AHC: bracket "the 1970s" in the U.S.A. in four to eight years politically.

Its definitly talked about in Western Europe, were it played a bigger role. Still I think its a sign, that speaks more for the long 70s theory. The leftists terrorism is no sixties leftover, its something new, showing the beginning of the seventies. The large protest-movements of the 60s fall apart; in Europe are they 1969 already gone, in the US they have 1970 with Cambodcha and Ken State their last hurrah. The extreme ideologes are left alone and go the way of terror, but the larger mass start their "march through the institutions". So I say political and social the 70s begin 1969.

My late uncle, who was a US Army officer in West Germany late 60s-early 70s (and married meine Deutsche Tante from Hambach), used to say that Europe was generally either five years behind (fashion and use of household appliances for example) or five years ahead (car design among other things) of the US during that period. I'd see the rise of leftist terrorism -- indeed the rise of terrorism in the specific contexts of the Marxist-derived but you could say "Marxist-dissatisfied" Palestinian movement and out of the fracturing of the '68 Left in Europe -- as a canary in the coal mine for the Seventies' arrival, it predates the real presence of "the Seventies" and thus confounds people operating at the end of "the Sixties" but it's one of the first symptoms. (That's a very English idiom -- I don't know about German or other Continental mining operations but British and American miners often took songbirds down into the pits with them, because the birds had highly sensitive lungs, and if they keeled over it was a sign the air was becoming unbreathable, so it became an idiom for the first sign of a big, dangerous change coming.) A classic example frankly is Das Attentat at the Munich Olympics. The whole concept there was (1) to embrace the likeable side of the hippy aesthetic as the antithesis of Nazism for a brightly-colored, idealistic, almost naively inclusive games, and (2) to focus security on the low-key diffusion of Sixties-style protest events and sit-ins, by doing things like passing out flowers to marchers and using dachshunds as police dogs. (Munich's mayor and police had done reasonably well defusing the local unrest there in '68.) They were completely unprepared for something like a trained team of goal-oriented terrorists operating on their own terms invading the compound even though the forensic psychologist the Munich PD had hired to help plan security had painted just such a scenario for them among twenty he laid out (one had Swedish neo-Nazis hijacking a plane and crashing it into the stadium, presaging that Seventies classic melodrama Black Sunday and also 9/11. Smart guy.) And even once it started, the political bigwigs involved thought it was all a Sixties-style armed sit-in as a "politics of the deed" in great-power diplomacy. They didn't understand they were facing the soldiers of a new age, with their own motives, tactics, agenda, and willingness to kill and die to break the existing system.

I think the two most underrated acts of political violence from the Sixties that helped make "the Seventies" happen as they did are these. One was the shooting of Rudi Dutschke, which did not kill him outright but crippled the one figure who might have found ways to hold a unified "Sixty-Eighter" movement together without losing the radicals to the Rote Armee Fraktion and Revolutionary Cells and so on. The other was the assassination (that's never been confirmed, but really, the same exact part was tampered with on the plane as in another near-crash he had two years before) of Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in the US, the one labor leader strong enough to back younger organizers' plays to buck the AFL-CIO hierarchy and align with the rights movements (minorities and women) on a common political front, and the one major union leader who could tell George Meany to piss off and lead at least a chunk of labor to endorse and support George McGovern in '72. Those two events IOTL had, as we say around here, great big butterflies.
 
The other was the assassination (that's never been confirmed, but really, the same exact part was tampered with on the plane as in another near-crash he had two years before) of Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in the US, the one labor leader strong enough to back younger organizers' plays to buck the AFL-CIO hierarchy and align with the rights movements (minorities and women) on a common political front, and the one major union leader who could tell George Meany to piss off and lead at least a chunk of labor to endorse and support George McGovern in '72. Those two events IOTL had, as we say around here, great big butterflies.

Honestly, I'm surprised no one has tried to do a timeline where Reuther didn't die in 1970 and explore it from there and the effects you'd see from it.
 
Honestly, I'm surprised no one has tried to do a timeline where Reuther didn't die in 1970 and explore it from there and the effects you'd see from it.

