Society in Transition

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the line of Warren and Burger Court decisions, from Mapp v. Ohio in 1961 through Roe v. Wade in 1973, that historians describe as the Rights Revolution, and explain why those decisions provoked sustained conservative opposition (LO 8.J, KC-8.2.III.F).
• Trace the Watergate scandal from the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974, and account for its effect on public confidence in the federal government (LO 8.J, KC-8.2.III.E).
• Account for stagflation, the OPEC shocks of 1973 and 1979, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Carter presidency as the cluster of crises that the College Board CED identifies as the trigger for declining public trust in government's ability to solve social and economic problems (LO 8.J, KC-8.2.III.E).
• Account for the rise of the New Right by 1980, including the Stop ERA campaign, the founding of the Moral Majority, the neoconservative critique of Great Society liberalism, and the California tax revolt that produced Proposition 13, and explain how those streams produced the Reagan coalition (LO 8.J, KC-8.2.III.C, KC-8.2.III.F).
• Account for the political and social effects of the rapid growth of evangelical Christian organizations across the twentieth century, treating Topic 8.14 as the place in Period 8 where Learning Objective 8.P is most active (LO 8.P, KC-8.3.II.C).

Topic 8.14 is the place in the Period 8 narrative where the postwar liberal consensus comes apart. The previous thirteen lessons have built the world that the consensus produced: the Cold War, the postwar economic boom, the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and the environmental policy state. Topic 8.14 is the topic where students account for what broke. The CED frames the answer in three pieces. The Rights Revolution wrote individual rights into federal constitutional law on a scale that produced sustained conservative opposition (KC-8.2.III.F). The convergence of stagflation, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis broke public confidence in the federal government's ability to solve social and economic problems (KC-8.2.III.E). And the Reagan coalition organized around business deregulation, tax cuts, and a more assertive foreign policy (KC-8.2.III.C). Topic 8.14 is also the place in Period 8 where Learning Objective 8.P is most active: the rapid and substantial growth of evangelical Christian organizations was paired with greater political and social activism on the part of religious conservatives (KC-8.3.II.C).

The first piece is the Rights Revolution. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and his successor Warren Burger handed down a line of decisions that expanded individual rights against the states on a scale not seen since Reconstruction. Mapp v. Ohio in 1961 applied the exclusionary rule to state criminal courts, holding that evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment could not be used at trial. Engel v. Vitale in 1962 prohibited state-composed prayer in public schools. Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 required the states to provide counsel for indigent felony defendants. Miranda v. Arizona in 1966 required police to warn suspects in custodial interrogation of their right to remain silent and their right to counsel, the warning still recited on every police drama on television. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 struck down a state ban on the use of contraceptives by married couples and announced a constitutional right of privacy that would anchor later rulings. Roe v. Wade in 1973, decided by the Burger Court, extended the privacy framework to hold that the federal Constitution protected a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy in the early stages. The Rights Revolution made the federal courts the agents of social change, and it made the federal courts the targets of organized conservative opposition for the next half century (KC-8.2.III.F).

The second piece is the Watergate scandal and the credibility crisis it produced. On the night of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington with bugging equipment, cash linked to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and a list of phone numbers connecting them to the Nixon White House. The administration spent the next two years denying involvement and engineering a cover-up. The cover-up unraveled across 1973: the Senate Watergate Committee opened televised hearings in May, the existence of the White House taping system was disclosed in July, and on the night of October 20, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. In United States v. Nixon in July 1974 the Burger Court rejected the president's claim of an absolute executive privilege and forced the release of the Oval Office tapes. The tapes contained the so-called smoking gun conversation of June 23, 1972, in which Nixon directed his chief of staff to use the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Watergate inquiry. Faced with near-certain impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the first president in American history to do so. Gerald Ford's full pardon of Nixon a month later spared the country a criminal trial of a former president and probably ended Ford's own political career. The CED captures the consequence of Watergate at the level of public attitude: confidence and trust in the federal government's ability to solve social and economic problems declined sharply across the 1970s in the wake of political scandals, economic challenges, and foreign policy crises (KC-8.2.III.E).

The economic side of that crisis is stagflation. Beginning in 1973 the American economy entered a condition the postwar Keynesian consensus had assumed was impossible: high inflation and high unemployment together with sluggish growth. The OPEC oil embargo of October 1973, imposed in response to American support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, quadrupled the price of crude oil within a year, produced gasoline lines and rationing, and pushed the consumer price index above eleven percent by the end of 1974. The second oil shock of 1979, triggered by the Iranian Revolution, produced a second round of gasoline lines and pushed inflation above thirteen percent. Manufacturing employment lost ground to West German and Japanese competitors. Gerald Ford's 1974 anti-inflation campaign, complete with Whip Inflation Now buttons, became a national punchline. Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976 on a promise to restore honesty to the post-Watergate White House, struggled across his single term with an energy crisis, an inflation rate that broke double digits, and a Democratic congressional party divided over how to respond.

