today's panel on the crises of the 1970's. so we have a great panel today. i am going to just start up i talk a little bit about what -- how we kind of framed this panel and how we are hoping -- what we are hoping to accomplish. we have the roundtable intensely. we are each want to speak about 10 minutes. just a few roof remarks about the literature on the 1970's and thinking about the 1970's and what this unique time means to us today. and then we would like to open it up for a lot of conversation both with each other and most importantly with the audience. so we will be sticking to a pretty tight time and hopefully having a lot of time for comp -- for conversation. one of the things we were thinking about was the central role of the idea of crisis in thinking about the 1970's, both in the contemporary clinical imagination of a time and also in historical scholarship. from watergate to the energy crisis, the urban crisis, a fiscal crisis, the rhetoric of the era is huge with extensive danger and historical change. and histories of the decade often treated in these heightened terms. many people have observed that the period of the 1970's have gone from being in an easily dismiss historical footnote or a punchline of some sort to being a far more interesting 1960's or 1980's and being seen as moments when our own present world really came into existence. histories -- many other books i really gone back to the 1970's in recent years. we see this revival and expansion of scholarly interest in speaking about the period. some of the things we will be thinking about is what it meant for various different areas of american life to be experienced and fraud with crisis and what is at stake in defining the period as one of crisis. how does the whole idea of crisis complicate things for us as historians? and if we are thinking about the 1970's in these terms, what do we think were the really critical and irreversible transformations that occurred over this time if that is how we want to set things up? other important areas point connections between areas we are thinking about on this panel the economy, national politics state structure family and sexual relationships, race the prison system, cities, international politics? or do we see these more as discrete areas that are not linked as an underlying way in this time? our first panelist is beverly gage. she is a professor of american 20th-century. she wrote a book "the year wall street exploded." also focusing on the 1920 wall st bombing. and her next book "a g-man, j edgar hoover and the 20th century," will be on j edgar hoover who died in the 1970's. [laughter] >> i think the protocol is that we would stand up here for comments and then sit back down when we get to the q&a and a full discussion. is that ok? so when i agreed to be on this panel at kim's initiation, i said that i would talk a little bit about the intelligence crisis of the 1970's. during the 1970's, there was both a learning period in which americans discovered a lot of things that they did not know and perhaps did not want to know about ways in which the intelligence establishment was operating, particularly the fbi and the cia. and the most notable feature of that intelligence crisis was in fact maybe not the day you -- the death of j edgar hoover. it was an important precondition . he died in may of 1972. but the church committee, which came along in the and -- in the mid-1970's was a senate committee and conducted a wide-ranging investigation into what to the intelligence agencies in the united states had been up to since the 1940's and arguably even earlier than that. but as i got into thinking about the intelligence crisis, i began to see all sorts of connections to other crises. because part of our charge in this panel was to make these kinds of connections, i thought it would offer a little bit of a sense of what i see going on in national politics overall particularly in the mechanisms of government in washington d.c. during particularly the early period of the 1970's, roughly 1971-1976. before begin talking about that come i will take a opportunity to offer a brief pitch for those of you who want to know more in depth about the intelligence crisis of the 1970's for two other panels. if you're coming to the oah in st. louis in april, we will be doing a panel on the 40th anniversary of the church committee, which will be this year, 2015. we will be joined by fbi historians people who have been staffers on the church committee, it and a variety of other people. we will sink in depth into the church committee itself. the second panel will actually be at the aha. it is in keeping with the themes we will talk about here. on sunday night, there will be a screening of a documentary film called "1971." it is actually about a break-in at the media pennsylvania fbi office in 1971 by antiwar activists. it was one of these pivotal moments that set off the intelligence crisis in the 1970's and the files are captured in that moment were one of the first ways that we began to find out things like: intel pro and other things that the cia and the fbi had been conducting in the 1960's and the 1970's. there will be a panel with the filmmaker and a journalist named betty metzger who wrote a book about the media break-in in 1971. so that is sunday night. the intelligence crisis of the 1970's, as i said, for the purpose of this panel, i am going to week about as a way in to considering what i see really is a transformation of the institution of government in washington in particular during the 1970's. i think we tend to think about the 1970's as a period of disillusionment with government, as a period when americans for the most part retreated from politics, the standard view having been that after all the ferment of the 1960's, after all of the sort of public engagement of the 1960's, the 1970's becomes a period when america's retreat from politics come in which they become disillusioned about the presidency, but the intelligence establishment about congress to some degree, about the electoral progress -- process, but local parties, and really step back from all of this. and i think that narrative is basically true on many levels. but i want to talking in little bit about what some of the responses to that crisis of disillusionment, to the crisis of legitimacy that is sort of the broader crisis of government in the 1970's, what some of the responses to that were. and i want to throw the idea that actually far from being a moment of retreat from politics, the 1970's particularly when you look at institutional reform in washington, was a period time of enormous creativity, and hamas political engagement, and our institutions of governance have really looked really different by the end of the 1970's than they did at the beginning of the 1970's. i would even suggest that the 1970's were as a profound period of institutional change in terms of the institutions of governance in this country as something like the progressive era. we think about the progressive era. we think of all the energy that went into political reforms like the direct election of senators city council government, to some degree the invention of the primary election. but there are a lot of changes that come about and we recognize the progressive area -- progressive era as a period in which she governance changed in significant ways to i will throughout for discussion the idea that the 1970's is actually a comparable period of institutional change. so we are sticking to 10-minute time limit. so rather than go into great depth about that, want to briefly point to a few moments of crisis, i think rather widely recognized moments of crisis, in the early 1970's. and then point to some of these institutional responses that are quite sweeping responses and all together in the skate of five years. when we think about the crisis of governance in the 1970's, i think there are a few images that often come to mind. we are going to talk about a long 1970 so we will push it back into the late 60's and maybe push it forward into the early 1980's. but in my mind, in many ways, we want to start with the 1968 democratic national convention the beatings of protesters there, and the sense that something has gone wrong in a deep, deep way. the electro-mechanisms, the party politics, and relationships between citizens and political parties and citizens on the state. obviously, there are other causes of this -- civil rights, vietnam. i will get into all of those. but if we start with 1968, we move onto a moment like watergate, which is obviously not only a crisis of legitimacy for the presidency but a crisis about the relationship between the president and congress, the relationship between the president and the citizenry. and then finally move into the intelligence crisis of the mid-1970's with the church committee, etc. so we have all of these things together. if we begin to look at what happened, it is a pretty remarkable transformation of at least certain aspects of american political institutions. such a close my remarks, i just want to list off a few of the changes that happened in the course of a very short period of time in the early 1970's. i think one of our challenges to think about what some of the consequences are and whether or not these are connected to each other. so between about 1971 in 1976 and 1977, we first of all get millions of new voters in this country. so you get a constitutional amendment that makes the voting age 18 instead of 21 and so. you also get a notion of the primary system. they were not binding primary systems. so the primary system we all experience that have at times cause crises of its own, that is also first in the 1970's. you begin to get a transformation that is already started in the 1960's. it comes to fruition in the 1970's. you get the breakdown of the old congressional committee structure, which have been dominated largely by southern senators particularly in the senate, and the invention april -- and the invention of what is supposed to be much more conventional structure. the freddie mac for the first family gained weight in the 1970's, particularly because of reforms in 1974. the foyer had been passed in 1966. it does not really get teeth until the mid-1970's. you have the war powers resolution, which again sort of changes the nature of the relationship between the president and the congress. and you begin to get a whole series of intelligence reforms as well that began to come out. this is slightly later than the watergate era reform. you begin to get congressional oversight of the intelligence committee. vv and to get to the fisa courts coming in -- you begin to get the pfizer courts coming in. and the last pieces i will mention are the federal election