writer Thomas Hine and his 'longish' view of the 1970s?

The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies, Thomas Hine, Sarah Crichton Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2007, pages 14-15:

https://books.google.com/books?id=I1lqxOVy4gkC&pg=PA15&dq=%22for+a+longish+seventies,+beginning+in+midsummer+1969%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMItaL4zauJyAIVQY4NCh3BrgNB#v=onepage&q=%22for%20a%20longish%20seventies%2C%20beginning%20in%20midsummer%201969%22&f=false

' . . . I have opted for a longish seventies, beginning in midsummer 1969. The Woodstock music festival and the riots at the Stonewall bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, both of which happened that summer, are often seen as quintessentially sixties events. But they really represent a transition from issue-based protest to the politics of identity and generational solidarity that characterize the seventies. And the draft lottery of December 1969 allowed draft-age young men to plan their lives, thus taking some of the urgency out of antiwar protest and setting the stage for the next phase. The end came in January 1981, when the Iran hostages were released and Reagan took the oath of office a few minutes later. Some of the economic gloom of the seventies carried over into the eighties, as the harsh inflation-killing policies of Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, a Carter appointee, continued under Reagan. But from the beginning, Reagan reassured the public that we were back in more normal times, times more like the fifties. . . '
I think this guy is a heck of a perceptive writer and makes a number of good points all through his book. Now, some of them I disagree with, even many of them, but that's half the fun!

Anyway, on this particular topic, how would you bracket the 1970s?
 

CalBear

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The 1960's died on December 6, 1969 at Altamont.

The 1970's died November 4, 1979.
 
The 1960's died on December 6, 1969 at Altamont.

The 1970's died November 4, 1979.

How do you conceptualize the Iranian hostage-taking as the death of the 70s, comparable to Altamont?

Altamont supposedly negated the peace-and-love ethos prevalent in the 1960s. Unless people were positing the 1970s as some sort of golden age of American diplomacy, I'm not sure how the embassy siege is supposed to have killed the 70s.

If anything, given that the 70s are generally considered to have been a time of malaise, the hostage-crisis could more plausibly be seen as a culmination, rather than a negation, of the prevailing spirit.
 
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As someone who was 16 at the start of the Iranian hostage crisis, it felt like the change of something.

Yeah, I thought about editing my post afterwards to reflect that. I think it was a pretty major turning point, just not away from anything specifically "1970s".

A case could be made for the Iranian Revolution being the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Not in the sense that it prompted the fall of the Soviet Union, but that it represented the emergence of political Islam as a significant force in international politics, which within fairly short order would eclipse Communism as the major concern of the west and its policymakers.
 
3rd May and 4th November 1979 serve were both culmination of the trends in the 1970s
Thatcher's election was the first of a series of elections were governments were elected in opposition to the previous economic consensus of the post war period, enacting the reforms of deregulation and monetarism which defined the 1980s

The Iran hostage Crises was a important moment in the practice of the Islamic revolution in Iran. It also represented the reemergence of cultural conservatism as a political thought, as it had ripped effects throughout the region. meanwhile in Europe and the USA the culturally liberal consensus of the major political parties would fall apart, and would witness the re-emergence of cultural conservative politics based on reasserting traditional national customs over liberal reforms. Reagan and Thatcher were a backlash to the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s just as Khomeini rejected the forced attempts at westernisation by the Shah's government.

Though the problem with the 1970s is that is is subject to two big overlapping decades, the 1960s and the 1980s, both of which had different cultural mores and political climates. But A perfectly symbolic moment would be December 1980, the shooting of John Lennon meant the death of an icon of the 1960s-1970s cultural and political movements, especially as it happened weeks after Reagan was elected president.
 
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CalBear

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How do you conceptualize the Iranian hostage-taking as the death of the 70s, comparable to Altamont?

Altamont supposedly negated the peace-and-love ethos prevalent in the 1960s. Unless people were positing the 1970s as some sort of golden age of American diplomacy, I'm not sure how the embassy siege is supposed to have killed the 70s.

