Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (42 page)

Why such battling over culture at this time? Responses to this question suggest that a combination of forces helped to highlight it. One answer emphasizes that the passing of the Cold War, which until the early 1990s had helped to unite Americans, enabled people to drop their fears of Communism and to focus on domestic concerns and in many situations to reaffirm ethnic and religious identities. No longer caught up in patriotic crusades against Communists abroad, they fought more passionately than earlier over social and cultural concerns. This is a plausible, though hard to prove, argument. A convincing second explanation—important in accounting for the force of cultural controversies after 1992—centers on Clinton’s triumph in that year, which broke the twelve-year hold of the GOP on the White House. To deeply disappointed conservatives, who launched most of the culture wars, Clinton was the epitome of all that was wrong with his baby boom generation—and with the elitist liberals, amoral Hollywood celebrities, and left-wing academics who supported him.

Whatever the causes, the clamor of cultural conflict over social trends, coexisting with laments about national decline, seemed especially cacophonous in the early 1990s. Conservative declinists, yearning for what they recalled as the more decorous days of the 1950s, even more loudly deplored America’s high rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, divorce, and abortion.
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Liberals shot back at what they considered the aggressiveness and intolerance of the Religious Right.

Highly publicized acts of violence further empowered a popular sense in the early 1990s that the nation was coming apart. Many people were outraged by the tactics of extremists, terrorists, in fact, within Operation Rescue, who killed seven people—doctors and people in clinics—at the time,
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and by the militaristic activities of right-wing hate groups, such as the Freemen and the Aryan Brotherhood. In 1995, two anti-government zealots, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, succeeded in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City, costing the lives of 168 people. A year later a pipe bomb exploded at the Atlanta Olympics. It killed one person and injured many more. Some gay-haters, too, were vicious: In 1998, two men beat a twenty-one-year-old gay man, Matthew Shepard, and tied him to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. Five days after being discovered, Shepard died of his injuries in a hospital.

Highly publicized culture wars over art in the late 1980s and early 1990s, although non-violent, were especially harsh. In 1988, Martin Scorsese directed the film
The Last Temptation of Christ
, which was based on a novel of that name that had been published in 1955 by Nikos Kazantzakis. The movie portrayed Christ as an ordinary man who was tempted by many things and who fantasized about being married to and having sex with Mary Magdalene. Though a number of film critics gave the movie good reviews (Scorsese was nominated for an Oscar), many conservative Americans furiously denounced it. Falwell exclaimed that the film featured “blasphemy of the worst degree.” Conservative organizations, led by Concerned Women for America, promoted letter-writing campaigns, street protests, and picketing. One demonstration, at Universal City, drew some 25,000 protestors. Leaders of the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and many evangelical Protestant faiths called for a nationwide consumer boycott of the movie. Though this did not develop, opponents of the film scored some victories. A few of the nation’s largest theater chains refused to screen it. Blockbuster Video declined to stock it on its shelves.
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In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), whose modest budget supported a number of arts projects each year, indirectly funded two photographic exhibits that touched off new controversies over high culture. One of these exhibits, by the photographer Andres Serrano, featured a shot of a crucifix in a jar of his urine. It was titled “Piss Christ.” The second exhibit, by Robert Mapplethorpe, included a photograph that turned an image of the Virgin Mary into a tie rack. Other offerings in his show featured homoerotic and sadomasochistic shots—one showing Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip implanted in his anus, another depicting a man urinating in another man’s mouth.
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As in the case of Scorsese’s film, these exhibitions aroused fierce controversy. Most art critics and museum people tried to defend the exhibits, either as imaginative creations or (more commonly) as free expression that must not be censored. Many other Americans were irate. Congress, led by Senator Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative from North Carolina, reluctantly reauthorized funding for the NEA, but at reduced levels, and on the condition that it sponsor works that were “sensitive to the general standards of decency.”
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Although these were perhaps the most visible of contemporary cultural struggles over art, two other controversies involving museums and the treatment of American history further frayed the bonds of cultural peace in the United States. Both these battles excited tempestuous public debates in which conservatives assailed “politically correct” approaches to United States history. The first swirled about an exhibit, “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920,” staged in 1991 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Art in Washington. Demythologizing American history, it highlighted the role of white exploitation of Native Americans during the exploration and settlement of the American West. A number of viewers, having read in school about the heroic struggles of white explorers and settlers who had spread democracy across the frontier, erupted in protest.
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A few GOP senators threatened to cut the museum’s budget.

The second fight erupted three years later when the National Air and Space Museum readied plans for a major exhibit that was to feature the
Enola Gay
, the B-29 from which the Bomb had fallen on Hiroshima in 1945. Conservatives, joined by veterans’ groups, protested when they were permitted to see the museum’s early draft of the exhibit, which seemed to question the wisdom of dropping the Bomb and which, they said, badly distorted American history. The pilot of the
Enola Gay
, Paul Tibbett, exclaimed that the proposed exhibit was a “package of insults.” Forced to the defensive, the director of the museum resigned, and the draft exhibit was drastically rewritten and cut, so as to feature the plane itself without a great deal of interpretive context. Many academic historians protested against this cave-in, as they saw it, but to no avail.
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Conservatives also mobilized to battle against liberal faculty members at universities such as Stanford, where in 1988, discussions took place that later resulted in the widely reported dropping of a required freshman core course in Western culture. It was replaced by a variety of humanities offerings that, though including many Western classics, were a little less Western-centered. Anguished defenders of the “Western canon,” including Education Secretary William Bennett, explained that Stanford was “trashing Western culture.” Stanford faculty members retorted by hailing the changes as enabling, at last, a “birth of multiculturalism” within the core of university courses.