reforms that come out of watergate and campaign-finance reform. again, we can go into some detail about what any of these laws mean, where any of them are coming from. but i think in total, this is a pretty serious rethinking of american governance during this period and shows the kind of political reek -- clinical creativity in washington that has not been recognized part of how we talk about the 1970's. they did not solve the problems they were meant to solve your i'm about to finish. many of them are in fact attempts to contain social protests, bring people "back into the system," and think about ways to change government to that effect. some of them were the products of deep disillusionment with government. but overall, we see a very energetic push toward a certain type of democratization, a certain kind of new openness in american government, a certain kind of new transparency that we haven't seen before. and many of these changes that have impotent place in the 1970's, as i said, were incomplete and also turn out to be flawed and have unintended consequences. and in many ways, we are dealing with some of those consequences and unintended consequences today. [applause] >> our next speaker is donna murch. she is associate professor of history at records university. -- at rutgers university. she is currently a fellow at the bunch center in ucla. she is currently at work on a book called crack in a lake, policing crisis and the war on drugs. >> thank you for coming. i have a formal paper so i will read from that. i will provide an overview in thinking about some of the issues about the drug crisis of the 1970's and then talk about some of the new graphical literature and kind of a wish list for things that still need to be looked at your. nothing embodied so much as displacement than the heroin panic. in 1969, nixon warned the public that illicit drugs represented "a growing menace to the general welfare." two years later, he declared to drug is public enemy number one and committed himself to waging an all out war against the deadly enemy. most disturbingly for the mainstream public, illicit drugs approved deeply destabilizing. popular estimates ran a size 20% of returning u.s. veterans self identifying as heroin users. contemporary scholarship has challenged that figure. classic 1970's films like "the deer hunter" and "the french connection" to dip take a world where masculinity and authority found itself imperiled by drug sale and consumption. similarly, blacks boy tatian -- blacksploitation. while this pervasive image of hedonistic and unsustainable culture and reckless abandonment embodied by illicit drugs and can -- and continues to dominate, lesser understood is the role of the state itself in generating the spectacle and the perceived crisis that justified unprecedented punishment campaigns that followed the passage of the rockefeller drug laws in 1973. as state rhetoric and popular culture converge, drug users were identified and targeted as the primary cause of this crime. in this way, one of society's most vulnerable populations found themselves directly in the crosshairs of unprecedented repression. as stuart hall has argued, in conjunction with popular media the state health generate crisis to justify the waging of its powers in the mystic war policing. in britain, the application of the american term mugging to the image context provided a rationale and justification for what he calls an authoritarian consensus and the adoption of new tools to reestablish law and order. calling into question whether mugging was even a real phenomena or a civil construction hall highlighted the interdependence of the stay and popular media in reproducing intense moral panic over increased crime. his primary point is a simple one. the production of crisis itself served as a move to expand state power. the same can be said of the u.s. in the 1970's and his era article from elation is an important one for historical studies of the decade. the success of federal and state wars on drugs and the modern incarcerate state more broadly. this is certainly true for the drug war and arguably many other realms of american policymaking in the 19 evony's. -- in the 1970's. in placing punitive campaigns against drugs in the larger literature of the 1970's, one of the challenges faced by scholars is how to interpret this decade in a larger scope of postwar and late 20th century history. one reason is empirical and the other conceptual. the first issue is the history of the postwar drug consumption prohibition is relatively new and much of it is unwritten. whether institutional studies of specific campaigns or social histories of consumption and illicit distribution, very little has been written by historians. pioneering studies have addressed substantial portions of this avoid but much more remains to be written. the second much thornier issue is a conceptual one and it is true of all the subsets we are talking about today. how to define and interpret the decade relationally. should the 1970's be understood as an exception of the 1960's or in anticipation of the 1980's and beyond. or should we reject the status as bridge altogether? i find this particularly challenging because, in many ways, my own understanding of the decade was forged by my first book on the panthers which, like other recent books centers on a period of knows that movement and change, the interrelated struggles for civil rights, black power, inclusion, in which previously marginal groups were able to gain greater access to the liberal benefits of the state. this marked the decade of true state corporation which we see the emergence of large numbers of municipal regimes and federally elected officials. milestones include the election of tom bradley and l.a., the creation of the black caucus, the black panther party's, the electoral showing in oakland and gary, indiana is hosting of the national black conference. in many respects, -- an emergency literature has begun to break down these polarized views of the 1970's by arguing that nixon's first declaration of the war on drugs, raw lookers -- rockefellers embracing minimum sentences were not as new as previously thought. the war on poverty restaged the war on crime and helped to create the infrastructure for its mass prosecution of youth of color wage received full collaboration in the youth services bureau and the war on drugs. a campaign that helped inspire community campaign had a momentum of its own. similarly, works highlight continuities of the postwar era. this scholarship is part of a look -- a broader literature. kathleen fry does exhaustive work locates the nixonian drug war in the larger postwar period as state responded to a crisis in governance during a period of intensification and expansion of imperial state power. the state punished its way to power. similarly, development became visible in the 1970's and 19 mary -- and 1980's. nearly two decades before the passage of the rockefeller drug laws, a perceived narcotics crisis in l.a. prompted a broad-based mobilization against dope edler's. -- dope peddlers. newspapers reported sensational stories of white female youth besieged by wolf and rat packs. it was a suburban crisis narrative in which marijuana and heroin use threatened black urban youth. in contrast to an older scholarly literature, reflecting the rise of the electoral right lesser shows that southern california suburban drug crisis is far from a republican invention. and, established california liberal democrats played a crucial role in the mandatory minimums which represented a joint racial project. it helps to place the perceived crisis of the 1970's in a much broader, temporal and conceptual frame. however, more work needs to be done in the u.s. itself. one of the most important books on the subject comes from the 1970's, namely alfred mccoy, "the politics of heroin" the list in 1972. through exhaustive fieldwork in vietnam in the late 1960's and early 1970's, he demonstrated how the national security state actively supported heroin cultivation in the golden triangle to fund covert operations. his google work in the link between imperialism and drugs has spawned several generations of critical scholarship on the geopolitical dimensions of the war on drugs including "pipe dream blues" and others. by expanding the focus from the domestic grandmothers of nixon's 1971 war on drugs, the geopolitics of the cold war and u.s. militarism mccoy and the scholarship in his wake have enlarged of the domain of analysis to explain the link between illicit drug economies the defense industry, and american militarization from the 1970's forward. still, there remains much to be done. what follows is a wish list of things that might further be researched. one of the most neglected areas of study is the social history of drug consumption and distribution networks. gang and organized crime historians will -- have called for labor histories of drug yelling at illicit networks themselves. while this type of study resents methodological problems with a relicense -- with a reliance on state sources, social histories of the crowd and popular uprising to think about how to brush government forces against the grain and supplement them with oral history and an enriched body of drug ethnography and economic anthropology. the concept of informal economy has utility in providing an ultimate framework to criminology and how to think about the interrelation between marginalization in a formal economy and participation and off the books economic activity. perhaps most importantly for our discussion of crisis, informal economy helps strip illicit drug distribution of the. fantasies that drive crisis narrative and moral panic. the second critical area that needs more research is the war on gangs here. my recent book approaches this history through a regional study. one of the challenges seeking to write municipal and national histories of the multiple war on drugs, the symbion versus and prosecutions for punitive campaigns, gang, crime, and later terrorism. one of the best examples of this is trash, and delete gang unit that later became rash which is notorious for the rampart scandal. really quite awful things it did in los angeles. the nine teen 70's burst a -- the 1970's burst a war on gangs. the conflation of drug crimes and street gang membership created the net of decriminalization of non-gang youth. motorcycle gangs and other forms of white youth organizations meant that the category of gang itself became racialized. by the 1980's, more than half of the male black populations between 18 and 30 appeared in the gang database. historians of the 1970's are in many respects placed in a difficult position of dean naturalizing the perceived