1980: America's Pivotal Year

By Jim Cullen

1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.
 
1980: America's Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.

Praise for Jim Cullen's previous Rutgers University Press books:

"Informed and perceptive" —Norman Lear on Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters

"Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today." —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

"This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative....Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch." —Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978831186

Book preview

Cover: 1980: America’s Pivotal Year, AMERICA’S PIVOTAL YEAR by Jim Cullen

1980

1980

AMERICA’S PIVOTAL YEAR

JIM CULLEN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cullen, Jim, 1962- author.

Title: 1980 : America’s pivotal year / Jim Cullen.

Other titles: Nineteen eighty

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022008494 | ISBN 9781978831179 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978831186 (epub) | ISBN 9781978831193 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. | Nineteen eighties. | Mass media—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—1981-1989. | United States—Civilization—1970- | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century

Classification: LCC E161.12 C85 2023 | DDC 306.0973/0904—dc23/eng/20220516

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008494

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Jim Cullen

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Facing Janus

1ON THE CUSP

American Politics and Culture in 1979

2WIND SHEAR

The Political Cultures of 1980

3THE CLOSING OF HEAVEN’S GATE

Hollywood in Transition

4STARTING OVER

Pop Music’s Future Goes Back to the Past

5EBB AND FLOW

Tidal Shifts in Broadcast Television

6TURNING THE PAGE

The Publishing Industry in 1980

7INFLECTION POINT

Autumn 1980

CONCLUSION

Inaugurating the Eighties

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

1980

Introduction

Facing Janus

WE LIVE AMID multiple calendars. Some are cyclical (seasons, holidays, generations); others are linear (seconds, minutes, lifetimes); still others are personal (graduations, marriages, retirements). Within these temporal dimensions, one of the longer units of time is that of the decade. The concept of a ten-year segment as a cultural measuring stick is itself a historical construct, one that became a form of cultural shorthand back in the 1890s—the Gay Nineties, as they were sometimes retroactively described. But such shorthand really dates back to the 1920s, perhaps because these were years in which the mass media of radio, film, and tabloid journalism came into their own, generating troves of sounds, words, and images that have been associated with particular intervals of time. Subsequent intervals have been similarly stamped and remembered ever since.

Of course, the demarcation of when decades begin and end is not precise. The twenties are commonly regarded as beginning in 1919 (in the aftermath of a world war, rioting, and a pandemic) and ending in 1929 with a stock market crash. Of course, the decade was more complicated than this, not only because so-called Roaring Twenties really only started roaring mid-decade, but also because these were years of sharp cultural bifurcation: the Jazz Age and the day of the flapper, yes, but also a time of drought, religious conservatism, and the Ku Klux Klan. The thirties, which are generally demarcated by the Great Depression inaugurated by the stock market crash in the closing months of the twenties, are typically remembered as stretching until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in (late) 1941. The sixties are sometimes pushed back to the fifties in terms of the Civil Rights movement and as far forward as Watergate in the early-to-mid-seventies. The twenty-first century is often regarded as starting on September 11, 2001. And so on.

The year 1980, then, is actually a bit of an anomaly in that it is widely believed to actually mark the beginning of the eighties—a decade seemingly embodied, for better or worse, by the figure of Ronald Reagan—and one globally regarded as ending in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the bipolar world of the Cold War. Here too, it is possible to quibble; there were clear signs of the economic libertarianism represented by Reagan, for example, in the decision of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, to deregulate the trucking and airline industries in the late seventies, and the coming cultural wave of the eighties was clearly telegraphed by the release of Star Wars in 1977, among other cultural touchstones. But it is truly remarkable to consider the confluence of forces—conservative politics, evangelical religion, a new awareness of tradition and patriotism—and the way they were reflected in specific events, such as the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Olympics, the Iran hostage crisis (which began slightly before, and ended slightly after, 1980), and of course the presidential election that resulted in a realignment, the echoes of which remain with us still. The year marked the beginning of a moment that has actually persisted for multiple decades.