This. Big ol' butterflies. Reuther wasn't a young man but he was in good health (and cigar-smoking, whiskey-swigging George Meany went on like freaking Metheuselah...) and could well have made it to at least 1980, so that's potentially a very different Seventies for the union movement. Leonard Woodcock was a good man but too narrowly focused on the UAW itself and on its sponsorship of what was more often called Ted Kennedy's plan (it really emerged from the UAW's think tank -- yes it had one thanks to Reuther's prescience) for universal health care. Reuther had a broader, strategic view and could have made a big difference in the '72 and '76 election cycles, and in getting more of the CIO-originated unions to move towards a more left-leaning, bottom-up structure which would heal or prevent rifts with the New Left and act as an incubator for more new talent in union leadership, rather than leaving it centralized and atrophying in the hands of Meany's apparatchiks when the hellish times hit in the early Eighties (or maybe some of that can even be butterflied this way.)
 
The Seventies *were* a relatively short decade politically. 1970-1972 were really an extension of the 1960's. I would date the 70's from the 1973-74 energy crisis/Nixon impeachment.
Agreed. 70-72 was the real end of the sixties. I would define the 70s politically as January of 1973 (the start Nixon's second term) to January of '81 (start of the Reagan years).
 
Honestly, I'm surprised no one has tried to do a timeline where Reuther didn't die in 1970 and explore it from there and the effects you'd see from it.

"An interesting might-have-been in labor history in the United States relates to this period. In 1967, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), broke with George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, over the direction of the U.S labor movement. Reuther, who had been the head of the AFL-CIO Economic Policy Committee from its founding in 1955, wanted a more activist approach for the labor movement both to social issues and to organizing. Meany, however, adopted a much more conservative approach. In 1968 the UAW withdrew from the AFL-CIO and in 1969 Reuther created the American Labor Alliance between the UAW and the Teamsters. This new federation was to be socially and politically activist. In fact, much of its platform had a similar direction to the newly-formed CLC in Canada. However, the ALA was short-lived. When Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970, the ALA and the goal of a more socially activist labor movement died with him." Seymour Martin Lipset, *The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do but Join Much Less*, p. 45.
http://books.google.com/books?id=k_tjAY9yYBYC&pg=PA45&sig=jEouymXpsP-drQWxUVr106WksUY

OOTH, you have to ask: how reliable an ally are Frank Fitzsimmons and the Teamsters for a progressive labor movement?...
 
And we can add Latin America and the secession movement in Quebec.

I guess the theory of "radicalization" sometimes happens, although we can come up with a ton of examples of people becoming political and in fact highly passionate about politics and not becoming violent.

.

And the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland.

Definitly only a fringe minority chosed violence, the overwhelming majority worked inside the system.
 
I don't know enough about economics to know whether we started seeing the limits of growth in the 1970s. . .
I've only taken a grand total of two college economics classes! Maybe just arc across the topic in some interesting diagonal direction, pulling a news article or youtube video along the way?

I mean, if you're interested in the topic at all. If not, then the hell with it. There's a hundred other great topics! :)
 
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OOTH, you have to ask: how reliable an ally are Frank Fitzsimmons and the Teamsters for a progressive labor movement?...

FWIW, it has always been my understanding that the Teamsters were the most right-wing of the major unions. And I'm not just saying this because of their reputation for being macho rednecks.

I seem to recall that 2008 was the first time that particular union endorsed a Democrat for president(and no, it's not because they were endorsing socialists all the other times).
 
[QUOTE="David T, post: 14416684, member: 483] OTOH, you have to ask: how reliable an ally are Frank Fitzsimmons and the Teamsters for a progressive labor movement?...[/QUOTE]