Foreign policy added the third element of the late-1970s credibility crisis. On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionary students stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and seized fifty-two American diplomats and citizens. The Iran hostage crisis ran for four hundred and forty-four days, dominating the evening news through the 1980 election campaign. A military rescue attempt in April 1980 failed in the Iranian desert when three of the eight helicopters experienced equipment failures. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. The crisis fixed in public memory an image of an American government that could neither protect its own diplomats abroad nor manage gasoline supply at home, the foreign-policy crisis the CED groups with stagflation and Watergate as the trigger for declining public trust (KC-8.2.III.E).

The political response to that crisis was the New Right. Four streams converged across the 1970s. The first was the Stop ERA campaign organized by Phyllis Schlafly, an Illinois lawyer and longtime conservative activist who turned the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which had passed Congress in 1972 and which seemed certain to be ratified by the states, into a national grassroots fight. By the time the ratification deadline expired in 1982 the amendment was three states short, and Schlafly's network of state-level organizers had become a model for conservative mobilization. The second stream was the political mobilization of evangelical Christians. The Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 as an explicit project of bringing evangelical voters into Republican politics, organized around opposition to abortion, school prayer rulings, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the broader cultural changes of the 1960s. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition would extend the model in the late 1980s. The CED captures the development directly: the rapid and substantial growth of evangelical Christian organizations was paired with greater political and social activism on the part of religious conservatives (KC-8.3.II.C). Topic 8.14 is the place in Period 8 where Learning Objective 8.P, on the political effects of the growth of religious movements over the course of the twentieth century, is most active.

The third stream was the neoconservative intellectual movement. A loose network of formerly liberal intellectuals, many writing in journals like Commentary and the Public Interest, broke with the Great Society over what they saw as the failure of federal social programs to deliver the social order they had promised. The neoconservative critique called for a more skeptical evaluation of federal social spending and a more assertive American foreign policy, both of which would become central to the Reagan coalition. The fourth stream was the tax revolt. In June 1978 California voters approved Proposition 13, a ballot initiative that capped property taxes at one percent of assessed value, rolled assessments back to 1976 levels, and required a two-thirds legislative supermajority for any future tax increase. The measure passed sixty-five percent to thirty-five percent. Within two years more than a dozen other states had passed similar measures. The tax revolt gave the New Right an economic program of business deregulation and tax cuts to spur economic growth, often citing the work of free-market economists (KC-8.2.III.C). Together, the four streams produced the political coalition that elected Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in November 1980 by ten percentage points and forty-four states. The Reagan victory closes Period 8 and opens Period 9.

Below the political surface, the cultural mood of the decade had shifted as well. The novelist Tom Wolfe, writing in New York magazine in August 1976, named the 1970s the Me Decade: a period of inward-turning individualism, therapy culture, jogging, fitness, and personal-improvement movements that he argued had succeeded the political idealism of the 1960s. The label oversimplified, as period labels do; the decade also produced the second wave of the women's movement, the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the most consequential immigration reform since 1965. But the Me Decade label captured a real shift in the public mood: a turn from collective political projects toward private self-improvement, and a wariness about the ability of any large institution, governmental or otherwise, to solve large social problems. That cultural mood, as much as the policy debates the CED foregrounds, set the stage for the political turn of 1980.

The five sources below align with the Topic 8.14 source list in the AP USH primary-source library and span the political, judicial, economic, and foreign-policy fronts of the late-1970s crisis.

1. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters to Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974. Identify the two or three most consequential turning points in the chain, and explain why each mattered for the eventual outcome.
2. (Continuity and Change) The Warren Court's decisions in Mapp, Engel, Gideon, and Miranda and the Burger Court's decisions in Griswold and Roe are often grouped together as the Rights Revolution. Identify one continuity and one significant shift across the line from Mapp in 1961 to Roe in 1973. Which is more historically consequential, and on what grounds?
3. (Causation) Account for the rise of the New Right by 1980 by identifying which of the four streams of the movement, the Stop ERA campaign, the Moral Majority, the neoconservatives, or the tax revolt, you take to be the most causally important. Defend your answer with specific historical evidence.
4. (Comparison) Compare the political mobilization of evangelical Christians in the late 1970s with the political mobilization of African American churches in the early Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. What does the comparison reveal about the relationship between religious institutions and partisan politics in the United States?
5. (Causation) Account for the way stagflation, the OPEC oil shocks, and the Iran hostage crisis together produced the credibility crisis the CED captures in KC-8.2.III.E. Could any one of the three, on its own, have produced the same political result?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.