Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (94 page)

38
. Davies, “The Welfare State”; R. Shep Melnick, “Governing More but Enjoying It Less,” in Morton Keller and Melnick, eds.,
Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century
(New York, 1999), 280–306;
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 342.

39
. Collins,
More
, 201.

40
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 305. For the 1990s, see
chapter 11
.

41
. Ibid., 320. It declined in the 1990s, to 2.7 million by 2001.

42
. Ibid., 305. This percentage continued to rise in the next few years, peaking at 67 percent between 1995 and 1997 before dipping to 57 by 2001. It rose again—boosted by tax cuts and by costs of the war against Iraq—to more than 70 in 2003.

43
. William Greider, “The Education of David Stockman,”
Atlantic Monthly
248 (Dec. 1981), 27.

44
. Over time, expert accountants and attorneys figured out new loopholes to help people avoid taxes, whereupon cries for tax simplification arose again.

45
.
Stat. Abst., 2002,
440.

46
. Ibid., 422;
New York Times
, Feb. 17, 2003. See also Pemberton,
Exit with Honor
, 206–8. Benefit packages for some of these workers improved, so that their total compensation, on the average, did not change much. For a grim view of family economics in the 1980s, however, see Barbara Ehrenreich,
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
(New York, 1989).

47
. William Strauss and Neil Howe,
Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069
(New York, 1991), 330–33.

48
. Edward Luttwak,
The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third-World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy
(New York, 1993), 49; Bernstein, “Understanding American Economic Decline”; Eckes and Zeiler,
Globalization in the American Century
, 208–10.

49
. Robert Plotnick et al., “Inequality and Poverty in the United States: The Twentieth-Century Record,”
Focus
19, no. 3 (Summer/Fall 1998), 7–14.

50
. Cannon,
President Reagan
, 746;
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 422.

51
. Daniel McMurrer and Isabel Sawhill, “The Declining Importance of Class,” Urban Institute paper no. 4 (April 1997); C. Eugene Steuerle,
The Tax Decade: How Taxes Came to Dominate the Public Agenda
(Washington, 1992), 24–25.

52
. Elliot Brownlee, “Taxation,” in Brownlee and Graham,
The Reagan Presidency
, 155–81.

53
. Cannon,
President Reagan
, 23, writes that between 1983 and 1988 Americans bought 105 million color television sets, 88 million cars and light trucks, 63 million VCRs, 62 million microwave ovens, 57 million washers and dryers, 46 million refrigerators and freezers, 31 million cordless phones, and 30 million telephone answering machines. In 1985, there were 86.8 million households in the United States, 62.7 million of which were family households.

54
. Stanley Lebergott,
Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton, 1993), 26–27; Thomas McCraw,
American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked
(Wheeling, Ill., 2000), 159.

55
. A great many of these jobs, as earlier and later, were relatively low-paying positions—often filled by women—in the expanding service sector. Moreover, growth in jobs (both in absolute numbers and in rate of increase) was a little more robust in the economically troubled 1970s than in the 1980s.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 367.

56
. Many books echo these criticisms. As titles and subtitles suggest, four of these are Garry Wills,
Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home
(New York, 2000); Robert Dallek,
Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Michael Schaller,
Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its Presidents in the 1980s
(New York, 1992); and Johnson,
Sleepwalking Through History
.

57
. This was the federal rate; states had varied minimums.

58
. The estimate of Christopher Jencks,
The Homeless
(Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Jencks found many sources of this increase: the deinstitutionalizing of the mentally ill, demolition of “skid row” hotels that had previously housed people, the rise of crack cocaine in the inner cities, and budget cuts.

59
. Terry Anderson,
In Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action
(New York, 2004), 196–97; Hugh Davis Graham, “Civil Rights Policy,” in Brownlee and Graham,
The Reagan Presidency
, 283–92; David O’Brien, “Federal Judgeships in Retrospect,” ibid., 327–54; and Andrew Hacker,
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York, 1995), 99–114.

60
.
New York Times
, Feb. 15, 1999. President Ford had earlier issued an official apology for the internments. Nearly 70 percent of the internees had been American citizens.

