The American Yawp — Chapter Twenty-Six: The Unraveling
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

On December 6, 1969, some 300,000 young people gathered in California for a free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway. Four months after Woodstock celebrated peace and love, Altamont ended in chaos when Hells Angels “security guards” beat concertgoers and stabbed a young man to death. If Woodstock captured the dream of sixties youth culture, Altamont exposed its dark side.

Nothing fed public disillusionment more than the Vietnam War. Television brought its brutality into living rooms, and reporters exposed the “credibility gap” between official claims of victory and the reality of stalemate. The Tet Offensive of January 1968 proved the enemy could strike anywhere, and the 1969 revelation of the My Lai massacre horrified the public. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection; two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for president.

That summer, police brutally attacked protesters outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency promising “law and order” and “peace with honor” in Vietnam. He slowly withdrew American troops while secretly bombing communist supply lines in Cambodia and Laos. After the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, North Vietnam conquered the South in 1975, uniting the country under communism.

The civil rights movement also fractured. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and Malcolm X emboldened militant Black Power activists, until police killed Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1969. Mexican Americans walked out of schools and formed La Raza Unida; Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island (1969–1971) and Wounded Knee (1973), winning new tribal-rights laws. Riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit, and violent fights over school busing in Boston, convinced many white Americans that the nation would unravel.

Nixon’s foreign policy mixed confrontation with negotiation. He announced the Nixon Doctrine, pursued détente with the Soviet Union and China — visiting China in 1972 — and signed the SALT I arms treaty. But in 1973, Arab oil producers placed an embargo on oil shipments to punish American support for Israel. Gasoline prices quadrupled, drivers waited in long lines, and the economy sank into stagflation — high inflation plus high unemployment.

At home, Nixon’s presidency collapsed in scandal. In 1971 the Pentagon Papers revealed that presidents had lied about Vietnam. In June 1972, burglars working for Nixon’s reelection committee were caught breaking into Democratic offices at the Watergate complex. Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed a massive White House cover-up. When secret tapes proved Nixon had obstructed justice, the House moved to impeach him. Nixon chose to resign in August 1974 — the only president ever to do so — and his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him.

The economy was also unraveling. Factories closed or moved from the industrial Midwest — the Rust Belt — to the low-wage, anti-union Sunbelt. In Detroit, once the “arsenal of democracy,” manufacturing jobs fell by more than half between 1947 and 1977, and Black unemployment soared. Unions shrank, wages stagnated, and the rich-poor gap widened.

New movements still won victories. After Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, twenty million Americans joined the first Earth Day in April 1970. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Water Act, and banned the pesticide DDT. Roe v. Wade (1973) legalized abortion nationwide, women entered the workforce in record numbers, and the 1969 Stonewall uprising launched the gay rights movement. But conservatives fought back: Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign stopped the Equal Rights Amendment, which fell three states short of ratification in 1982.

Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 promising honesty after Watergate. He brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978, but stagflation worsened — inflation hit 20 percent — and Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. In 1979, Carter warned of a national “crisis of confidence.” With the economy stagnant and Washington in gridlock, Americans were ready for a new conservatism.