crisis of the era while at the same time engaging in acts of historical recovery to us. the recovery of phantasms that naturalize the states unprecedented incarceration of large segments of the american public for nonviolent offenses. in the case of the first drug war, there's so much more to be known and the conceptual question of whether its historical arc is designed by the poor store past or a dark future remains to be decided. thank you. [applause] >> our third speaker is robert self professor of teaching excellence and professor of history at brown university. he is the author most recently -- >> good afternoon. going to get a little feel for this microphone. it is coming through the system? i don't need my arm and my elbow? great. i also applaud beverly for being able to do this off-the-cuff aired but i will stick to script because i will be here all day and you will not be so happy about that. i am love the opinion that if historians go looking for a crisis they will likely find one. it is merely a matter of for whom and where the crisis exists. to identify a crisis is to determine subjectivity to portray a one of you, to engage in a discursive actress, as donna said if we mean a crucial turning point condition by instability and perhaps in a term cree sees -- sometimes crises are noisy and celebrated. but sometimes they are less noisy and less celebrated, even less visible to much of the public. my role this afternoon is to bring a discussion of the family and the crisis or perceived crisis in the family to this discussion about multiple and overlapping instability of the 1970's. i want to be clear about for whom we might talk about a crisis of the family in the 1970's. and in particular for whom the notion of a crisis of the family did in -- did it political work or discursive work. we talk about demographic changes and family composition. we really have to have a much rotter view than just -- much broader view than just the decade of the 1970's. to contextualize this discussion, i would like to think about family in the 1970's in three distinct ways. first, there is little doubt that the 1970's saw the advent of significant shifts in the composition of american households in to this point they have largely been the domain of economists, demographers and sociologist. historians have only rarely stepped into that conversation. some of these ships will be well known. there was a spike in divorce in the decade which produced a doubling of the overall divorce rate by the early 1980's. since then, those marriage and divorce rates have the verge significantly by economic last two grossly oversimplified high income, generally white-collar americans tend to marry later divorce rarely, and have fewer children. these shifts and their differentiation by class have yet to attract deep historical study. although they are clearly related to an underlying economic and cultural landscape that one could map onto growing rates of income inequality that are of course the topic of the day in our own era alongside a partly overlapping with these changing marriage and divorce rates, there had been since the 19 60's female head of households in primary breadwinners in the bottom and upper end of the income scale. in 2010, 40% of american households had women as the sole or primary source of income. in 1960, the number had been 10%. it's not entirely clear that the 1970's were the critical decade in that transformation although that apd was really important. -- although that period was really important. the increase represents urgent economic experiences with the feminization of party at one extreme and the growth in the female professional class at the other. alongside these blood measures of household compositions were a married of additional shifts. the growth in single person households, both with and without children. the growth in same-sex cohabitation and the still small but growing population of lgbt households with children including the so-called lesbian baby boom of the 1970's. by a variety measures in which americans constituted households and made understood families began to shift between the 1960's and the 1970's. whether any of this constituted a crisis of the merck and family depends subjectively on where one stood in relation to the larger structuring system of race, class, and patriarch. a topic that we can certainly take on in the larger discussion. in other words, it is a crisis depending on where you stand. but let me turn to the second framework of family in the 1970's we should consider, the rhetorical or discursive side. largely separate the statistics -- there is little historical doubt that in the 1970's family came to do a great deal of political work. the breakdown of the american family was a powerful and foil for political projects. "i find people deeply concerned about the loss of stability and the loss of value in their lives. the root of the problem is the steady erosion and weakening of our families. running against gerald ford that year, ronald reagan used the term "family" 17 times in a nationally televised speech. most powerfully and evidently family emerged between 1972 in the 1980's as the train on which a conservative political coalition could be constructed. within that you and racial coalition, family did a great deal of ideological work. first, family was an antifeminist rhetorical valid. feminism and lgbt writes were not the product of progressive shifts in how civil and economic citizenship were conceived that direct causes of family breakdown. second family alongside law and order became the opposition to the social order. this is perhaps the most obvious in the nt juvenile delicacy campaigns and antiwear fair -- anti-welfare campaigns. but it can be seen in the christian school movement that emerged in the 1970's around school the segregation in the south and the family values movement, particularly exclusively in the southern bible belt that came to define institutions like the southern baptist convention and the southern republican party by the 1980's. third, family came to signify came to represent a way of talking about the appropriate functions of government. family and the 1970's became a rhetorical vehicle for imagining a citizenry who needed not economic security or equal opportunity but moral protection. it emerged as a handmaiden to a vision of government in which social provisioning and gender and racial holiday were subordinated as legitimate collective social and political objectives. in all of these ways, family was far less and isis that it was undergoing a profound political re-articulation and mobilization. this is not to suggest that family was only a concept with residents -- with resonance among political conservatives or that it's only role in american life the sears was romanticized. all families wrestled with the ways family did or did not could or could not constitute the psychic, moral and social world in which to inhabit. to my mind, those various engagements are as important and as -- they let the cohesion for clinical momentum than family had for a central right political agenda. feminists of various persuasions headlong argued that the male model of economic life was outdated if not oppressive, even as the feminists played a critical role in that model in the first half of the 20 century. by the 1970's, working-class feminism had launched powerful challenges to the states elements of the male breadwinner model. this produced a legitimate crisis within the framework of those welfare and rights liberalism that could not be resolved quickly or easily within the institutions and political coalitions that the central left had created in the 1930's and the 1960's. a deep, difficult to resolve political crisis in the centerleft understanding of family in relation to its vision of both state and society. as one disgruntled delegate in 1972 said we heard from the abortionists but there were no steelworkers know quite headers and worst of all know plumbers. that's a great line. there are other ways of talking and thinking about family and the 1970's. but i want to stick to my time and i want to welcome questions and arguments in a larger discussion. i welcome the opportunity to have my fellow panelists -- to hear my fellow panelists on this as well. thank you. [applause] works our next speaker is heather and thompson -- heather ann thompson. she will be joining the faculty at michigan in the fall. she has a new book coming out next year from pantheon on attica and the attica uprising. she has written widely, as many worldly no not only for the journals of american history and other scholarly publications, but also for the atlantic, for the new york times and elsewhere about mass incarceration and the prison system. >> good afternoon. like everyone else, i kind of came to the topic today really having to think a lot myself about how do we think about the 1970's, how do we write about the 19 70's, and take a pause or timeout in the things we do all the time to really assess where we sit in this broader literature. to me, while i feel like i can nod my head in agreement with virtually everything that has all ready been said, the way that i thought about this was that the 1970's to me is really characterize or has been characterized by two kind of central or primary arguments. one of them we have heard about which is that the 90 70's it -- the 1970's is this bridge decade between the 1960's and the 1960 -- from the 1960's and the 19 80's, from a period of radicalism to a period of conservatism. and in the second is that the 1970's is a decade of crisis. i want to talk about both of these but i will say about the second which is that the 1970's as a decade of crisis, it is remarkable when i sat down to think about it how much we have thought about and written about and characterized the 1970's as a moment of crisis. the foreign-policy crisis, both in the middle east, southeast asia, the energy crisis, which is related to the crisis in the middle east but also it's about a crisis for the american driving middle-class, the middle -- the economic crisis recession after post were prosperity, the welfare rices certainly the conservative argument for it, the crisis of the labor movement, the crisis of the family, the broader urban crisis that for many years was a paradigm many of us wrote within, and of course in my field the broader crime crisis that will amass this mass incarceration. of course notably, all of these crises, everyone that i mentioned are deeply racialized particularly who was allegedly causing the problem, what the crisis origin is, and the kind of narrative that is tied to the first narrative about bridge decade, which is having to do with things were better and then things would