This transition and its echoes have been amply documented by many historians, most recently and impressively by Rick Perlstein in his magisterial Reaganland, the final installment of his four-volume history of modern American conservatism.¹ What this considerably slighter book purports to do is somewhat different, in that its ambit is more cultural than political, focusing specifically on popular culture. By boring in with granular detail on a few key touchstone documents—obscure as well as legendary ones—it captures a zeitgeist as it shifts, identifying those elements that hearken back as they jostle with others that point forward. The effect will be analogous to capturing in slow motion the mysterious but unmistakable process by which a child grows.

The organization of the book is fairly straightforward. It begins with something of a prologue in the form of a chapter on the culture and politics of the year 1979 in the United States, and how that year reflected the decade that preceded it, even as there were tremors of change. It is followed by a second chapter sketching the political climate in the first half of the year, notably the early months of the presidential election campaign. The core of the book consists of four chapters—one on movies, another on music, a third on television, and a fourth on bestselling books—exploring the major cultural works of the year and the ways in which they reflected the receding and emerging trends that characterized the year. A chapter that looks at the climax of the presidential election is followed by a brief epilogue that peeks ahead to the 1980s and beyond.

For some, a book like this serves as an exercise in nostalgia. The past can be a nice place to visit, even a refuge, and I think that for many people who were alive at the time, the moment recorded here is one that echoed into the early twenty-first century—an era which, however promising or even precious it may be for any number of people, has been one of war, economic upheaval, epidemiological crisis, and political polarization. This is not the first time a large number of Americans have felt their country was going in the wrong direction—indeed, the dozen or so years preceding 1980 were one such a moment, which is why the ones that followed can seem like an interlude in retrospect.

Be that as it may, one may still legitimately ask what the larger point may be in this exercise. There are three answers to this question. The first is that readers are asked to entertain—a verb used advisedly here—the proposition that 1980 was a hinge of American history, a time when a vibrant culture emerged from a season of doubt into an Indian Summer of revival. There is an inevitable degree of subjectivity in such assessments, and indeed the same person can look at the same period differently from different vantage points in a lifespan. Which is precisely why it’s worth doing—memory offers a sense of (shifting) perspective that can help us see the present more clearly no less than the past.

Second, 1980 was an important year in American history because it inaugurated an era of political logic whose impact remained the prevailing common sense long after the 1980s were over. When Bill Clinton—a Democrat elected president because he successfully repositioned the Democratic Party toward the right—famously said The era of Big Government is over in 1995, this child of the sixties was essentially conceding that the eighties had colonized the nineties.² The two George Bushes were very much the heirs of Reagan, and even Barack Obama (who had complimentary things to say about Reagan when he was running for president himself) was forced to accept the presumably libertarian character of the American economy when he bailed it out in the aftermath of the financial crisis and adopted essentially a hybrid model of health care in the Affordable Care Act. Donald Trump was in many ways Reagan’s opposite in temperament when he was president, and it now appears he has destroyed the ideological foundations of political coalition that have dominated American politics for the last forty years. But the loyalty he continues to command nevertheless rests on the rhetoric and instincts of modern conservatism, even as Trump discarded many of its core components (along with the sunny temperament that made Reagan’s message so appealing to so many for so long).

Finally, at perhaps the most important level, this project is less about culture, politics, or 1980 than it is a meditation on the nature of history and its role in making sense of the world. All human attempts to envision the world as it is (was, will be) are necessarily partial. That is because they are edited—their creators decide what to include, and exclude, from the literal or figurative stories they tell in an inevitable human subjectivity. Beyond that, there is also the fact that the world keeps changing, and that any truth, no matter how closely it approximates reality, is likely to lose accuracy over time. That is why we keep writing histories, and why the past keeps changing. But the elusiveness of the past does not quench the need we have for stories, or attempts to refashion them. In any event, historical accounts are never entirely fictitious, because, whatever their limits, they are rooted in events that really did happen—fixed points in time and space—even if those points can be connected in different ways, and even if there will inevitably be arguments about their shape and significance. And agreement, too, at least among some of the people some of the time. It’s in the space between argument and agreement—a sweet spot that is not always obvious, but believable and perhaps useful—that characterizes the best histories of our time. The hope here is to legibly capture what amounts to a piece of slow-motion photography of 1980.

