Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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Jimmy Carter in 1976, a former nuclear engineer who had served in the navy
and who seemed like the moral antidote to the nastiness and lies of Richard
Nixon. Carter projected an image of plain decency. More importantly, Carter
was a born-again Baptist who wore his religion like a badge of honor, and he
was from the New South. He lectured America to uphold its moral mission in
the world and to conserve energy. He installed solar collection panels on the
White House grounds to symbolize the government’s commitment to alterna-
tive
energy sources. He enforced a 1975 law mandating that U.S. carmakers
bring all their models up to a 27.5 mile-per-gallon standard.
President Carter could not, however, accomplish the one thing people most
wanted from him: to feel better about America’s prospects. Carter had entered
office during an economic slump. Beginning in 1973, after the United States
supported Israel in a war against Egypt and Syria, the Organization of Petro-
leum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) had embargoed its oil shipments to the
United States for one year. The resulting oil shortages sliced into the economy
and worsened an already bleak financial situation. Throughout Carter’s admin-
istration,
factories struggled, sales of American cars slumped, and long lines
of needy applicants stretched around social services offices. The president’s
faith-based moral politics appealed to much of the electorate, but he seemed
ineffective. He had the United States boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow
because the Soviet Union had just sent its tanks rolling into Afghanistan under
flimsy pretenses. But when Iranian students seized American embassy workers
and officials in Tehran as hostages in 1979, Carter proved unable to secure
their release. In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan from California, a former
movie actor, once-upon-a-time Rooseveltian Democrat, and recent two-term
governor, campaigned on the new conservative Republican platform: low
taxes, a strong military, and cautious attitudes toward the use of government
to solve or ease social problems. Reagan easily won.
The
election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 signaled a shift
in American culture. The modern conservative Republican Party had arrived
at the pinnacle of political power by piggybacking on people’s discontent
with three things: a flagging economy, the social chaos of civil rights and
Vietnam War protests, and what seemed to many a secular and immoral drift
in society. Reagan Republicans supported a big military, lower taxes, balanced
government budgets (which Reagan never accomplished), voluntary prayer
in schools, and deregulation of business—in particular by allowing corporate
mergers in all sectors. Many of Reagan’s supporters opposed pornography,
homosexuality, and most welfare programs. In fact, the whole network of
Roosevelt’s New Deal struck conservative Republicans as a shift into social-
i
sm. They agreed with President Calvin Coolidge’s old 1920s dictum that “the
business of government is business,” which Reaganites understood to mean
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that government should do what it could to help businesses make profits,
generally by leaving them alone.
5
President Reagan had Carter’s solar panels removed from the White House
grounds and gutted the funding for solar energy research. Reagan had sold
himself as the ally of big business, and renewable energy sources had nothing
to do with his constituents’ objectives. He cut money out of welfare programs
and cut income taxes for all Americans, mainly benefiting the wealthy. Dur-
ing
his eight years in office, the economy seemed to rebound, but at the cost
of a mushroomed federal debt and increased poverty in inner cities and rural
districts. His administration condoned the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and
used the proceeds to fund a right-wing paramilitary organization in Nicaragua,
the contras, who overthrew a democratically elected, left-leaning government.
Reagan officials thought of themselves as the last of the cold warriors, and
they intended to win what they saw as a never-ending struggle between “good”
and “evil.” Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and pumped
money into the military. In particular, he spent more than $30 billion for a
space-based missile defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative,
“Star Wars,” which never worked. Reagan’s carefully projected image as a
virtuous leader armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles appealed to many
voters who had felt emasculated by the United States’ failure to prevent a
communist takeover in Vietnam. When Berliners tore down the Berlin Wall in
1989, many Americans saw its collapse as a symbol of Reagan’s right-minded
strength. Within another two years the Soviet Union collapsed, yet further
proof to many that an increased military budget could create the kinds of
changes in the world that Americans wanted—namely the end of communist
regimes and the spread of free-market capitalism.