get worse and that is deeply gendered and deeply racialized. my work is in problem of tithing both of these. the first is the bridge decade in the second that it is a decade of crisis. the former, i don't want to spend a whole a lot of time on that that the idea that the 1970's was a bridge decade between radicalism may conservatism we have really problem what ties that already. i think we continue to do so. donna's work does this. dan berger's work. my own work on prisoners rights. it is clear that radicalism does not die in the 1970's and i would make the case that in ways that we have failed to appreciate the 1970's is a far more contested decade, much more about a continue should -- a continuation and contestation for power and resources that does not bridge at all. that continues well past the 1970's. and the other piece of that bridge decade that i really take issue with is that this is the decade that signals the death of liberalism. my own work suggests that this isn't the death of liberalism and it is the racial coming-of-age of liberalism. a moment when liberalism was really most -- a task, made to make clear what it stood for and what really supported. in that configuration, liberals don't so much get killed off by the law and order conservatives or tariff their views to stay in power, but are faced with their own challenges to their own authority, their own challenges to their own legitimacy in the body politic that leads them in their own very conservative directions and leaves them to be arctic's -- architects to many conservative programs. it is in my view that liberalism dies in the 1970's but that civil rights activists and activists in general call liberalism to clarets -- two identify itself more clearly. it seems to me that we need to be really clear about what the implications -- the implications of this is. then we can ashley ask how much of a crisis were we really in? if the 1970's was crisis ridden, the logically the nation needed to embark on new policy tasks in many different areas. with the economy, welfare, crime policy, etc. indeed, the policies that led to sylmar -- so much crisis were keynesian and redistributive. someone say this would be a backlash to previous decade efforts. others would say it was a logical corrective. there was a crisis. and these policy correctives would have major applications, particularly on income milley lottery -- income inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality. the 1970's have become the and day -- to indicate this was perhaps not at all a decade of crisis. this is a decade in which crises are declared and asserted to affect substantive policy change . and that the stakes were very, very high. and that the ways in which crisis is asserted, declared and i would argue created has itself invocations that would lead us to crisis. this is not an unimportant chicken-and-eight at i would like to argue. you think about the welfare crisis, the idea that we have a welfare crisis in the 19 evony's. -- the 1970's. we have a new generation of lazy people who don't want to get a job and too many people populating the welfare rolls and so forth. again, it is so clear from this recent work that it is a created crisis, manufactured and it waited good yes, there were -- manufactured and exploited. yes, there were problems with the welfare program, but mainly that it was underfunded. but it was clear that it was a positive. it was working well. it was declared as a crisis in when it gets declared as a crisis, we need a logical policy corrective which is the welfare reform act. that probably itself will create crisis. it will create a crisis of poverty. it would create the crisis but not the one we imagined. we can make similar arguments about labor and family and every thing else. i want to talk about the crime crisis of the 1970's. out of all of them, this is the one that has been getting a whole lot of attention lately. here is the way that we tend to understand it. certainly in the popular arena, this is still the way we understand it. this is what happens. we get crime rates in the 1960's. they begin to soar out of control. in response to that, we get a policy corrective. the policy corrective is this war on crime. unfortunately, we will end up with mass incarceration. but make no mistake, we had to do this because there was a crime crisis, right? imagine the importance of that understanding for everything that comes after it. my own work, we spent hours and days working on the numbers. is this why we started the war on crime? was there in fact a crime crisis? and fat what this incredibly educationally diverse panel concluded was no good this was a created crisis. we began a war on crime before we had a crime crisis and we chose this path for very copper kidded reasons that i don't have time to do with pushing back at the system in place at the time and accessing greater equality and artistic tory democracy. nevertheless, policymakers chose this path. by choosing this path, they in turn generated a crisis. they in turn generated what would become a crime crisis or i say it is a crisis of violence, a crisis that is generated when you have excessive homelessness, when you have orphaning of generations of children, when you destroyed entire neighborhoods, when you make entire populations permanently unemployable because they have a criminal record. this gets us into a different area, but what it suggests is that crime crisis is in fact it rotted of the policy changes of the 1970's, not generative of those policy changes. and i think this is something we should inc. about. so we get crisis for chicken and a are crucially important. it matters whether politicians and policymakers are responding to crisis when they overhaul the american economy, social welfare policies, farm policies, criminal justice system, or they poorly decide -- they prematurely decide to do these things, to prevent further equality, to prevent further income redistribution, to prevent greater labor rights and i could go on and on. and the applications of this, when we think about the national stage, the 1970's at large are back some it could be that by getting the 1970's wrong, we might have totally misunderstood the evolution of the postwar period overall. the stakes were incredibly high in the 1970's. that's why i think we need to inc. about less of a decade of crisis and more of a decade of contestation and create a crisis which then in turn will shape the 1980's and the 1990's. thank you. [applause] >> i am going to speak briefly myself. i will introduce myself and then i will standoff -- stand up. so i am kim phillips find. i am a professor at nyu where i teach in the history department and also in the gallatin school of individual study. my first book was called "invisible hands" and i'm working now on "new york city of the 19 70's and the disco crisis of those years -- and the fiscal crisis of those years. one of the things that brought me to this question and to the panel today was the sense that 1970's new york has been long a subject of a certain kind of nostalgia. i think we have seen this over the past few weeks when the decade has been invoked by the police commissioner and many others, seeking to compare the contact -- the context over police violence and the murder of the two police officers in brooklyn to the state of violence against police officers in the 1970's. in 1970's new york, in one view it was lawlessness, disorder and chaos, a city on the verge of bankers see, and the blackout of 1977. and the 70's indoors as a time that nobody wants to go back to, an era of -- and the 1970's indoors as a time that nobody wants to go back to. yet, coexisting with this is a certain undeniable real nostalgia for the graffiti-covered trees, the underground clubs, the radical politics of the time, to the time when there was an actual art scene in lower manhattan and even for the old buddy times square, a grittier, less control, less money-dominated new york. the success of patti smith's memoir "just kids." in a recent essay nicholas daines draws out this sense of nostalgia about the entire period of the 1970's, set during the decade and asking why so many authors [indiscernible] how said, he asks, does one have to be to rigid asked regurgitate the air of stagflation. thinking about the panel today i think one of the reasons for the appeal of the decade and part of the challenge for historians, the why we are drawn to it, is, even as it was unfolding, was this acute historical sense of what was happening, this sense of the period of transcript -- of transformation, and the feeling of openness and urgency implicit in the idea of crisis, even if it is also fraught with danger. so let's think about what this means and what the challenges and opportunities it offers. we talked about some of the areas perceived as being in crisis. the one of the interesting things is that many intellectuals invoke this idea. social problems appear not as random consequences of a system that otherwise works well but as a necessary result of a more extensive set of evil, but -- that can be confidently predicted to produce similar results. as both heather and donna suggested, the sense of crisis the naming of crisis means to imply that things have reached an intolerable point that cannot go on as they have been. some kind of change must be forced into existence. naming a crisis contains in itself the seeds of action, a strong sense that something must be done to alter the situation if social order is to continue. it suggests a kind of contrition of historical times. i'm thinking of the writings on crisis where it is a definitive moment of transformation, even if it is anticipated. the episode marks a dividing line between the world as it was and the world as it will be. this is something roland wasn't the only person to write about. there was a sense in the 1970's that the entire world system of capitalism was entering into a time of crisis, and objective set of difficulties that policy tools could not confront but only compound. james o'connor writes in 1973 about the fiscal crisis of the state, the idea that the slowdown, the inability of the private economy to boost higher levels of profits will mean that there's an intensifying competition for public resources, and that this will lead to a displaced social conflict into a fight over the state. his ideas are picking -- picked up by daniel bell where he writes both about the welfare state and the deepening tensions over the old social structure of capitalism, the bhuj while virtue, nationalism, delayed gratification, work, and the new cultural order emphasizing hedonism and pleasure. in addition to roland's sense of crisis, the subjective experience a moment of naming and