If anything, given that the 70s are generally considered to have been a time of malaise, the hostage-crisis could more plausibly be seen as a culmination, rather than a negation, of the prevailing spirit.

After November 4 everything changed. It was also the end of the Vietnam syndrome. Carter's last year+ in office consisted of dealing with the Crisis and the later Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

I can remember the little brother of one of my friend freaking out about having to register for the draft, something that everyone had believed was gone for good (registration ended in 1975 and picked up again in 1980).

The moment was an utter sea change.

The 1980s lasted until January 20, 1993. A major date, it was the moment that the U.S. government became dysfunctional.
 
CalBear wrote:

After November 4 everything changed. It was also the end of the Vietnam syndrome. Carter's last year+ in office consisted of dealing with the Crisis and the later Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Assuming I understand the use of the term "Vietnam Syndrome", I'm not sure how the hostage-crisis was the END of it. Wouldn't the end of the Vietnam Syndrome have to be an event where the US reasserted its military prowess boldly on the world stage? With the hostage-crisis, the US was seen as being kicked around helplessly by a weaker power.
 

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CalBear wrote:

After November 4 everything changed. It was also the end of the Vietnam syndrome. Carter's last year+ in office consisted of dealing with the Crisis and the later Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Assuming I understand the use of the term "Vietnam Syndrome", I'm not sure how the hostage-crisis was the END of it. Wouldn't the end of the Vietnam Syndrome have to be an event where the US reasserted its military prowess boldly on the world stage? With the hostage-crisis, the US was seen as being kicked around helplessly by a weaker power.

The change was that the public started to embrace the concept of a stronger U.S. military. The American public was, overall, not much in love with the military post Viet Nam. The Iran crisis changed that. I suppose I could have used April 24, 1980, that was the day that totally doomed Carter and ensured the Reagan/Bush era, but without the Embassy take-over there would be no Eagle Claw disaster.

The exceptionally robust, thoroughly professional U.S. military of today can be trace its conception directly to the Embassy take-over and its birth to Desert One.
 
There are a lot of ways to slice and dice the 1970s. If you look at the decade as one of transition from the postwar social democracy consensus toward a more laissez-faire economic system, the 1970s began either at the time Nixon took the US off the postwar fixed exchange rate Bretton Woods system (1971) or the time of the 1973 OPEC oil shock. The period then ran through the end of the 1981-82 recession sometime in early to mid 1983 when the gains of conservatism were locked in place politically in the US and the UK and particularly the latter with the 1983 election which returned Thatcher to power.

Having lived through it despite being rather young, the 1970s were a very confusing time in most respects with a lot of rapid change in the political, economic, social and popular culture spheres. I'm not sure any definition of when the decade began and ended can be entirely correct for that reason as the definition will shift depending upon the perspective of the observer, just as the 1960s, another decade of dramatic change, can be viewed differently depending on one's perspective.
 
Someone in Carter's administration later said the Iranian government incurred costs such as spare parts embargo and frozen assets which a standard government would not have chosen to incur, but revolutionary governments sometimes do that.

President Carter played a steady eddie game in a free-flowing, hard to predict situation and he got the hostages home safely.

The perception of the time was that we were being weak and passive. Certainly not the case when looking at the economic and technological influence we had all through the next decade. And militarily, all through the cold war of the '70s and 80s, we supported a shitload of military dictatorships, this part nothing to be proud of. And strategically with the Soviet Union, in a sense they reached nuclear parity in the 1970s, but I don't think they ever had the triad of sub-based, land-based, and heavy bombers like we had.
 
I'm going to say the date the Soviets invaded Afghanistan ended the 1970s. The end of detente and any realistic chance of SALT II, the military build-up begun under President Carter and more highly publicized under President Reagan, increasing tension and a dangerous 1983, Reagan being the good bully making peace with the bad bully. That's kind of the way I look at it. But if you push me, the line between good and evil is not between us and them, but rather pretty much down the middle of each of us. Or, as I once heard an engineer say it, people are about 70-30, and on the good side, so it's a guardedly optimistic theory!

So, this is another candidate date.

Dec. 24, 1979.
 
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