G
eorge H.W. Bush followed Ronald Reagan as president from 1989
through 1992. Bush had to raise taxes to cover the twin costs of running the
government and paying off the morning-after headache from Reagan’s tax
cuts and military expenditures. During the 1980s, the wealthy had generally
grown wealthier and the poor had not only grown poorer but had also grown
in numbers. Inner cities increasingly resembled racial ghettoes, filled with
African- and Latino-Americans who could not afford to get out. With “white
flight” to the suburbs, city budgets strained to find the tax base to pay for
adequate police forces, social services, and education. White flight became
the new segregation. By the late 1990s, primarily white suburban schools
received more money per student per year than mostly black and Latino
schools in the inner cities. Suburban residents could fund bonds for school
funding; inner-city residents had fewer resources. Brown v. Board of Education
c
ould not prevent neighborhood segregation, even if it could increase school
integration. Poor people’s decreased access to quality education and medical
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care showed in increased epidemics of petty crime and preventable disease.
By 2006, African-Americans, though only about 12 percent of the popula-
t
ion, constituted 51 percent of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States.
Poverty, lack of access to equally funded public school education, and distrust
of a medical establishment notorious for experimenting on black people led
to cycles of hopelessness and sickness.
As for the race-based medical experiments, the most notorious example had
taken place in Macon County, Alabama, where from 1932 through 1972, phy-
sicians
from the U.S. Public Health Service had knowingly and intentionally
allowed about 400 African-American men with syphilis to remain untreated,
even after the advent of penicillin, which could have eradicated the syphilis
bacterium but was intentionally withheld. The physicians tracked the men’s
deteriorating health by taking yearly spinal taps and then autopsied their
cadavers. The syphilitic men were lied to during the whole forty years, were
never informed they actually had syphilis, and were prevented during World
War II from joining the military, where they might have received adequate
health care. The story, broken in the media in 1972, had added to the sense
in many African-American communities that influential white people were
willing to use black people like guinea pigs. What health care poor people
could get by the 1990s consisted primarily of treatment at underfunded
Medicaid clinics.
On
the heels of twelve years of conservative Republican administrations,
Bill Clinton from Arkansas stepped into the White House in 1993. He was
young, southern, and affable, the first progressive populist president in a long
time. Clinton stayed up late at night devouring books and fried food, had a
hybrid Roosevelt-Kennedy smile, and charmed well more than half the nation.
He was to the Democrats what Reagan had been to the Republicans: a reason
to celebrate. And there by Clinton’s side was Albert Gore Jr., lately a member
of the U.S. Senate, formerly a member of the House of Representatives, and
a failed contender for the Democratic presidential ticket in 1988.
Al
Gore had run for an open congressional seat in 1976 and gotten elected
along with Jimmy Carter. The two men shared southern roots, military
service, born-again Christian renewal, a liberal social vision, and a certain
kind of thoughtful public presence, but where Carter—a relative political
outsider—would prove unable to achieve his short- or long-term goals, Al
Gore had been raised to go the political distance. During the late 1970s and
early 1980s, Congressman Gore established a reputation as an expert on
global issues, especially nuclear weapons research and deployment. Gore
opposed President Reagan’s unprecedented spending on new missile systems
while simultaneously supporting a vigorous maintenance of existing nuclear
capabilities. Gore’s stance, somewhere between the typical Democratic and
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Republican positions of the day, gave him something of a bipartisan tough-
on-communism image during an era of increasing political strife, a useful
image in his successful 1984 race for the Senate.
Gore
grew and changed during his years in Congress, reflecting both the
changes in American society and personal experiences of his own. While he
would weigh in on topics like abortion (pro-choice), regulation of cigarette
manufacturers (labels with warnings about cancer), foreign affairs (tepid sup-
p
ort for funding the Nicaraguan contras), and campaign finance reform (more
transparency), Gore made himself a recognized expert in two particular fields:
computer technologies and the environment. In both cases, but especially
with regard to environmental policy, the 100-year-old relationship between
the federal government and private industry was at stake.