calling for a new direction there is also a sense of crisis as this objective moment when limits have been reached and a social order cannot continue forward as it has been. in new york, i've been very struck by the way the rhetoric of crisis is invoked in city politics by people on the right and left. for conservatives, the image of the city's a florida apache, a place of rising crime, racialized -- this becomes intimately linked to financial problems. both are symbols of liberalism run amok. the answer is through strict fiscal controls and police. to the left, the problems of new york become intimately connected to the unfolding crisis of the postwar order and the end of prosperity. for both left and right, the immediate practical problem the city faces the gap between expenses and revenues, is connected to a set of national issues through the sensibility of crisis so that the resolution of the problem is no longer a simple question about renegotiating debt but becomes a chance to call for an entirely new direction in politics and for a new direction for the nation as a whole. this is connected of course to a larger shift from a sense of urban crisis to the framework of fiscal crisis, and a transformation in the sense that the primary problems facing city governments is no longer how to address social problems or poverty or racial injustice but instead to find ways to safeguard scarce resources in a time of decline. in this sense, fiscal crisis becomes -- it is a moment when the city's near bankruptcy, new york is near bankruptcy -- their fiscal problems are seen as due to a certain extravagance and the problems of bankruptcy are just punishment. it becomes a moment of substituting a framework of treatment or remedy as a mode of discipline and retrenchment. the frightening images of social breakdown become part of a narrative about a need to restructure. fiscal crisis becomes a framework for thinking about how to restructure the city. it is not just one adopted by the right but one that is used to reframe the commitments of liberalism, as well. here i think we get to one of the problems of the idea of crisis, and as a number of younger scholars have suggested including some in this room, there is a tolerance of drawing this sharp line between the war on poverty framework and what comes after, or more broadly, between postwar liberalism and what comes after. even during the war on poverty any of the ideas and practices associated with neoliberalism are present. in new york city, the lindsay years, ben holtzman is working on "the lindsay years," the development of the innovations associated with 1980's such as the use of real estate, property taxes payments, the aggressive effort of city government to stem the exodus of industry, and the use of credit markets to fund the state, rather than taxation. it's a way to try to use finance to evade political conflict. in some ways, framing the period as one of crisis or accepting those terms can obfuscate the ability to see these areas of continuity and see the ways that the assumptions of the postwar years and pose were liberalism shaped what came afterwards. finally, to return to nostalgia i think that we shouldn't throw out the idea of crisis altogether either. part of what makes the idea such a compelling want to study is this awareness of collapse of an older social order and a sense that a divide is opening up between the expectations generated by the past and the new sense of the reality of the present and future. as heather contest -- suggested, the fierce contest over these conflicting possibilities and expectations. in the specific case of new york, the machine politicians as well as many different activists and radicals continued to articulate a variety of different ideas for the cities to moment, pressing for broader national political changes that would lessen the particular pressures the city was facing, as well as various ideas about imposing limits on the ability of banks to sell off the cities securities. they attempted in a variety of ways without success to describe ways to solve the city's problems, while also laying claim to avoid in the retrenchment that happen the wake of the crisis. this is exactly the kind of idea that within the city a newly confident financial and business community seeks to combat, joined by national politicians and by city and state democrats insisting that the old commitments of new york, the free tuition at the city university, the certain model of public education, these commitments and expectations make recovery impossible. a banker who helped engineer the crisis -- an overkill in terms of budget cuts would have the necessary impact to make it clear to investors across the country that new york city was really changing. in a way, what is at stake is the expectation that people have within the city and the expectation that people have of society and government in general. i think this sense of an era being in flux, one set of expectations giving way to another, yet still contested and not really accepted at a deep level, is part of what accounts for this experience of crisis both in new york and more broadly. i think it is also what accounts for our attraction, or some part of the attraction, to the 70's, that we see this as kind of a last moment of life outside of a certain kind of domination by the market and the existence of a strong set of alternative norms and expectations before they are discarded as unrealistic. the conflicting expectations around the era, those who lived through it it was a time of crisis, and it is part of what makes the period compelling to scholars now. i think i will wrap up their -- there. [applause] i will shift back down here and open it up for questions and discussion. i should say this panel is being taped by c-span. you both might know that. also, part of what that means is everybody should direct questions to the microphone, actually get up and go to the microphone over there, so they will be able to capture the questions. people should feel free to make comments too. there are lots of people here who write about the 1970's, and it would be great to hear from people with your own thoughts, as well. >> my name is michael kristofferson. i am here in the suburbs of new york. i actually come to this gathering from a slightly different perspective. i'm a historian of the 1970's in france, and your panel said crises of the 1970's -- he didn't say in the united states but that was pretty obvious what it was going to be about. i wonder if i broadening out the perspective and looking at this comparatively there might be something to be gained, particularly in problematizing the questions of, is this a period of crisis or a bridge between two eras? comparatively, there definitely are some real crises that are seen in many different countries. it is not just all a discursive creation. there definitely is a slowdown of the world economy. there is no doubt about that. it is happening in western europe. it doesn't -- it is happening in eastern europe, as well. there's definitely also a crisis of governance that is happening in many different countries, and you have reflections of that, like the creation of the trilateral commission that was supposed to deal with this international crisis of governance. that is happening in both the communist and non-communist world's. some of these other problems, like the issues of the family, the history of the family, the demographic history, there are similarities between europe and the united states. the baby boom existed tehre -- t here. even when you get to questions of car searle issues in the 1970's in europe, you have issues -- efforts to reform prisons. one of the more significant products of this would be the work of michel foucault. in france, you have an important prison reform movement. it results in a very different outcome, the abolishment of capital punishment in france in the 1980's. a.b. there is nothing to be gained by looking at the fact that some of these crises are international and by comparing the outcomes in different countries. perhaps we can learn more in the sense of, which is a creation of the particularities of american politics or the american situation? it reflects a more underlying sort of problem in world history. >> i don't know if anybody wants to speak to that? >> is this on? i think that's an pointexcellent po -- that's an excellent point. it is a question of crisis for whom and why this has become a crisis. you can have economic slowdown. you can have all kinds of changes. you can have catastrophic changes, but whether or not they become crises, and crises for whom often have to do with the responses to them -- when you have an economic crisis, you can either respond to it by greater redistribution of wealth or you can respond to it by clamping down on redistribution of wealth. i thoroughly agree with the point of international comparison but again, this idea of crisis, we need to be very contextual about for whom, and how might have it not have been a crisis. change and crisis are not synonymous. transformation and crisis are not synonymous. >> i don't know if this is on or not. visit on? -- is it on? i also want to thank the commentor. one of the things that would certainly be on the agenda in the 1970's would be to think about whether we internationalize that question of economic deficit or not. we have to look at the relationship between the broad economic shifts of the decade and some of these other questions in close empirical ways. geographers have done fairly good job, but historians have never -- have really not wade into that debate. -- weighed into that debate. if you look at global distributions of wealth and global class structures in the last half-century, you see these two spikes. one is the upper class, the 1% in the west, and the other is the rising, tiny middle-class, and what lies in the middle is essentially the working class in the industrial west. i really think there is a way in which we can think about the 1970's as representing a true crisis for the industrial working class of the west, a crisis from which it has yet to recover. that particular crisis ties into all of these and all kinds of ways. the notion that the white working class in the united states is in the midst of an economic crisis is mobilized in all of these conversations politically mobilized to do other kinds of work, rather than to address, as you point out. i think there are connections. i think thinking about this in a global way makes a lot of sense. >> i am rick perlstein. i write about the 1970's. collective enterprise, i am proud to be a part of. robert, i'm referring to what you sent. let me know if i got it wrong. you talk about the family as a site of