Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (44 page)

As earlier, mothers who worked outside the home struggled to resolve varied goals: a wish for satisfaction from home management and child-rearing on the one hand, and the desire (and often the need) to earn a living or fashion a career apart from the home on the other. They still had to contend with the double shift, to scramble for affordable day care, and to cope on occasion with sexual harassment on the job. The average earnings of women who had full-time, year-round employment were only 77.5 percent of those of similarly employed men in 2002. Sexual segregation and discrimination in hiring and promotion, though considerably less widespread than in the past, still confronted women in various occupations. In 2000, women held only 136 of 655 federal district court judgeships and only 20 percent of law professorships.
⁵⁰
Feminism, in eclipse since the 1970s, was hardly vibrant.

In a number of ways, however, many career-oriented and wage-earning women in the late 1990s had reason to be pleased by the continuation of earlier improvements in their relative position. By 2000, women were nearly 50 percent of entering classes at American law, medical, and graduate schools. They were more than 55 percent of college undergraduates. Federal laws such as Title IX were being enforced, though not always vigorously, to advance equal rights for women in sports and other activities at schools and colleges. The average wages of full-time women workers, though still lower than men’s, were closer to parity than in 1979, when they had been 62.5 percent of those of men. The earnings of childless young women in 2000—those aged between twenty-seven and thirty-five—were virtually the same as those of employed men of the same age.

By the 1990s, many employers of women were a little more likely than in the past to understand the necessity for flex-time scheduling and leave time, especially after the signing by Clinton in 1993 of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which called upon businesses with more than fifty employees to provide up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave for workers, including fathers or mothers with new babies, who needed time off. Thanks to the spread of personal computers and the Internet, slightly higher percentages of employed women were able to work at least part-time at home.
⁵¹
These and other trends, adding to earlier advances since the 1960s, amounted to significant gains for American women. On the average, women workers were faring considerably better economically than they had done in earlier decades. They also made slow but heartening advances politically: The number of women holding seats in the House rose from twenty-eight in 1991 to sixty-two in 2001; the number in the Senate increased in the same years from three to thirteen.
⁵²

These and other developments, reflecting the receptivity to progressive change that had often been a feature of American culture, represented forward strides away from many social and cultural patterns of the supposedly Good Old Days. Though conservatives in the 1990s had successes in
political
battles against Clinton’s public policies, such as health care reform, they continued to struggle when resisting the tides of
cultural
change. They were surely not winning all the culture wars.

I
T WAS EVIDENT
that some of these social and cultural developments of the 1990s came at a price. Many liberals warned that this was especially the case concerning the most celebrated of these changes: declining crime rates. Though there was no clear consensus about the sources of this widely welcomed improvement, experts enumerated several likely causes, including a decline since the 1970s in the percentage of young people in the population, improving economic conditions, and much better community policing, which featured quicker public attention to signs of neighborhood deterioration, such as graffiti and broken windows.
⁵³

Worried observers, however, pointed to related trends, notably the impact of harsher sentencing procedures, such as California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law of 1994. This act, harsher than a federal measure and than twenty-four similar laws that state legislatures enacted in the next few years, hit three-time felony offenders, including those whose third conviction had been for small-time shoplifting or for possession of drugs, with mandatory prison sentences ranging from twenty-five years to life.
⁵⁴
National crackdowns, especially in “wars” against drugs, also became tougher in the 1990s than earlier, resulting in a considerable rise in convictions and in a 13 percent increase in the average length of sentences during the decade. Between 1970 and 2000, America’s jail and prison population increased fivefold, jumping (especially during the 1990s), to approximately 2.1 million.
⁵⁵
More than 50 percent of all federal prisoners and 22 percent of state and local prisoners during these thirty years were incarcerated as a result of drug-related convictions.

Many conservatives rejoiced over the crackdowns, believing that by removing criminals from the streets they did a great deal to deter serious crime. But the rates of many varieties of serious crime, though lower than they had been in the 1980s, were still considerably higher than they had been in the 1950s and early 1960s. Harsher laws and sentencing, notably of non-violent offenders, did little to inhibit the still flourishing drug trade. The laws led especially to a surge in jail and prison building, which drained public funds from other uses, such as schools, roads, and health care.
⁵⁶
The rise in the number of prisoners was staggeringly high. By 2003, nearly 8 Americans per 1,000 of population were behind bars. This was a far higher rate than in Britain, the nation whose numbers were second highest in this respect.

Statistics on crime in relation to race, as earlier, remained especially unnerving. In the early 2000s, it was officially reported that 12 percent of black males aged twenty to thirty-four and 4 percent of Hispanics of these ages were in jail or prison. By contrast, only 1.2 percent of similarly aged white men were incarcerated. In 2003, African Americans, who were 12.3 percent of the population, were 46 percent of all prisoners in the United States (as opposed to 36 percent who were white and 17.6 percent who were Hispanic). Roughly one-fourth of all federal prisoners were not citizens of the United States. In the same year, the Justice Department estimated that 28 percent of black men would serve time in jail or prison at some point in their lifetimes.
⁵⁷

Statistics like these inevitably aggravated culture wars over race. While minority group leaders, backed by white liberals, saw the numbers in part as proof of the oppression, especially by police, that continued to afflict people of color, many other Americans found the statistics to be confirmation of their belief that blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics were prone to lawlessness and deserved whatever punishments they got.

M
ANY OTHER CULTURAL AND SOCIAL TRENDS
of the 1990s continued to alarm contemporary Americans, both on the right and on the left, and to suggest to worried people that the nation was in decline and at war over culture.