Computers
in one form or another are at least as old as the Chinese abacus.
Computers compute. They add and subtract; they multiply and divide. Or, more
accurately, humans program computers to compute. The twentieth-century
history of computers starts with engineers and mathematicians working with
next to no funding in relative isolation from one another. As with so many
other technologies, however, the federal government and military had a use
for high-number calculating starting in World War II. From the 1940s forward,
military budgets included ever-higher stipends for computers. Universities like
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford and corporations like
General Electric and IBM won government contracts to develop increasingly
complex computers, using, in essence, public dollars to jump-start their inno-
v
ations. By the late 1950s, engineers had solved various problems. Originally,
computers had used vacuum tubes as a power transfer, but vacuum tubes ran
very hot and took up lots of space. In the 1940s, some computer engineers
worked in boxer shorts and undershirts because the laboratory felt like a roast-
ing
desert with all the vacuum tubes radiating heat. Over a thirty-year period,
engineers invented first transistors, then integrated silicon circuits, and finally
silicon microprocessors with smaller and smaller gridworks of circuitry. The
four problems of heat, space, speed, and memory storage were solved with the
advent of silicon microprocessors. It had become possible by the early 1970s
to envision and even build computers that could fit onto a desk.
Until the advent of personal computers in the late 1970s, computers had
been used almost exclusively by big companies and the government. They
had been expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. However, Bill Gates,
Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs did a lot to make small, afford-
a
ble, enjoyable computers a reality for the average consumer. Gates and
Allen formed Microsoft to sell computer programs, or software, that could
be installed on a machine named the Altair 8800, a clunky-looking desktop
model that resulted from a 1973 competition in Popular Electronics. Whereas
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272
the founders of Microsoft realized the profits to be made in software applica-
tions, the two Steves—Wozniak and Jobs—decided that they could integrate
form and function, hardware and software, inside the plastic shell of their
Apple I and II designs. By 1977, the Apple II could be purchased for $790,
and third-party creators were selling games and even spreadsheets that ran
on the Apple II, which came with a pop-top monitor and a keyboard. As early
as 1969, the first electronic messages, or e-mails, were sent through the first
computer-to-computer connections that linked four computers through a
network called ARPANET. Goodbye, Flintstone slide rules and compasses.
Goodbye, board-game chess. Hello, computers.
Al
Gore’s role in the computer revolution was much less sublime than
the mathematical splendors of the Gateses and Wozniaks of the world. How-
ever
, Gore did substantially involve the federal government in funding and
organizing the modern Internet, as people know it in the twenty-first century.
Beginning in 1986, one year into his first term as a senator, Gore sponsored
legislation calling for studies, completed within a year, to check the feasibility
of fiber optics as a means for conveying information relays from computer
to computer. Five years later, he helped push through a more robust bill, the
High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, which allocated approximately
$1 billion to make the Internet faster and more ubiquitous. While most of the
work was to be done under the guidance of the National Science Founda-
tion,
Senator Gore made sure to include a directive for the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) to “conduct basic and applied research directed
toward the advancement and dissemination of computational techniques and
software tools which form the core of ecosystem, atmospheric chemistry, and
atmospheric dynamics models.”
6
In other words, Gore wanted the EPA to
figure out how to use computers and computer networks (the future Internet)
to improve understanding of global weather patterns.
While
the 1991 Internet legislation was important for fostering the United
States’ lead role in Internet connectivity until the end of the 1990s, Gore
would soon make a bigger name for himself as vice president of the United
States and as a leading advocate for understanding and addressing what was
then called global warming but is increasingly being referred to as global
climate change.
Fr
om Vice President to Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
A few events shaped the choices Al Gore would make in the early 1990s. First,
he lost his bid to receive the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency
in 1988. Despondent, he organized a series of meetings with advisers to decide
what he should do next. The Senate was a fine place to work but perhaps a bit
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stultifying for someone with Gore’s ambitions. Then, in 1989, after leaving
a Baltimore Orioles baseball game, a car in the parking lot ran into his son.