various -- feminist critiques of the nuclear male breadwinner family created a crisis for welfare and rights liberalism that cannot be easily resolved through existing 1930's and 1960's institutions. can you elaborate on that? >> sure. it is an "all in the family." [laughter] i guess i'm suggesting that for the center-right, family becomes less a crisis than a political opportunity, but for the centerleft, it is a real crisis, which is to say there emerged within the centerleft coalition beginning in the 1960's, clearly with the rise of the black freedom struggle, then compounded by the rise of feminism and lgbt writes, all kinds of social justice and rights projects on the left around redefining citizenship along the lines of gender, race, and sexuality. that made core understandings of family within that centerleft coalition, that had more or less been stable since the 1930's -- although we could have an argument about that -- that brings those understandings of family into real contestation and dispute. that contestation and dispute was, in many ways, irresolvable within the ways in which that, to my mind, to ways in which that particular political coalition had been put together since the 1930's, which is to say that a particular idea of breadwinner liberalism that was embedded with him labor liberalism was very difficult to dislodge in the 1970's and very difficult to reform, certainly quickly. that has been a project at the centerleft -- for the centerleft the last 50 years. it has taken that long to even come close to a resolution of that particular problem. i see family and gender and sexuality alongside race as the core problematics with which the centerleft coalition has to wrestle in those years, and many on the left wish that those conflicts and disruptions could be resolved quickly. the argument in "all a family" was that they simply couldn't be. the coalition was not set up to solve them quickly. neither were the legal or political coalitions in the larger nationstates set up to resolve them quickly. that is a generational set of conflicts that i think characterize the centerleft coalition from the 1960's on. that is all i really meant. there are lots more details about that, that do not want to hug the floor. -- but i do not want to holgg the floor. >> if no one is coming up to the microphone, and we have a few minutes, i would actually like to throw out a question to my fellow panelists, which is about this idea of crisis and the distinction that kim was making in her talk. one of the things that i think is a little bit dangerous about viewing crisis only as a kind of discursive framework is the idea of, on the one hand, what is an objective crisis, and on the other hand, i think kim is cried right that people understand -- understood their world through a sense of crisis. how do you balance perceptions of the time, the way in which those perceptions shape the policies that are happening, versus a sense of, was it a real crisis or was it not? i think there is a bit of a danger in going back to the 1970's in taking some of the real drama that people felt like was occurring in their lives. when you devalue the idea that people thought they were experience in crisis, in some ways, there is a kind of tension with the real drama that people felt like they were understanding, the real drama of these events they were experiencing, whether you're talking about crime, something like watergate, which interestingly is increasingly disappearing from our narrative of the 1970's, which, as the panel suggested, is moving much more in a direction of political economy, social history. for many people, if you said what is the crisis of the 1970's, the first thing they would say is watergate. i don't have any resolution to this tension, but it is something i wanted to throw out. i know we have another person up at the microphone here. host: -- >> did you want to speak to that? >> can you hear in the back? that is a really important formulation, and i think that is actually one of the things that occurred to me as i was listing the crises. there is a particularity that we need to be careful about. not every crisis is characterized the same and some may resonate more in real time than others, and some may be more creative than others, but i would say that this idea of what is felt as a crisis at the time, again, as a slight competition of that, i think it depends on who we are talking to. if you were a feminist in 1971 this was a moment of enormous possibility. if you were a prison rights activist in 1971, this was a moment of not only crisis but potential revolution. if you were a trade union activist who was trying to generate new goodwill and energy in the trade union movement, and you are part of miners for democracy, this is a really exciting time not of crisis but of finally getting rid of many of the oppressive things that had existed before. i guess what i would say is you are absolutely right. for some, it did resonate as a crisis, but it is also true that it is very particular. we have to be clear about who our actors are when we are talking about it. >> hi. i am steve pan out. this has been a really fabulous, rich discussion. i'm very glad that it was here. i wanted to just talk for a second or ask about. the workplace there have been a couple of discussions about crises, the crisis of labor, and in general these questions tend to take one or two forms -- why didn't you talk about my work, or how does this link into my work? i'm going to jump into the latter category. i am working on a manuscript looking at the challenges of organized labor in the postwar period and i'm getting right up to redoing my chapter on the 1970's. one of the things that is interesting, in doing the oral histories that i'm doing and the archival materials, there is a genuine sense of turmoil, of crisis in the 1970's. on the one hand, i am fascinated by this turn in the historiography and literature about reassessing that. on the other hand, it can be challenging to reconcile that with the first-hand lived experience of people in workplaces talking about how the culture of the workplace changed in ways that they found disruptive and challenging. >> i will speak to that quickly. i think the focus on the workplace was very important for thinking about the period, and both the kind of crisis of unions, both within unions themselves, the democracy movements that were happening and the sense -- obviously the unionization rate has been declining throughout the 1960's, but this is masked in some ways by public-sector unionism. in the 1970's, the complex become much more open, much more nakedly hostile much sharper and clearer, and i do think -- at the same time, the question about what is going to happen to the industrial workplace, will there be a postindustrial workplace, what is going to replace the motor of manufacturing as it declines, disappears moves, is anything going to come into existence that will substitute for that -- i think these questions are very open and alive in the 1970's. this may be speaks a little bit to this question of the tension between crisis as an objective -- both as an objective reality versus subjective experience and also to the sense of crisis as a discursive construct used to impose certain visions from above, versus the sense of lived turmoil. i actually think that there is something -- i do think people -- the sense of turmoil and things coming to the forefront that previously hadn't been fully articulated, i think people actually found that frightening, but in other ways exciting, even when they were losing, even when the consequences for their groups or classes or movements were not positive. there was still something about the time that was emotionally intense and engaging. certainly for people who managed to be on the winning side of some of these battles, and from my interviews with people who played roles from above in the fiscal crisis, people recall this period as one of tremendous excitement and energy, and people view it as a formative moment in their own lives ments in which they were able to ascend to these new positions of power. they were able to go out to dinner all the time. it was like a war. it was our war, and we were at the helm of it. on the flipside, activists also recall it as a time when these struggles were articulated in ways that made them, that were difficult but nonetheless perhaps easier than the daily crises that don't emerge into open conflict in that way. maybe something similar might be said about the workplace during these years. i think the workplace is an extremely important area for thinking about the period overall. >> i don't know if this is on or not. it is hard to tell. that is a great question. we have a labor historian on the panel. -- if we had a labor string on the panel, a true labor historian could speak in more detail. one thing that i was going to talk a little bit about but as a result of time didn't get to, it's something that i think historians have not taken up yet. nancy maclean's book does it, but for a broad spectrum, and that is the post-civil war -- post-civil rights workplace, and the ways in which after the first couple of decades after the creation of the eeoc -- this might be less about the lived experience of work in the 1970's and more about the workplace as a kind of legal and political site of contestation, but the number of eeoc lawsuits, the battles over sexual harassment, the creation of sexual harassment laws, the combination of all of those things in the wake of the 1964 civil rights act has yet to find its historian. to think about the american workplace through the lens of those transformations, both legal and social, i think that is something that is a hidden part of the decade. >> prior to becoming an historian of prisons, that is what i did, labor history, and i wrote on the auto industry for many years. i was really taken by this comment about the workplace. in fact, that is a perfect example of the complexity of what we are talking about here. if you looked at any detroit auto plant in 1968-1975 all of these things were happening, and they were all true. what workers felt that this was a crisis moment. they had lost a lot of power on the shop floor to black workers. that was their perception, right? black workers on the other hand who were in the league of revolutionary dockworkers or even in the trade leadership union conference felt like they were finally getting some inroads in the labor movement and within the auto plants. both sets of workers were facing an economic crisis in the sense that management was battling them day and night for concessions. the workplace is actually really important. in fact, that is ground zero. all of those things are