The 1970s w/ Jefferson Cowie
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For a long time, it seemed like not much happened in the 1970s. Today it seems like so much of what's happening can be traced back to those same years.
The 1970s was a pivotal decade in American history. In a ten-year span, the United States admitted defeat in Vietnam, saw a President (and Vice President) resign in shame, and came face to face with its leaders' abuse of power at home and abroad. At the same time, American citizens directly experienced a score of problems, including "stagflation," an energy crisis, and the consequences of environmental devastation. Yet in this era of deconstruction and disappointment, the political coalitions than defined the US from the 1980s until (today/recently?) were forged.
In this episode, Jefferson Cowie joins us to talk about his book Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working and what happened in the decade in which everything now seems to have happened.
Dr. Jefferson Cowie is James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and the author of multiple award-winning books, including Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2023. You can hear him discuss Freedom's Dominion in episode #255, and check out his multiple appearances on the show by searching You can find out more about Jefferson Cowie and his work at his website by clicking here.
This is a rebroadcast of episode #115, which originally aired on December 18, 2017. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the Road to Now. |
| 0:09.7 | Today, we're taking it back to the 1970s. Our guest is Jefferson Cowie. You may know Jeff |
| 0:15.6 | for his multiple appearances on the Road to Now or perhaps for other things like |
| 0:19.2 | winning the Pulitzer Prize last year for |
| 0:21.6 | Freedom's Dominion, or being on CNN's documentaries about the 70s. Anyway, this conversation |
| 0:27.2 | is so good because we're not just taking it back to the 1970s. We're taking it back to 2017, |
| 0:33.6 | which is when we recorded this episode. I wanted to reshare it because so many of the trends we're |
| 0:38.0 | still seeing right now come out of the 1970s, the coalitions that were seeing fracture within |
| 0:43.1 | the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, the key issues, the culture wars, a lot of this stuff |
| 0:48.3 | goes back there. But when I listened back to this episode to consider re-airing it, I was |
| 0:53.0 | blown away by the fact that I had to take |
| 0:54.9 | almost nothing out of this conversation that was dated. In other words, so many of the questions |
| 0:59.7 | that were asking about modern politics, where are we going, where do we come from? They're |
| 1:03.5 | answered in this episode and the 70s, which people used to say was a decade where not much happened, |
| 1:09.7 | it seems like you really just can't |
| 1:11.7 | understand what's going on right now unless you understand how this modern political era that's |
| 1:16.5 | falling apart right now was formed in the chaos of the 1970s. I also want to say it was refreshing, |
| 1:21.7 | because in a world where we're constantly dealing with news cycles and surface-level historical |
| 1:27.1 | precedents that they pull out there, everything's so fleeting that we're really dealing with new cycles and surface level historical precedents that they pull |
| 1:28.2 | out there. Everything's so fleeting that we're really just lacking on deep meditations on |
| 1:34.2 | how the past shapes the present. So I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did because I had a blast |
| 1:41.4 | editing this. And as I got further into the episode, I was like, this could have been recorded today. |
... |
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