The boy suffered major internal injuries. He had, in fact, stopped breathing
and was resuscitated on the spot. Al and Tipper spent two weeks in a hotel
room across the street from the hospital to make sure one or the other of them
would be with their son at all times. The political defeat and near-loss of his
son sparked something in Al Gore, something already there—a passion for
saving the planet.
During
the next two years he hatched a plan for a book, proposed it to
Houghton Mifflin, wrote it, and got it published in January 1992 as Earth
in
the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. His name on the book read
“Senator Al Gore,” but he was already in the race for the vice presidency by the
time Earth
in the Balance hit the marketplace. The book gained monumental
attention, moving instantly onto the top ten list of the New York Times. The
book described a planet under siege from capitalism gone wrong and laid out
a plan for putting people back into balance with the cycles of life surrounding
and pervading them. Not all scientists at the time even agreed with Gore’s
contention that global warming was a serious threat, but the book provided a
platform from which, as vice president, he could prod the nation to pay seri-
ous attention to the environment.
D
uring the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the United States and
Al Gore enjoyed similar fortunes. The Clinton-Gore team balanced the budget
and left a surplus at the time of their departure. Unemployment fell, and the
minimum wage went up from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour. The consumer high-tech
industry took off, with names like Amazon.com and eBay sounding no funnier
than MTV had ten years earlier. Often with Vice President Gore’s prompting,
Congress passed new environmental laws. For example, most road building in
federal forests was halted, and billions of dollars were set aside to restore the
Florida Everglades. Policies that put money in banks and wallets and protected
the few remaining old-growth forests satisfied business owners, workers, and
conservationists. In 1997, Gore went to Kyoto, Japan, to participate in the first
international meeting to establish global plans for lowering the emissions of
greenhouse gases—a touchy prospect in the United States, where corporations
argued that any step-down in emissions would also hurt their business. Gore
signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the U.S. Senate has never ratified the treaty (be-
c
ause no president has submitted the treaty for ratification), meaning that while
more than 165 other nations have been actively trying to solve the global climate
crisis, the United States has been effectively sitting on the sidelines with the
motor running for the last ten years. Nevertheless, in October 2007, Al Gore was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the environment.
Other challenges beset the Clinton presidency, challenges that resonated
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274
more deeply with Americans in the 1990s than did worries about global
warming. Notably, from before the time he entered office until his impeach-
ment
in 1998, Bill Clinton was dogged by allegations about one sex affair
after another. The last one, involving a White House intern named Monica
Lewinsky, provided an engrossed news audience with tawdry details about
private affairs that Democrats argued were irrelevant and Republicans argued
were germane to determining a chief executive’s fitness to lead the nation.
Though the House impeached Clinton for lying under oath (after he claimed
not to have had sexual relations with Lewinsky), the Senate overwhelming
acquitted Clinton in 1999 of any legal wrongdoing. The censure cast on him
by the impeachment also cast a shadow over Al Gore, who became smeared
by association. This would affect his run for the presidency in 2000 by en-
abling
Republican Party politicos to register conservative voters displeased
by Clinton.
The Early
Twenty-first Century
In 2000 Al Gore ran against Governor George W. Bush of Texas for the
presidency of the United States. Nearly 500,000 more people voted for Gore
than for Bush, but the electoral votes of the state of Florida went to Bush,
giving him the election, after a rare turn of events. In Florida, the initial
count revealed that Bush led by fewer than 2,000 votes, so the state’s laws
mandated an automatic recount, after which Bush’s lead was cut to a mere
327 votes. Gore exercised his right to request a second, manual recount
in certain counties where complaints about voting machine irregularities
had been most pronounced. But ballot recounters had difficulty tabulating
the results quickly. The automatic counting machines could not read hole-
punched ballot cards with what got called “hanging chads”—the bits of
the card that voters had failed to punch out completely—and those ballots
needed to be recounted individually. There were also 175,000 ballots that had
been disqualified, for a variety of reasons—some, as it would later turn out,
quite illegal. More time was needed to do a thorough recount, but Florida’s
secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican and the leader of Florida’s
campaign to elect Bush, ordered all counting to be completed by November
15 unless the four counties in question could offer a valid reason why their
recounts were ongoing. The Florida Supreme Court overruled Harris and
decreed that the recount continue until November 26. As the debate intensi-
fi
ed, Bush partisans did their utmost to stop the recount, while Gore partisans
tried to keep it going: By November 26, the gap between Bush and Gore
stood at 537 votes, with Bush in the lead. Gore still seemed capable of win-
n
ing if the process continued. Although the Florida state supreme court ruled
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on December 8 that the count should proceed, Bush’s legal team appealed
directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which made its ruling on December12.