playing out. particularly vis-à-vis this way in which crises are racialized. one person's crisis is sometimes another person saying, finally i have some say so on the shop floor, or finally i have a voice. >> my name is pete. i am a phd in college. thank you so much for this fabulous panel. if anybody is still interested in talking about the 1970's and is around on monday morning, we are -- having a panel about catholicism in the 1970's. i wonder how you see the role of religion in the 1970's. i'm thinking about liberal christianity. there is a sense of crisis and transformation. i'm just wondering how we would work that into the conversation, and thank you so much for having this panel. >> other than just -- not as a historian of religion but somebody who has thought a little bit about it, other than to say, yes, let's do it, and certainly within both liberal broadly-drawn liberal and conservative protestantism there is a sense -- whether it is crisis or a reformulation, a re-modernizing of faith, that is how many liberal protestants would have seen it, a new era. that is certainly a political project within liberal protestantism. i don't know nearly as much about the catholic story. i don't want to wade in the four fear -- i nfor fear -- in for fear of embarrassing myself. what i've written about gender, sex and family, they are a fundamental part of that debate. when i looked at the conservative evangelical protestant movement in the 1970's and early 1980's and waded into those archives, i was a little bit surprised to find that overwhelmingly the two major issues -- there are lots of things being talked about pornography and all kinds of things, but overwhelmingly, if you took it as a mass of archives, what are the spikes? the spikes are overwhelmingly abortion and the perception that there is a secular religion being taught to children in schools. there really is very much a sense of crisis around those two questions. a modern christianity or a secular religion was being imposed, especially on children. there is much more to say about it, and i am not the person to say it, unfortunately. >> jonathan gentry, brown university. my initial question was about globalization, which i thought was a word that would get mentioned more, but i think that has been addressed little bit. what i wanted to talk about or ask you about was, one of the interesting threads was the transformation of the state and the relationship of the citizen to the state, whether that is an franchise and, transparency, the war on drugs, war on crime. i'm wondering if you could elaborate on or even conceptualize what this transformation is, particularly in the context of narratives of retreat. is the state sort of going after citizens in a new way to bring them in? the relationship of citizenship and the state. >> i also had wanted to answer myself -- i just wanted to highlight the contrast between beverley's idea -- the idea of the 1970's as seeing an increase in transparency in certain ways and engagement, and the sense of the state becoming more oppressive, or how to reconcile these two different trends. >> i can talk a little bit to the intelligence agencies, particularly to the fbi, and i do think you have to some degree a paradoxical story when you look at an institution like the fbi and put that in conversation with the sorts of things that heather is doing. for the fbi, the 1970's was both a period of crisis in the sense that somebody like j edgar hoover dies. he had been there for 48 years. many people declared that a moment of national crisis. it is a crisis that is also an opportunity. it opens up a lot of questions about what is coming next. i will just highlight two things that come out of that. one is a much more deeper and widespread knowledge of the repressive and us of that institution up to that point the ways in which, largely because of the church committee but many other committees, because of the press, other factors as well, but the amount of knowledge that americans have by the mid to late 1970's about what intelligence agencies like the fbi have been up to, especially in terms of domestic surveillance, in terms of a whole host of other activities, and the cia as well, those are dramatically different knowledge systems that people are using to relate to their government. it is pretty dramatic. i think that is one piece. you see a generally -- a genuine opening of knowledge. congressional committees are much more inclined to publicize this kind of knowledge. that is piece one a real opening, and piece two is that you begin to get genuine new restraints on the kinds of activities that they can engage in, which you could also argue is a genuine democratizing. you have congressional oversight for the first time. you have a series of restrictions, though many of those are incomplete or lifted. from the perspective of the intelligence agencies, they understand themselves to be in crisis, but i think from a kind of citizen or democratizing perspective, you actually get an opening of what is going on at that level that arguably doesn't last very long, but that is the story. at the same time you are getting much more little criminal justice system coming to play. i don't think is a straightforward story. >> i would like to add to that -- in looking at the war on drugs, i think the rockefeller drug laws are very important. i wanted to highlight the new work that is being done that places it in a much larger context or you see mandatory minimums established in california, in d.c. in the 1950's, it certainly the development of mandatory minimums and the focus on street level drug dealers and users as the real, central focus of policing in the state is very important. after the passage of the rockefeller drug laws, 48 other states developed and passed similar laws. i think it is absolutely important. on the other hand, i think it is important to place it in this larger history of bipartisan support for increasingly punitive criminal justice. the other thing i would highlight is this redefinition of drug addicts and drug users as agents of crime. this is a profound shift from medicalization, the use of methadone programs and things abused as a public health crisis prior to this, and it is a shift in nelson rockefeller's own drug policy, which is an abrupt one. in this evolving creation of the state apparatus, which is going to yield a massive incarcerations, it really reaches its height between 1985 and 2000. this focus on street level drug dealing or drug distribution is very important. i actually wanted to go back to answer the question that beverley posed, which i think is quite important. i struggled with this myself, on the one hand talking about the discursive role of crisis, but what brought me to study this was the discussion of black panther party members and other radical activists about how street local -- level drug economies damaged the movement in the 1970's. they themselves, while enjoying a period of unprecedented visibility in the early 1970's, at the same time, they found themselves facing new barriers and the drug economies themselves were seen as very destructive. of the complex challenges in disaggregating state and media-generated discursive crisis from the voices of ordinary people living in neighborhoods who see themselves as affected by crime and drug economies -- one of the dangers is the appropriation of particular voices by the state in order to support specific agendas. that goes back to both robert and heather's points about crisis for whom. i think it is a real challenge about how we create a dialogue between state and media-generated ideas of crisis and what that says to oral histories and grassroots accounts. certainly, that does exist. i think this issue becomes an even more potent issue during the crack crisis of the 1980's. >> hi, i am a postdoc at stanford. this might be another way to ask a similar question. i am specifically interested in the intel pro -- co-intel pro and its role in creating or manufacturing a crisis of violence, or being destructive to the black freedom movement, or am i granting them too much agency in that? are they actually not as big of a factor as i feel that they are? just your opinions about co-intel pro and its role in manufacturing a crisis, or as a destructive force. thanks. >> co-intel pro, definitionally stands for counterintelligence program -- it was a program run by the fbi, for a series of strategies that the fbi adopted beginning in the 1950's initially against the communist party, and then expanded throughout the 1960's to target a lot of organizations on the left, but interestingly, also organizations on the right. at least some of it was directed at the ku klux klan and other right-wing organizations. the question isn't how much of a crisis is actually being generated by the state or deliberately generated by the federal bureau of investigation. the answer is some of maybe not as much as they wanted you to think, on some level. the fbi absolutely did things like attempt to, for instance in black radical organizations disrupt organizations by sending anonymous letters from the leader of one organization to the leader of another organization saying, you are a jerk. your girlfriend is sleeping with so and so. did you know that? they also extensively had informants within radical organizations who were there to sometimes foam and violence, often to just foment internal dissension, and i think those had dramatic impacts in particular cases on radical organizations, but i actually think the most damaging parts of an operation like co-intel pro or fbi surveillance much more broadly was the police believed fbi agents were everywhere fbi informers were everywhere. whether or not they were there that became a part of the culture, whether you are within the ku klux klan or you are in some sort of left-wing organization. that perception and that fear even before co-intel pro was as well documented as it is today, i think is a critical part of the movement cultures of the 1970's, and for me, one of the most interesting questions about social movements and the state during this period. i think there are a lot of places to do work. the ways in which they were mutually constituting each other and responding to each other -- that is a quick answer to your question. >> i also have an answer to that wearing my earlier hat as a panther historian, no pun intended. co-intel pro and thinking about the black panther party -- j edgar hoover defined it as the greatest threat internally to the united states. j edgar hoover defined the black panther party as the greatest internal threat to the united states. party itself was a recipient of a number of directives. i think the most glaring effect that the program