Fair point. Yet Reuther was often a strategic idealist but a tactical pragmatist (including his underwhelming support for actual black shop stewards during the Sixties, despite his deep and genuine involvement in the Civil Rights movement -- he'd done the internals and didn't want a coup against his leadership coalescing around the Wallace-voter demographic in the UAW.) Fitzsimmons had a big union behind him which was one thing -- and if Reuther had lived I am sure he would've courted the United Mine Workers too like it was going out of style, once the murder-for-hire scandal brought down the leadership and democratized the union in that 1970-72 window, because the miners hated Meany. In fact if you put the UAW at its membership height, the Teamsters, and the UMW together, you can just about form an alternative to the AFL-CIO hiving off some of the smaller, more politically radical skilled unions (like the communications workers.) Fitzsimmons wanted recognition and leverage more than anything else, and Reuther could help manage getting enough of that for Fitzsimmons in return for backing the kind of economic populism McGovern offered. And more than any of that, perhaps, Fitzsimmons was determined (he is somewhere down the middle of the suspects list...) to throw in high relief the contrast between his leadership and Hoffa's. Even if it's something as teenager-lizard-brain simple as "Hoffa had a deal with Nixon, then I'll make a deal with the Democrats," Reuther probably saw that to long-term strategic advantage. It helps secure more of the Northeast (and probably tips over battleground-state Michigan) for the Democrats, and it makes Meany look weak. Meany was running on fumes anyway in terms of his leadership and influence during the Seventies but they were powerful fumes -- his flirtations with Nixon, his pig-headedness about the war (rooted it seems in a misguided hope that the labor unions the AFL-CIO helped organize in South Vietnam would become the roots of a worker-led democracy there), and the fact the older generation of establishment Democrats had come up in the era when Meany was the king of labor and didn't appreciate how that was changing, all worked in Meany's favor. LBJ's preference to deal with Reuther had already knocked at least one pin out from under him, hence his determination to make dominance displays backing Humphrey in '68 and shanking McGovern in '72. But a more concerted coalition, like a UAW/Teamsters/Mineworkers alliance with other unions joining, would be a real rebuke and help point out that Meany was basically a grumpy old man by this point. If it meant dealing with the Teamsters, I think Reuther figured "Paris is worth a Mass."
 
. . . Volcker pushed too damn hard. But what he did -- too much of, but did -- was a piece of the Keynesian recovery of the early Eighties. I would at a dogmatic level call it a post-Keynesian recovery . . .
I'm not even willing to give Volcker that much credit.

To me, trying to "wring out inflation" during a recession is the equivalent of a patient who is already dehydrated and a 1700s doctor deciding it's a good idea to bleed the patient!
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=M...nection with a guy who is in my book"&f=false

' . . . Things jelled for me in connection with a guy who is in my book. He was a Vietnam veteran. It made no sense to him to talk about revolution in China or Cuba, and what socialism would be like, when he was still beating his wife and hating himself from his experience in Vietnam. I began to put out an analysis to folks like Dick that for him, being involved in a long-term revolutionary struggle meant changing as a human being. He began to see politics as a very personal transformation. I was giving the revolution some meaning to someone at work.

'I no longer romanticized the consciousness of the working class, or believed that they were going to lead the revolution. I no longer had a belief in the inherent consciousness of any group of people. People had to change and to take responsibility for that change. They couldn't just talk about how rotten the system was. . . '

.

.

' . . . In the late 1970s, we starting posing the right of people in the community to have jobs before people in the auto plants worked overtimes. I remember picketing Chrysler Jefferson assembly the week before Christmas, when Chrysler was working overtime and people were on cheese lines in Detroit. Our signs said, "Give a Gift for Christmas: Stop Overtime."

'The League of Revolutionary Black Workers had said, UAW means "You Ain't White." By the late 1970s UAW began to mean, "You Ain't Working." The leadership in certain plants did not stop overtime when their own members were laid off. The schism between the community, between those people who were unemployed and were no longer needed by capitalism as we entered the multinational stage of capitalism, and the workplace, got larger and larger. . . '
I used to be acquainted with a woman who worked in a Chrysler plant in the '70s and saw one of the UAW="You Ain't White" wildcat strikes!
 
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November 20, 1979, Issue #10

LABOR NOTES SPECIAL REPORT

http://www.labornotes.org/2009/10/labor-history-concessions-trend-begins-Chrysler

' . . . And most historic of all, Chrysler workers agreed to make a no-strings-attached gift of $2,000 apiece to their employer. [back to the company ! ! ! ] . . . '

' . . . Turnouts were embarrassingly low at both Ford and GM; in a move to do better at Chrysler, International officials asked locals to conduct their votes in the plant rather than at a meeting. In spite of this, only 33% of Chrysler’s 112,000 workers voted (at least 29,000 are on layoff). . . '
When people don't have something positive to vote for, they tend not to vote.

And of course union members share this very human tendency.
 