The court, in a five to four decision, said that because different counties had
different procedures, the whole process was arbitrary and thus violated the
Fourteenth Amendment by denying “equal protection of the laws” to certain
people’s ballots. The recounting halted, and George Bush became president
without a majority mandate.
When hijacked jet airliners hurtled into the World Trade Center’s Twin
Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001, the whole world changed, in
part because the unpopularly elected President George Bush had a new op-
portunity
for authority, one that he did not request but could not shirk. The
choices that President Bush would make in the coming years would reverber-
ate around the globe.
Bush
vowed a swift revenge on the plotters of the hijackings. Immediate
blame rested with what author Mahmood Mamdani calls the terrorism of one
branch of “political Islam,”
7
and more specifically with Osama bin Laden and
his organization known as al-Qaeda. Religious fundamentalists—worshippers
who believe that holy scriptures are literally true—are common to all major
world religions, including Christianity. To say that members of al-Qaeda are
radical Muslim fundamentalists (as media outlets and government officials
often do) is to accidentally group all fundamentalist Muslims into one group,
which is not accurate. The vast majority of the world’s fundamentalist Muslims
do not advocate terror as a tool, tactic, or objective. However, bin Laden and his
Salafi cohort do advocate the use of violent terror. Salafis are a tiny minority of
a minority of Muslims who want to re-create the social and religious systems
current during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime. Al-Qaeda also advocates
the overthrow of the nation of Israel and the removal of all U.S. troops from
Muslim-majority countries, in particular from Saudi Arabia, which is home
to the cities of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites.
George W. Bush vowed to destroy bin Laden and al-Qaeda. He would not
prove able, as of 2007, however, to defeat bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or terror-
ism as the questionably named “war on terrorism” suggests. Terrorism is a
behavior
, not a group.
The United States invaded Afghanistan immediately following the attacks
of September 11. Al-Qaeda had roosted in Afghanistan thanks to the invita-
tion
of the mullahs of the Taliban regime, a ruling group of men who used a
public soccer stadium as a stage to cut off women’s heads as a punishment
for infractions of sharia (Islamic law). The initial invasion quickly pushed the
Taliban out of power and into the mountains bordering Pakistan, where they
fought alongside al-Qaeda guerrillas against combined U.S.-Afghan troops.
By 2007, a democratically elected Afghan government sat shakily in a wartorn
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276
nation. The Taliban was not wiped out. They had allies in the Pakistani secret
services and military, but U.S. fighting power was diverted elsewhere because
President Bush decided to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003.
The
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 had nothing and everything to do
with the attacks on the World Trade Center. The government of Saddam Hus-
sein, despot of Iraq, had not planned or enacted the events of
September 11,
2001. In fact, most evidence indicates that Hussein and bin Laden were more
opponents than allies: Hussein wanted to keep political Islamicists out of Iraq
so they could not undermine his regime. Although Hussein paid lip service
to Islam, his public acts of piety were a thin cover for his gang of thieves and
murderers. Nearly every 9/11 hijacker had actually come from Saudi Arabia.