had on the panthers was to initiate a fratricidal, mentor seidl split in the party between the new york chapter and east and west coast chapters, new york and california and that was done through a series of letter writing campaigns. it extended much deeper than the leadership. you had a massive infiltration of the panthers. one interesting fact that came up during the discussion about richard aop and his non-status as an informant -- i had a discussion with some of the oakland leadership about this, and their own estimate -- this may speak partially to beverley's point -- their own estimates was that there were up to 700 informants within the black panther party. looking at some of the oral histories that have been done a previous organizations like the communist party, i think the questions of infiltration are very important problematic. i think there is a lot we don't know about levels of infiltration and surveillance inside radical organizations but in the panthers, that split between the east and west coast branches was incredibly destructive. one of the ways that intelligence operated was to take things that were pre-existing cleavages and then to actively manipulate them. you had the division between oakland and the rest of the country because of its democratic, centralist structure. it was not incorporating leadership from other parts of the country, and this was actively used and manipulated through correspondence. i think there is much more research to be done on this. the kind of spectacular debate we had about richard aop and the black panther party is an indicator of the additional research that needs to be done. >> i think that is a wonderful question in no small part because one of the reasons we are all here to work on the 1970's -- the answer to that question is so important to how we already understand the 1970's and what we not know about the 70's. donna and i have talked about this a lot. in part, if it is true the fbi was less involved than it wanted to be or have less of an impact than it wanted, which, i can make that argument, that has an impact on the history of the 1970's. on the other hand, if it is true that we don't even know half of what was going on -- remember we didn't even know about co-intel pro had it not been for the break-in. co-intel pro was probably the tip of the iceberg. in fact, every organization had their own version of co-intel pro, that deep level investigative apparatus. whether or not it was effective partially we can't answer that because accessing those documents is very difficult, but i will say in attica, this is a prison rebellion in a small town in upstate new york. within hours of it taking place there are memos going from the prison to the buffalo fbi the buffalo fbi to the national fbi, and everybody is cc'ed from the president, the vice president, the army, the navy, the marines every branch of the military, and then later on, fast forward when we had the adequate trials, -- attica trials, there is an informant. does that shape the outcome? i suspect it does, but to be able to document that and locate that is very difficult and yet we must do that if we are to fully understand that history of the 1970's. >> hi, aaron scott from princeton university. i was wondering how you might characterize the spatial elements of the crises. heather had a comment where you set a lot of your work used to fall under the rubric of the urban crisis. are the crises of the 1970's felt or perceived to have been felt to firmly in different places, different regions? is that category useless? do we need to replace it with something else? >> wow. that is a great question. when i said that, i was speaking more historiographically. we were all trying to figure out cities and what happened to sit these. there was this framework where we were trying to figure out where we got it, how deep it was, and for whom, and now we are at a level of specificity now, and we are investigating those crises at a different level. part of it is how we identify ourselves as historians in given moments maybe. to me, that is what it felt like. >> i think your comment makes me think of a recent article by andrew sandoval strauss about latino urbanisms. i do think it is interesting. i think the earlier question about globalization brought this up for me, as well. the way in which -- certainly what is happening during the 1970's plays out differently in different part of the country, and also people are naming or labeling or trying to understand the set of changes that we can see much more clearly in retrospect. the idea of globalization and the idea of how cities might come back from some of the problems, the north and east of midwestern cities might come back from some of the problems that were especially pressing, we can see these things now in a way that people at the time were trying to understand, make sense of, and interpret. the whole framework of globalization or of a postindustrial economy or of gentrification and what that would mean and of new immigration flows and how those would change -- all of those are just coming into existence, and people are grappling to try to understand them. i guess that is one way of thinking about it. to your other point, i think there is definitely a strong regional component to this. it would be interesting to know -- i don't know to what extent did southwestern cities like phoenix talk or think about crisis at the time. >> i think we have time for maybe one or two more questions. >> my name is irvine cake in. i'm the chair of social studies at hunter college high school. i was interested in simply a question of etymology and how often the word "crisis" is used in the 1960's, 1950's and 1960's, versus the 1970's, and how it might be used. crisis earlier seems to be applied to foreign policy. the cuban missile crisis. i'm also thinking about mcnamara saying at some point, there is no such thing as strategy anymore. there is just crisis management. this notion that emergency measures have to be taken, or there is no way to plan for these problems -- i guess i'm wondering, did this term leak from foreign policy into domestic policy? also, thinking about the media framing the 1970's -- i'm sorry, the iranian hostage crisis where every night we counted how many days we were in crisis -- i wonder what role it became just a meme that was used for everything. thanks. >> thank you for that question. i have just a quick comment about it. in earlier iterations of my paper, i had a line that said something like crisis could be used not only in the international context but to mobilize the mastech war -- domestic wars. it made me think about the relationship between crisis and domestic wars. the wars on crime, wars on gangs, crisis and war go together in such profound ways, whether that is historical or discursive. i'm not sure. one of the ways i see them linked -- the use of war as a metaphor calls for the mobilization of unprecedented resources, and a notion of something abstract that cannot be fully won or completed when you're talking about it domestically. a war on drugs cannot ultimately and domestic drug consumption. it might be interesting to think about what the relationship is between crisis and war and given the imperial nature of the american state, how profoundly this idea of foreign policy helps provide a language and the conceptual idea of how to mobilize state resources. >> is there one more person? i think that is a great question. there is a lot more to say. i think we might have one more question or. maybe we should go with that and talk afterwards. >> i am suzanne from columbia university. a lot of people have mentioned demographic change, but it hasn't really been discussed that much -- i was curious about how the demographic changes happening in the 1970's intersect with political institutions to create if not real crises but imperatives for changing political institutions. >> what do you specifically mean? >> i come at it from the perspective of rising divorce rates and how divorced women then approach the social insurance system that is built around breadwinners and homemakers. i was also curious about the rising number, or the massive influx of young people into the voting pool, that beverley mentioned, and how that might have affected political institutions. >> on that front, i will say people thought it would be a dramatic transformation, like many things -- like many political reforms, it both is a dramatic transformation, and then it turns out it doesn't transform a whole lot. honestly, i don't know we as historians -- there may be good political science literature on that question, but we as historians really want any number of the kinds of reforms i just started listing -- i don't think we've actually looked in a serious way and what the consequences of those reforms have been. >> i would just say very briefly -- you know this as well as anyone given your research -- as part of that centerleft project i talked about is an intent to rethink the social contract. whether it is divorced women, whether it is questions of child care, questions of social security and the nature of who is included or not and under what terms, there is a myriad set of questions that emerges. i think the centerleft project is to try to reconceptualize the nature of social provisioning and what the social contract looks like. that is where so much of the conflict emerges. how is that done? can it be done given the way the social contract was imagined 50 years earlier? absolutely what comes out the other end, i think, is less probably a renegotiated social contract than something that looks more like civil rights liberalism. you have a certain kind of rights project that wins, but a different kind of social provisioning for the most part doesn't end up winning the day. >> i think that last question actually brings >> i think that last question and goes some of the other engines about the changing relationship between citizens and the state. it highlights this tension between changes in political institutions and political economy and society more broadly. and perhaps one of the things that is compelling about the decade is this parallel set of changes. it is not just that the ideology or framework of the social contract is shifting, although it is. it is not just that the nature of the population and deep social structures of households, family, workplace, and economy are changing. but there is this kind of dual set of changes happening. the challenge is how to understand and think about those going forward. unfortunately, we are just about out of time. but thank you to everybody in the panel and in the audience for a really helpful discussion. 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