But perhaps the best metaphor to invoke at the start of this study comes from Roman mythology, specifically the god Janus, the two-faced figure who looks forward and back—the patron saint of transitions, so to speak. It would be fair to say that any given moment in history is Janus-faced, in that it simultaneously embodies what has been and will be. But certain moments seem to capture this duality with notable clarity, and 1980 appears to be one such year. The goal in the pages to follow is to bring both into focus in a way that is not so much timeless as timeful, showing the way that our lives are lived on the three temporal planes of past, present, and future. This is the way history gets made—and remade—all the time.

CHAPTER 1

On the Cusp

American Politics and Culture in 1979

SIGNS OF the Times:

On January 1, 1979, the lead story in the nation’s newspaper of record reported that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was recommending that dependents of employees leave Iran because of a worsening security situation that could endanger their safety. Another page-one story noted the striking reorientation of the people and government of Communist China away from the Soviet Union toward the United States. America is the most advanced industrial power in the world, a university student told veteran journalist Fox Butterfield in Beijing (referred to as Peking in the nomenclature of the day). We want to study America’s science, its management and its political system, too. And on the op-ed page, longtime fashion reporter Bernadine Morris lamented an emerging trend she found troublingly retrogressive: a new emphasis on traditional femininity in women’s couture. Were designers so carried away by one of fashion’s golden ages that they simply didn’t notice how women had changed? she asked, noting the widened shoulders and narrowed skirts that were the new order of the day. They have succeeded in evoking an epoch in which many women, perhaps the majority, were delighted to dress as sex objects.¹

TRADITIONAL LEFTY

FIGURE 1. Senator Edward Kennedy in 1979. Kennedy was a leading figure in the Democratic party after the deaths of his brothers John in 1962 and Robert in 1968. But private scandals made his candidacy for the presidency problematic, obstacles he haltingly put aside in deciding to challenge the incumbent Jimmy Carter for the party nomination in 1980. The seriousness with which his candidacy was taken demonstrated the lingering power of liberalism as the seventies came to an end.

From one angle of vision, there’s something glib, even dishonest, about plucking three newspaper stories from a single date and suggesting they foreshadowed the future. It is certainly true that before 1979 was out, the ominous premonitions of the U.S. ambassador proved justified, in that Iranian students, with the blessings of its revolutionary government, took dozens of hostages later that year, many of whom were not freed for 444 days. The China story was published weeks after the government’s famous Central Committee of the Communist Party Conference of December 1978, presided over by the rising Deng Xiaoping, who famously said, It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice—a mini allegory of market reform that turned China into an economic colossus by century’s end.² Meanwhile, the trend-setting, wide-shouldered look Morris noted became a signature image in the collective imagination, embodied most vividly by Joan Collins and Linda Evans in their hit TV show Dynasty (1981–1989).

But of course other stories from that day don’t neatly fit into a foreshadowing narrative. There was one, for example, about how the nation’s colleges were facing hard times given the prospect of declining enrollments. Yet the coming decade was generally one of prosperity in academe, fueled in part by growing numbers of women getting undergraduate degrees (they exceeded men for the first time in 1981–1982, and have done so ever since).³ And then there were other stories of no particular significance in terms of what came before or after, like one about overheated office buildings in Chicago.⁴ In this sense, one could argue, history is little more than fiction—questionable arrangements of facts juxtaposed in attempts to superimpose order on unruly sets of realities that run in multiple, and often contrary, directions.