So the United States did not invade Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 because Iraq
had not been involved in 9/11. On the other hand, Americans were gripped
by panic throughout 2002 and 2003. Many people mistakenly came to be-
lieve
that Iraq had had something to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers,
likely as a result of Bush administration rhetoric—often repeated by certain
news organizations—that lumped talk of 9/11, terrorism, and Iraq into the
same framework. And the Bush administration spent more than a year putting
together a case to show (inaccurately as it turned out) that Hussein’s regime
possessed many powerful weapons, including a budding nuclear weapons
program. Arguing that Hussein threatened the security of the United States,
President Bush claimed the right to wage preemptive warfare to protect the
United States from possible future harm, and under that pretext the United
States invaded Iraq in March 2003.
By
the summer of 2007, some 3,700 U.S. soldiers had died in Iraq, and
more than 20,000 had been seriously injured. Estimates for the number of
Iraqis killed during the war ranged as high as 500,000. The Sunni and Shiite
factions were unable to reach political accords with each other, and the Kurds
of northern Iraq continued to maintain a generally safe, autonomous enclave.
Al-Qaeda had infiltrated Iraq, but only after the U.S. invasion had destabilized
security enough that foreign fighters could enter unopposed; and internal
debate within the United States was confused and fractious. The Democrats
took back both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, largely on
their promise to change the course of the war. By 2007, they had proven unable
to do that. The nation waited to see what a new president would do in 2009.
Meanwhile, American soldiers sweated in hundred-degree heat, loaded down
with water, ammunition, and a burning sense that their mission’s objectives
were complicated by the political, religious, and civil strife of the society into
which they had been deposited.
All
was not gloom in either the world or the United States in 2007, though
a variety of perplexing issues competed with the ongoing war in Iraq for news
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space. In spring 2007, while about 12 million illegal immigrants waited to
find out what Congress and the president would do about their status, citizens
spilled into the streets across the nation to advocate a humane, decent solution
to the immigrants’ plight. Illegal immigrants—many from Mexico, Central
and South America—provide the labor force for fruit and vegetable harvest-
ing,
animal slaughtering and processing, and a host of other low-paying jobs,
particularly in the construction trades. Farm labor is one of the few job types
to which the minimum wage laws do not apply, enabling farmers to pay paltry
wages to migrant laborers who work stoop-backed in fields regularly coated in
pesticides and herbicides all so that U.S. consumers can buy oranges, orange
juice, beets, lettuce, and the full cornucopia of produce at affordable prices.
The inconsistencies and paradoxes of the system are staggering. Many U.S.
citizens want the economic benefits of inexpensive labor but do not seem to
want the laborers themselves.
In
his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush finally acknowl-
e
dged that scientists’ repeated warnings about global climate change had
some merit and committed the nation to a policy of finding and developing
energy sources alternative to the burning of fossil fuels. While critics of the
administration contended that little money was actually being devoted to
the problem, the president’s admission about the realities of climate change
provided a top-down forum for a more cohesive national program sometime
in the future. And in 2007, Al Gore rode on high waves of publicity after
winning the Nobel Peace Prize a year after the release of his documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth, which dovetailed with growing unanimity of opinion
among the world’s scientists that the planet perched perilously on a global
climate catastrophe capable of wreaking untold havoc. Most scientists would
not have been ringing the alarm bells if they did not bear some measure of hope
that humanity could alter its present course and implement more sustainable,
less polluting energy sources—like solar, wind, and geothermal—to power
the homes, businesses, and conveyances of the world.
The
history of events in this last chapter obviously does not come close
to encompassing the infinite realities of life in the early twenty-first century.
The chapter could just as well have looked at the increasing incidence of
obesity, the enforcement of laws pertaining to nonviolent felony offenses, or
the recent history of genetically modified food and the implications for global
health. Or the chapter could have taken a lighthearted spin and examined the
cultural roles of celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey, and Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Or the chapter could have digressed into the most populist
realm of all: YouTube. After all, if you cannot find it on YouTube, it must not
have happened. And if it is on YouTube, it must be worth knowing about.
Future historians, however, will have to figure that one out later.