In his new book, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, the historian Andreas Killen christens 1973 “Year one of the culture wars.” By which he means that it marked the end of the idealism and political transformation of the sixties and the start of a new conservatism and political malaise. Was the year really that pivotal? It was the year of Roe v. Wade, the OPEC oil embargo, the cease-fire in Vietnam, the Watergate trials, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and the first reality television (An American Family). President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society began to be dismantled, as punitive measures like New York’s stringent Rockefeller drug laws were introduced. The economy faltered with the oil embargo, and “stagflation” set in. Cities crumbled, and white flight made the suburbs a “force to be reckoned with both politically and culturally.” A conservative backlash against Roe v. Wade, gay rights, and women’s liberation began to gain force.
excerpt from American Heritage