Little more, but not nothing more: a well-wrought piece of history has a ring of truth. The attempt to craft one here begins with a set of commonplace observations, among them that growing instability in Iran, growing stability in China, and the (unexceptional) presence of female journalists on the op-ed page in the New York Times are all artifacts of the 1970s. They are not necessarily unique to the 1970s—instability in Iran has waxed and waned in the decades that preceded as well as followed the 1970s; China has enjoyed long periods of stability in the thousands of years before the 1970s; women have remained fixtures on op-ed pages of newspapers in the half-century since the 1970s. But all these developments were relatively novel at the time, and appeared to many as distinctive to their moment. That moment was understood to be longer than a day, a week, or a year, but shorter than a century or a generation. Which is why we have collectively adopted the shorthand notion of a decade as a means of demarcating time. The argument here, of course—ironically, it’s a little counterintuitive given the vagaries of history—is that the 1980s, whose emerging contours will be traced in the pages that follow, really did start in 1980. Which raises the question of what made the seventies the seventies, so to speak—which is to say an explanation of not only when the seventies ended but also when they began.

This is tricky. Of course, one can say that about demarcating any decade, but scholars have been notably variegated in the way they segment the seventies. The first major book-length study, Peter Carroll’s sturdy 1982 account It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, begins with President Richard Nixon’s inauguration in 1969 and his administration’s attempt to expand the long-stalemated war in Vietnam by bombing Cambodia, a move that resulted in the Kent State University protests and the deaths of four students at the hands of the National Guard in April 1970. As Carroll’s title suggests, the seventies seemed like little more than an epilogue to the sixties. Christopher Strain takes this idea even further in his 2016 book The Long Sixties: America, 1955–1973, which expands the sixties well beyond its calendrical limits on either side, bounding it by the birth of the civil rights movement on one side and the end of the Vietnam War on the other—which effectively severs the length of both the fifties and the seventies. In The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics, Bruce Schulman flips this idea on its head by arguing that far from truncated, the seventies began in 1969 and stretched through the reelection campaign of President Ronald Reagan in 1984. A similar assertion of the seventies’ significance is affirmed by Edward Berkowitz, whose study is titled as a refutation of Carroll: Something Happened. Some studies of the seventies have a more overtly ideological character; David Frum’s 2000 study How We Got Here gives the decade a cheerfully neoconservative spin, while Philip Jenkins reaffirmed the general perception of liberal cultural dominance steadily giving way (regrettably in his view) to conservative ascendance in Decade of Nightmares in a narrative that straddles 1975 to 1986.⁵

The segmentation offered here is that the seventies was a short but highly distinct decade with a discernibly chiseled character that ran from about 1972 to 1979. The sixties was a period marked by great confidence in the efficacy of social change—and impatience when efforts of reform met resistance (hence the subtitle of Todd Gitlin’s classic account of the sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage).⁶ This spirit of idealistic reform giving way to growing militancy characterized the civil rights and antiwar movements, animated still further by the nascent movements second-wave feminism and gay liberation, both of which had clear roots in the sixties even as they came of age in the seventies. Reflecting this spirit of restless innovation, the sixties were also notable as a period of widespread cultural experimentation, particularly in popular music and film, both of which were infused by a new generation of artists who had an unusual degree of latitude to operate in industries marked by a state of flux (in music, a vast expansion; in movies, a sense of uncertainty among industry veterans about evolving popular taste). The spirit of the sixties culminated with a pair of liberal victories: the end of U.S. involvement the Vietnam War in 1973, coupled with Richard Nixon’s resignation amid the Watergate scandal in 1974.

But these triumphs—the end of an unjust war; the constitutional reckoning imposed on a corrupt leader—were followed by a widespread sense of deflation sometimes characterized as the age of limits. The term deflation is meant metaphorically (and ironically); the seventies were notable for a sustained economic downturn marked by a seemingly contradictory rise in unemployment and rising prices at the same time, a phenomenon known as stagflation. Both were inflamed by the Arab oil embargo of 1973—a year that marked the peak of real median income for men, the pain of which was masked by the growing number of women in the workforce to compensate for this relative loss in income. The ensuing energy crisis, coupled with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, contributed to a powerful sense that national power and purpose were diminished—and that domestic reform was in retreat, notably in the realm of civil rights and in feminism, where early hopes for an Equal Rights Amendment were running into unexpected difficulty. Indeed, the year stands out enough to have merited its own cultural study: 1973 Nervous Breakdown.⁷