61
. Malcolm Gladwell,
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference
(New York, 2000), 133–38, 147–49; Hacker,
Two Nations
, 99–100. In 1996, a jury in a civil suit awarded Darrell Cabey, the paralyzed youth, $18 million for past and future suffering and $25 million in punitive damages, but Goetz had little money, and Cabey was not expected to benefit from the verdict.

62
. Nicholas Lemann,
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
(New York, 1991).

63
.
Washington Post
, May 17, 1984.

64
. Cannon,
President Reagan,
721; O’Brien, “Federal Judgeships in Retrospect.” Reagan named higher percentages of women and Hispanics to the federal bench than had any previous president except Carter, who nominated forty women to district and appeals court judgeships, compared to Reagan’s twenty-nine. Reagan named fewer blacks to judgeships than had his four predecessors.

65
. William Martin,
With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America
(New York, 1996), 227–30.

66
. News that Ginsburg had smoked pot when young killed his nomination before it got off the ground.

67
. White,
New Politics of Old Values
, 131–33.

68
. Cannon,
President Reagan
, 744–49. Steven Fraser,
Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life
(New York, 2004), 560, estimates the cost of the bailout as of 1990 to have been $210 billion.

69
. Fraser,
Every Man a Speculator
, 714–15.

70
. On Reagan and environmental issues, see Cannon,
President Reagan
, 145, 463–71; and Hal Rothman,
The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945
(Orlando, 1995), 186–92.

71
. Rothman,
Greening of a Nation
, 180.

72
. Martin,
With God on Our Side
, 139–43.

73
. Ibid., 221–34.

74
. Jonathan Zimmerman,
Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools
(Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 179–85.

75
. Garry Wills,
Under God: Religion and American Politics
(New York, 1990), 323–28.

76
.
Newsweek
, Sept. 10, 1984. For women’s agendas in the 1980s, see Alice Kessler-Harris,
The Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America
(New York, 2001), 289–96. For cultural resistance to women’s rights in the 1980s, see Susan Faludi,
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
(New York, 1991).

77
. Faludi,
Backlash
, 108–11, 176–87.

78
. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(Chicago, 1997), 354–67.

79
. For Reagan and AIDS, see Cannon,
President Reagan
, 731–36; Johnson,
Sleepwalking Through History
, 454.

80
. By the early 2000s, more than half of Americans said they knew people who were gay.
New York Times
, Feb. 29, 2004.

81
. Congress then and later appropriated more funds than Reagan requested.

82
. The actual number of AIDS cases in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, was 103,000, with 60,000 deaths, as of the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1989. Martin,
With God on Our Side
, 241. Between 1980 and 2001, 482,904 Americans died of AIDS. AVERT.org, “HIV and AIDS Statistics by Year.”

83
. For Koop and AIDS, see Martin,
With God on Our Side
, 239–43, 252–57.

84
. Cannon,
President Reagan
, 773.

85
.
Bowers v. Hardwick
, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).

86
. James Morone,
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven, 2000), 480–81, states that HIV incidence in the United States soon became ten times as high as in Britain.

87
. For the Castro area, see Frances FitzGerald,
Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures
(New York, 1986), 25–119.

88
. Michael Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s
(New Haven, 1995), 453–56; D’Emilio and Freedman,
Intimate Matters
, 366–67. For funding to fight AIDS, see Steven Gillon,
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America
(New York, 2004), 199–200.

89
. Cannon,
President Reagan
, 736.

90
. See
chapter 8
for “culture wars.”

91
. Gillon,
Boomer Nation
, 199–200.

92
.
New York Times
, March 27, 2003. At the time of the Court’s decision, concerning a sodomy law in Texas, thirteen states—all in the South, West, or Plains—still had laws on the books criminalizing sodomy.

93
. A total of 113 such shuttle launches took place between then and February 2003, when a crash killed seven. Another crash, of
Challenger
, had killed seven in 1986.

94
.
New York Times Almanac, 2003
, 384. Americans over the age of eighteen smoked 4,171 cigarettes per capita in 1960, 3,985 in 1970, 3,849 in 1980, and 2,817 in 1990. The drop during the 1980s was nearly 27 percent. In 1985, 30.1 percent of American adults smoked, a percentage that fell to 25.5 in 1990 and to 23.3 in 2000.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 124.