The OPEC oil embargo and subsequent energy crisis of the 1970s drew further attention to the issues of conservation and energy policy. The Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act soon followed. For example, the crusade to protect the environment from all sorts of assaults- air and water pollution, toxic waste in places like Love Canal, New York dangerous meltdowns at nuclear power plants such as the one at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania highways built through city neighborhoods-really took off during the 1970s.Īmericans celebrated the first Earth Day in April 1970, and Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act that same year. In other ways, 1960s liberalism continued to flourish. The repudiation of so-called alternative lifestyles and religions found renewed purpose after the Jonestown Massacre of 1978, when over 900 followers of preacher Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple-based in San Francisco-committed mass suicide. For example, they fought against high taxes, environmental regulations, highway speed limits, land policies in the West (the so-called “ Sagebrush Rebellion”), affirmative action and school desegregation plans. New Right conservatives resented and resisted what they saw as government meddling. This movement, rooted in the rapidly growing suburban Sun Belt, celebrated the free market and lamented the decline of “traditional” social values and roles. Johnson’s Great Society programs as he could, and he made a show of his resistance to mandatory school desegregation plans such as busing.Īs the 1970s continued, a new political movement known as the “New Right” emerged.

He abolished as many parts of former President Lyndon B.

It has been reintroduced to Congress every year since 1982.Īlmost immediately, Nixon began to dismantle the welfare state that had fostered such resentment.

It was introduced to Congress every year until 1972, when it finally passed but was not ratified. This silent majority swept Republican candidate Nixon into the White House in the 1968 election, defeating the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.ĭid you know? Suffragist Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. Tired of what they interpreted as spoiled hippies and whining protestors, tired of an interfering government that, in their view, coddled poor people and minorities at taxpayer expense, these individuals formed what President Richard Nixon and political strategists called the “silent majority.” Some Americans, particularly working class and middle class whites, responded to the turbulence of the 1960s-the urban riots, antiwar protests and the counterculture-by embracing a new kind of conservative populism.

70s chinese style font