A still more hotly contested fight over humanities teaching broke out in 1994 and 1995, this time over proposed national standards aimed at assisting teachers of United States history. Produced by leading scholars in the field, the standards recommended that teachers help students understand the importance in American history of such evils as slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and McCarthyism. Conservatives, however, complained that the guidelines had not nearly enough (or nothing at all) to say about patriots such as Paul Revere, inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, soldiers such as Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and the Founding Fathers.

This bitter controversy ultimately quieted down after scholars revised the standards so as to moderate a little the complaints of conservatives. Published in 1996, the standards were read by many thousands of teachers in the following years. Well before then, however, Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities (and wife of Dick Cheney), had entered the fight against the standards. The battle had also reached the floor of the U.S. Senate, which in 1995 denounced the standards in a vote of 99 to 1. This was a procedural roll call that had no practical effect, but the testy debates on Capitol Hill vividly exposed the gulf that separated cultural conservatives—and a great many national politicians—from most academic historians. A Republican senator, Slade Gorton of Washington, exclaimed that the standards confronted Americans with a choice. He demanded to know: “George Washington or Bart Simpson”—which person represented a “more important part of our Nation’s history for our children to study?”
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Conservatives such as Gorton also fumed about the proliferation of “political correctness,” or “PC,” as it became called, in the early 1990s. Much of this PC arose, they complained, from the zeal of liberal faculty and university administrators, who were introducing detailed codes of speech and conduct aimed at promoting tolerance on university campuses. Some of these codes took special aim at “hate speech” that students were said to be using when they targeted women, gays and lesbians, and minorities of color. Conflict over such issues roiled a number of universities, especially in the early 1990s, and prompted a host of excited exchanges among students, intellectuals, and others.
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Some of these fights over culture were nasty, featuring language by protagonists that was harsher and more unforgiving than in the past. Religious conservatives damned their foes as “masters of deceit,” “amoral,” and “arrogant and self-righteous.” Liberals, they said, supported the “forces of the anti-Christ.” Liberals retorted in kind: Their foes were “moral zealots,” “fanatics,” “latter-day Cotton Mathers,” and “patriots of paranoia” who stood sanctimoniously for “God, flag, and family.”
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The rancor exposed sharp regional and class divisions. Cultural conservatism developed increasing appeal to people—notably white working-class Americans—in the South and in the Plains and Rocky Mountain states, while liberal ideas continued to appeal to well-educated academic and professional people on the east and west coasts and in the metropolitan centers of the East and Midwest. Some of these antagonists appeared to think that the enemy had to be not merely defeated but also destroyed.

At the time that these struggles were stealing headlines, a number of contemporaries thought that they would have powerful, long-range consequences. James Davison Hunter, who in 1991 published a thorough account of the controversies, concluded, “America is in the midst of a culture war that has and will continue to have reverberations not only within public policy but within the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere.”
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Eight years later, a leading conservative writer, Gertrude Himmelfarb, published a book that received considerable attention. Its title,
One Nation, Two Cultures
, revealed her central argument: Culture wars were cutting the nation in half.
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Assessments such as these echoed the opinions of many contemporaries. Especially in the early 1990s, talk about “culture wars,” complementing complaints about “decline,” attracted a good deal of impassioned coverage in the media.

F
ROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF THE EARLY 2000S
, two broad observations seem fairly clear about these assessments. The first is that many in the media, which frequently fixated on conflict, exaggerated the ferocity of the culture wars, which in any event abated a little bit (though not among politically engaged elites and partisan politicians) in the late 1990s.
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Hunter himself observed that a “vast middle ground” (60 percent or so, by his estimate) of Americans paid little attention to such battles.
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Even in presidential elections, nearly 50 percent of the voting-eligible population did not turn out. Of those who did, one-third or so identified themselves as independents, and many others said that they found it very difficult to decide on candidates. About many social and cultural issues, including the aesthetic and political messages of academe and of high culture, most Americans did not get terribly excited.
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The influence of the Religious Right, about which many liberals did get excited, was a little less potent between the late 1980s and the mid- and late 1990s than it had appeared to be in the early 1980s. In 1987, Jim Bakker, then at the peak of his fame as a television star, had been exposed as an adulterer with his church secretary, and as an embezzler of millions of dollars from his ministry. Convicted of fraud, he was fined $500,000 and sentenced in 1989 to forty-five years in prison. (He served five.) A second Assemblies of God television preacher, the piano-playing, hyper-emotional Jimmy Swaggart, was photographed taking a roadside prostitute into a motel room on the outskirts of New Orleans.
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Swaggart appeared before his congregation of 7,000 in Baton Rouge, where he begged tearfully for forgiveness of his sins and resigned from his ministry. Publicity surrounding the tribulations of these self-righteous crusaders tarnished some of the glitter of religious conservatism.