One of these trends—long a bane to conservatives as well as to many communitarians—was what they thought was an overheated rights-consciousness. Rising expectations, they complained, were continuing to strengthen “selfish” interest groups whose sense of entitlement knew no bounds.
Rights Talk
, a sober assessment of such expectations by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon that appeared in 1991, helped to spur growing attention to this development. Rights talk, she wrote, “promotes unrealistic expectations, heightens social conflict, and inhibits dialogue that might lead toward consensus.”
⁵⁸

Others who fretted about the rise of rights-consciousness pointed to trends in the legal profession, which seemed to become steadily more powerful in the United States. It was estimated in 1993 that America had more than 800,000 lawyers, or 307 for every 100,000 of population—as opposed to 103 per 100,000 in Britain and only 21 per 100,000 in Japan. A decade later the number of lawyers in America had leapt to more than a million.
⁵⁹
Though the largest growth in the profession took place in the fields of business and corporate law, many of these attorneys specialized in sexual harassment or personal injury cases, such as the one that hit McDonald’s for $2.9 million, and created what one scholar called a “litigation explosion.” A few of these cases, especially those involving medical malpractice, resulted in damage awards for “pain and suffering” that soared into the nine-figure range. Trial lawyers who were skilled before juries, such as John Edwards, a North Carolina attorney who won election to the United States Senate in 1998 (and ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2004), earned fees—normally around one-third or more of awards—that catapulted them into the ranks of multimillionaires.

Lawyers for plaintiffs in these cases predictably spoke as champions of the rights of underdogs. Their opponents, denounced as faceless corporations with deep pockets, were depicted as hard-hearted villains whose blunders or deceptions had helped to harm or kill people. To the extent that juries sided with plaintiffs, they exposed what some observers regarded as rising class resentments in America. This was a doubtful generalization, but confrontations such as these did exacerbate already sharp cultural conflicts between liberals and conservatives. Personal injury lawyers, conservatives exclaimed, were members of the “only true parasitical class” in the nation. Backed by manufacturers, insurers, and many physicians, these conservatives demanded tort reform, especially to deter a few “hellhole” states and county court districts where “jackpot juries” were known to render lavishly anti-corporate verdicts. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America, which had become an increasingly active interest group, fired back angrily and effectively at charges such as these.

Whether the surging of rights-consciousness—and the “scourge” of litigation—was good or bad obviously depended on one’s point of view. Liberals contended persuasively that these developments were long overdue, that marginalized people who had been abused or oppressed were finally receiving justice.
⁶⁰
They rejoiced that the American Civil Liberties Union was becoming a considerably more influential organization than it had been in the Bad Old Days of McCarthyism, at which time it had been smeared as a “pinko” front. It was also true that in some ways the litigiousness of the United States was a healthy development—a sign not only of the diversity and dynamism of American society and politics but also of the trust that people were placing in the courts and in the ultimate fairness of the justice system.

Other Americans, especially but not only conservatives, emphatically disagreed, and they fought back vigorously in lawsuits of their own. By turning so often to the courts, they charged, litigants abandoned efforts at negotiation and compromise and ratcheted up societal ill will. Critics such as these further complained that litigation of this sort drove up the price of goods and services, such as medical malpractice insurance. Physicians, they said, were being forced out of business. Advocates of tort reform insisted that recourse to litigation bypassed and weakened democratic institutions, notably legislatures. The result, as Glendon put it, was the “impoverishment of political discourse.”
⁶¹

A related manifestation of litigiousness did seem fairly clear in the 1990s: the durable power of conspiratorial thinking. Popular suspicions of authority figures was hardly new at the time; these had spread at least since the assassination of JFK and had swelled as a result of the deceptions that government leaders had practiced during the Vietnam War and the drawn-out crisis of Watergate. Some conspiracies—like the one that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995—surely existed in the 1990s. Other supposed conspirators, however, lived only in the fevered imaginations of racists and self-promoters: Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, was among the small but sometimes noisy group of bigots who circulated rumors through the media during the 1990s about a vast conspiracy of Jews. Popular notions of conspiracy—and resentments aimed at people of power—nonetheless attracted considerable public attention.

As earlier, distrust of authority spurred conspiratorial thinking, especially among hustlers looking for a buck. In 1991, the filmmaker Oliver Stone brought out
JFK
, which implied that all manner of authority figures, including LBJ and members of the “military-industrial complex,” had plotted Kennedy’s assassination. Stone’s irresponsible film was a success at the box office and sparked congressional efforts to reexamine the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report, which in 1964 had identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of Kennedy. A majority of Americans, attracted by conspiratorial notions, still rejected these conclusions.
⁶²

Dark rumors never stopped swirling in the 1990s about other conspiracies, such as those that had supposedly brought about the deaths of Elvis Presley and Princess Diana and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Some rumormongers identified a “satanic underground” that abducted young girls and abused them in demonic rituals. Conspiratorially minded Americans especially targeted members of the government, which had always been the most distrusted authority of all. When Vincent Foster, a top aide of President Clinton, was found dead of apparent suicide in 1993, rumors (never in any way substantiated) abounded that the president had had a hand in having him killed. As earlier, the Pentagon was blamed for withholding the truth about UFOs, for concealing evidence about MIAs in Vietnam—would the scars of that awful conflict ever heal?—and for downplaying the extent of the Gulf War Syndrome, the illnesses that were thought to afflict American soldiers who had taken part in the recent war against Iraq.
⁶³