faith” ministers, built an entire university and hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and some of his students, such as Kenneth Copeland, or contemporaries, such as Kenneth Hagin, developed powerful healing and “prosperity” ministries.

Traditional churches, of course, despised the charismatics, whose main identifying practice was that of speaking in tongues under the influence of the Holy Spirit. These charismatic churches featured several characteristics that antagonized the mainstream churches: they were racially integrated, they crossed all economic lines, and women had prominent positions of power in the organizations. Faith healer Katherine Kuhlmann, for example, had been the first female with a regular religious show on television. Discrimination still existed, and many of the Pentecostal denominations still frowned on interracial marriage. But compared to the mainstream church, the underground Pentecostal movement was remarkably free of racism, classism, and gender bias.