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My late uncle, who was a US Army officer in West Germany late 60s-early 70s (and married meine Deutsche Tante from Hambach), used to say that Europe was generally either five years behind (fashion and use of household appliances for example) or five years ahead (car design among other things) of the US during that period. I'd see the rise of leftist terrorism -- indeed the rise of terrorism in the specific contexts of the Marxist-derived but you could say "Marxist-dissatisfied" Palestinian movement and out of the fracturing of the '68 Left in Europe -- as a canary in the coal mine for the Seventies' arrival, it predates the real presence of "the Seventies" and thus confounds people operating at the end of "the Sixties" but it's one of the first symptoms. (That's a very English idiom -- I don't know about German or other Continental mining operations but British and American miners often took songbirds down into the pits with them, because the birds had highly sensitive lungs, and if they keeled over it was a sign the air was becoming unbreathable, so it became an idiom for the first sign of a big, dangerous change coming.) A classic example frankly is Das Attentat at the Munich Olympics. The whole concept there was (1) to embrace the likeable side of the hippy aesthetic as the antithesis of Nazism for a brightly-colored, idealistic, almost naively inclusive games, and (2) to focus security on the low-key diffusion of Sixties-style protest events and sit-ins, by doing things like passing out flowers to marchers and using dachshunds as police dogs. (Munich's mayor and police had done reasonably well defusing the local unrest there in '68.) They were completely unprepared for something like a trained team of goal-oriented terrorists operating on their own terms invading the compound even though the forensic psychologist the Munich PD had hired to help plan security had painted just such a scenario for them among twenty he laid out (one had Swedish neo-Nazis hijacking a plane and crashing it into the stadium, presaging that Seventies classic melodrama Black Sunday and also 9/11. Smart guy.) And even once it started, the political bigwigs involved thought it was all a Sixties-style armed sit-in as a "politics of the deed" in great-power diplomacy. They didn't understand they were facing the soldiers of a new age, with their own motives, tactics, agenda, and willingness to kill and die to break the existing system.

I think the two most underrated acts of political violence from the Sixties that helped make "the Seventies" happen as they did are these. One was the shooting of Rudi Dutschke, which did not kill him outright but crippled the one figure who might have found ways to hold a unified "Sixty-Eighter" movement together without losing the radicals to the Rote Armee Fraktion and Revolutionary Cells and so on. The other was the assassination (that's never been confirmed, but really, the same exact part was tampered with on the plane as in another near-crash he had two years before) of Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in the US, the one labor leader strong enough to back younger organizers' plays to buck the AFL-CIO hierarchy and align with the rights movements (minorities and women) on a common political front, and the one major union leader who could tell George Meany to piss off and lead at least a chunk of labor to endorse and support George McGovern in '72. Those two events IOTL had, as we say around here, great big butterflies.

The "Hippie"-approach for security in Munich is really strange, especially if you realized, that the RAF was already active in West-Germany and that palestinian terror was already a thing. I think something comparable couldn´t have happend in 1968. Another sign like mentality changed in a couple of years.
 
The "Hippie"-approach for security in Munich is really strange, especially if you realized, that the RAF was already active in West-Germany and that palestinian terror was already a thing. I think something comparable couldn´t have happend in 1968. Another sign like mentality changed in a couple of years.