The seventies were not entirely dour; many feminists and gay Americans, to cite two examples, continued to make social, economic, and political gains in public as well as private life, and there were cultural flowerings in places like Los Angeles, captured vividly in Ronald Brownstein’s study of the year 1974, Rock Me on the Water.⁸ While times were tough in the so-called Rust Belt stretching from New England through the industrial Midwest, the rise of the Sun

Reviews for 1980

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An in-depth look at the cultural, political, and social trends of 1980, rightly seen as a time of major transition in American society.The author explores in depth the 1980 Presidential campaign as well as the music, the books, the television shows, and the movies which defined 1980. The author goes to great lengths to show the fading of many of the cultural and social trends which had defined the 1970s and even all the way back to the end of WWII by 1980 and the points of emergence of a new, laissez-faire conservative perspective. The author concluded with an analysis of the 1980 election and how it ushered in the Eighties as we understand it, and seeing in the events of 2001, 2008, and 2020 the final end of the age inaugurated in 1980.The work is interesting but has a "laundry list" feel to it: the author felt compelled to discuss almost everything, and in the process the analysis and the explanation of importance got lost. In many ways it is important to make it clear how things were changing around 1980 since new generations have arisen which did not live to see it; and yet plenty of eulogies have been made for the spirit of the 1980s and yet somehow many of its platitudes and ideologies persist. Only in future generations will there be sufficient distance to be able to better assess such things. But for now this is an accessible work to explain a pretty important year in American history.**--galley received as part of early review program

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1980: America's Pivotal Year, by Jim Cullen, is an interesting and well-presented argument for just what the title claims. Even if you don't come away thinking it is THE pivotal year one can't argue with the fact it was A pivotal year.The book is thematically organized, so while some discussion within each chapter may cross media lines, the chapter is about a particular medium or topic (film, music, publishing, politics primarily because it was an election year, etc). This works well for both presenting each case and for then showing the cumulative effect.Don't let an asinine review from a "Dr" (should all of us who could use that designation do so, or just the self-righteous?) keep you from reading the book. Trump is mentioned no more than most figures that came after 1980 so it is the Dr's bias that is showing, not the writer's. This is not about the decade of the 80s, as reading the entire title would tell most people, but this guy must either have a serious reading comprehension problem or just skimmed some of the text to be able to make a very poor and slanted review. Especially since these aren't even remotely "lists," though a number of examples are mentioned to show how the work Cullen centered each chapter on is pivotal. But those examples have a discussion explaining why he believes they make good examples. Emeritus, yeah, from U of North Podunk, all while working for investment firms through an "information services" company. And his (mostly edited by rather than written by) publications and expertise is in the economics of media, not the social and cultural influences or ramifications, so he is as "expert" as whoever the next person you may see is. In other words, not one. Enough about that hideous excuse for an "educator."If you were at least a teenager in 1980 (I was past that) you will remember a lot of what is in here but perhaps not the way Cullen contextualizes it. Additionally, if you tended toward the less popular in an area you may well not be as aware of just how popular (numbers and profit wise) some of these examples were. I personally wasn't watching much TV at the time so while I knew, for example, that Dallas was a big deal, we didn't gather 'round the reactor on the sub and discuss episodes. Yes, there is a lot of political discussion throughout, in large part because it was an election year and in large part because the way politics pivoted from that point until now is the single strongest argument for 1980 being pivotal. From two parties that warred but understood that democracy requires compromise, to a two-party system where they are both to the right of center and the one furthest to the right has authoritarian leanings. While my comment, and the blatantly dishonest review from numbnuts, gives the impression the book is largely a political book, it isn't. In fact, until I saw that just mentioning facts brought a "dr" to full-fledged lies, it was largely a trip down memory lane that made me think, for each area, to what degree I agreed. And the argument Cullen makes holds pretty well for the separate areas as well as for the country as a whole.Recommended for those who might remember 1980 and want to reconsider the year as an important one as well as social historians who enjoys looking at how various threads in our society influences each other.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.