They were "fighting the last war" as large organizations so often do. Also, after Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were captured in Frankfurt back in the summer (of '72) and Ulrike Meinhof was discovered in her hideout, the regular police in West Germany had a deeply mistaken sense (a few bright sparks in the Bundeskriminalamt knew better but no one was listening to them yet) that the "Baader-Meinhof Gang" (the cops and press saw it as a Bonnie-and-Clyde style deal, not the taproots of a well-organized and recruited, sustainable terrorist network, connected to others and good at going to ground) was on the wane. Lots of premature self-congratulation. And the stubbornness of Munich's director of police, Manfred Schreiber, didn't help matters. As far as he was concerned the RAF were yesterday's news, the Palestinians were someone else's problem (even though the BRD and BKA both knew that there were Palestinian operatives salted around somewhere in the country, their best guesses were Frankfurt and Hamburg), and he knew how to deal with longhairs who wanted to make problems. Also there was a lot of territorial pissing involved -- Munich's was one of the last Stadtpolizei organizations in the country (the American occupation forces had let it carry on after hearing about its role breaking up the Beer Hall Putsch) and taking charge of Olympic security was Schreiber's chance to ensure its bureaucratic survival by proving they were up to the job. So like many a leader of a large organization before him he did what was most familiar and got ready to deal with an invasion of hippie protesters. And when instead he was faced by a small group of heavily-armed, fully professional Palestinian terrorists ready to kill to get things done, he did the other fatal thing such bureaucrats do -- grabbed more and more control for himself over the situation to prove he was capable. He wasn't, and by 1974-75 the Munich police were in the process of being absorbed by the Bavarian Landespolizei. There was also the issue first of constitutionality -- West German states had all responsibility for internally policing themselves so the federal authorities had very limited powers of influence despite Hans-Dietrich Genscher being part of the negotiating process the whole way through (interestingly he brought his aide from the Bundesgrenzschutz, Ulrich Wegener, with him, who learned first-hand what not to do in this situation.) Second of course, Bavaria was Franz-Joseph Strauss' patch, the complete political opposite of Willy Brandt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher's SPD/FPD federal government. There was a lot of "let's let these other guys handle things so if it turns out badly it only reflects on their careers." Really, for its crucial importance in the development of tactics, media coverage, and political gravity of terrorism, the German handling of the incident was a lot more like an episode of The Wire (turf-hungry bureaucrats scramble to not be embarrassed inside a broken system) than, well, a world-historical terrorist attack.
 
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This is a real gem from the '70s entitled A Dream For Christmas. A family of seven where the Dad's a minister move from Arkansas to Los Angeles (set in the 1950s) where he's to become the new minister for a church that's his new assignment.

The church is slated for demolition. At one point, he meets with the real estate developer and this fellow says, I saw that look in your eye when I walked in here. You were surprised that a black man is in this position. Well, I want us to keep advancing so we're no longer so surprised.

Perhaps they still show it on Hallmark. I haven't seen this for years.
 
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. . . the German handling of the incident was a lot more like an episode of The Wire (turf-hungry bureaucrats scramble to not be embarrassed inside a broken system) . . .
Yes, it's infuriating, and also very human. I guess what you need is an individual with a strong personality who's not afraid of being embarrassed, and build an ad hoc team on the fly to handle the crisis? Based on his or her skills as well as previous relationships with some of the persons involved. That's all I have.
 
Camelot.

Jack until 1969, Bobby through to 1973 before losing in an upset to Generic McRepublican, who then loses re-election to an economically radical Democrat in 1976 who governs into the 1980s and whose VP continues their legacy. . .
There's no Yom Kippur War on Oct. 6, 1973. I've heard it argued that at least a draw was necessary on the Egyptian side in order to get to the 1978 Camp David Accords. And yes, I'll acknowledge that some good can sometimes come of war. But people die during war, families lose people they love. So, no war in this TL.

There's still a reckoning where OPEC realizes its power and flexes its muscles, but it comes later and a little more gradually. The price increases come mid-'75 to mid-'76. Yes, unfairly, a president is voted out just as the economy is stabilizing and in fact starting to improve.

Our POD is that the public better understands stagflation. For example, of course when a major input increases in price, it shifts the supply curve inward. How could it be otherwise? This is at the level of a no-brainer. And of course, this supply curve intersects the demand curve inward and higher so that the resulting equilibrium point is both higher in price and lower in GDP. Again, how could it be otherwise? The hard part is knowing what to do about it.

And what causes this better understanding? Maybe fewer items in the news, maybe an earlier rise of talk radio in which union and left-wing stations are also added to the mix, and heck, maybe an earlier rise of fantasy baseball so that more members of the general public are comfortable running the numbers.

The Keynesian consensus easily holds.
 
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GeoDude wrote:

The church is slated for demolition. At one point, he meets with the real estate developer and this fellow says, I saw that look in your eye when I walked in here. You were surprised that a black man is in this position. Well, I want us to keep advancing so we're no longer so surprised.

A cynical portrayal of certain black real-estate brokers in the 70s...

The Blockbuster
 
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. . . cynical portrayal . . .

Well, the African-American businessman is just a regular fellow. Not necessarily the savior of the Universe any more than any other person in business!

Now, in the movie, he does say that he'll feel something when that old church goes but he knows he'll be doing the right thing. And maybe his views and plans change during the course of the movie or, then again, maybe they do not?

PS I cannot play the episode of All in the Family because youtube helpfully blocks the content at Sony's request.
 
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