Historian Bruce Schulman and the 1970s

Everybody who knows me and this peculiar blog knows that among my many aesthetic passions, alongside music and the many arts, can be found the decade of the 1970s.

When it comes to the 1970s, there was one person who was the first to take it seriously, to rescue the decade's boomer centric relegation to middle child status - or worse - the person who wrote the book on the seventies, indeed called it The Seventies: Bruce Schulman. Since then 1970s historiography has certainly expanded, even exploded. Not only is there a new book by Thomas Borstelmann, which blatantly recapitulates many of Schulman's original ideas, but in a turgid and humorless prose style, but there is also Jefferson Cowie's much better Staying Alive, and a few others. My own personal favorite after Schulman's is Thomas Hine's The Great Funk. Hine's book is unique in that it tries to make sense of the aesthetic exceptionalism of that decade - its flouting of decades old restraints in design and manners. Since Schulman's book  perhaps there have been many others too numerous to name. I've read practically all of them.

But Schulman was there first. This makes Schulman an original, an innovator in history, in my book. Time and again I see his original insight -s about the "Southernization" of American politics and culture or the shift to a local, self-help kind of culture after the loss of trust in or even existence of larger institutions and universalistic aims pop up all over the place. Daniel Rodgers took a rather theory oriented, more academic approach in his Age Of Fracture. Rodgers book is certainly deep intellectual history and it is mightily impressive and learned - indeed it was one of the most important non-fiction books of the past few years, but it is a different kind of book in its intention than Shculman's. Schulman's book is actually the kind of book that serves as the best popular history, not unlike some of Arthur Schlesinger's books from the fifties and sixties, say, or a Howard Zinn or Jill Lepore (whose new book on the history of Wonder Woman is a must read if I may add a plug) This makes Bruce Schulman, though not a household name, a public intellectual of sorts. He writes the kind of clear and entertaining prose that too many historians shy away from out of a mistaken belief that it is less valid or serious. Here he is giving his take on the meaning of Martin Luther King's famous speech.

In this all too brief sample of Schulman discussing the meaning of Martin Luther King, we see that Schulman's work on the 1970s is marked by a moral seriousness. When he talks about popular culture as he does at length in The Seventies, it always for some very good reasons, and not as an honorific to the popular status of the works he reviews.

Back in 2003 when I discovered his book I did a lengthy interview with him. It was interesting to revisit that article, a scanned excerpt of which is found below.

This is the only copy that exists of that. For a good twenty-five years I was a staff writer for a really decent periodical called Organica which is now sadly defunct. They gave me a lot of freedom, and used that freedom to spread the word about Schulman's new and exciting thesis about the centrality of the 1970s to subsequent decades. This is the shift to a "symbolic politics" and an increase in a decentralized ethic, and an abandonment of larger civic purpose and larger institutions.

Of course there is the "lighter" side of the decade, if that is the word for it.

Here is an excerpt from that page, if you cannot make it out from the picture.
"It seems ludicrous to us today but if you look at Gentleman's Quarterly or Esquire, all of top highest end designers were proud of the polyester. They wold say '100% Quiana. It was the chief selling point in ads, not just for the leisure suits. but especially for their most conservative and refined business suits."

If there is anything that perfectly illustrates this feature of the decade it is this ad I came across most recently. Now if there is any fabric that epitomizes the virtues of natural fibers it is tweed, specifically wool, yet here is Johnny Carson modeling his line of tweed and proud as a peacock of the fact that it is a synthetic tweed.

Of course after the obligatory design elements are scrutinized the decade resonate even today in all sorts of ways. Schulman teaches at Boston University and we had the opportunity to have a reunion of sorts at the close of 2014. The foremost matter on my mind was how his students have changed over the years.

"One of the new things is that what you used to be able to rely on (students knowing) you can no longer rely on. They can be very smart and sharp and analyze texts well but you can't assume knowledge."

"Sometimes I will show something with absolutely no introduction and no identifying information. For example the famous Stanley Forman busing photo from 1976. And the results are interesting."

To this day Schulman's text continues to regularly sell 1,500 to 2000 copies which is encouraging. One thing of which I am proud was giving Schulman the idea of using the overlooked, underrated comedy How To Beat The High Cost Of Living as an example of the economic situation of the 1970s in popular culture.


Another new insight I learned from Schulman is one concerning sensibility, a matter that should definitely interest the fine folks over at the Society For U. S. Intellectual History http://s-usih.org/.
 This concerns the emotional manic-depressive character of the 1970s. Too many films that are set in the those times are only manic and miss the depressive aspect. I think for Schulman Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm were exemplary in this regard and last year's hit, American Hustle only hit the manic mark. Manic depression is an interesting way of looking at a sensibility, not as a scientifically proven diagnosis but as a metaphor.

These days Schulman's research has him going back to even earlier periods of historical time the years from 1896 to 1929, his contribution to the Oxford History Of The United States. Schulman expresses great curiosity and even a sense of awe at what he is learning, things he did not already know.

That is the best thing about the life of the mind. It is a joy that it is never boring and never done, and there is always more to learn.

Above all I have Bruce Schulman to thank for introducing me to Richard Hofstadter way back in 2003. He was kind enough to lend me Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. That too is a book that never seems to be out of date.

My only regret is that the film Selma had been released when we had our early fall reunion, if only so I could get Bruce Schulman, an L.B.J. scholar and author of an important text on Johnson, to respond to that newsworthy current release.

Next time.

Book Review: GETTING LOOSE, Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s Sam Binkley (Duke University Press 2007)

As a non professional scholar and obsessive of all things 1970s related it seems there is always more to learn and in turn be inspired that most complex and crazy of decades. I thought Bruce Schulman's THE SEVENTIES an excellent start, especially on the (party) politics of the period. I also endorse Thomas Hine's THE GREAT FUNK as it has an orientation towards what in academe is called "material culture" and actually attempts to investigate and make sense of the DESIGN of the period.

But in GETTING LOOSE, Sam Binkley has added another important voice to the discussion, that of sociology and cultural studies in general and the "genealogy" of Foucault in particular. I have a vexed and ambivalent relationship to some of cultural studies in general. Sam Binkley's book, however, as old fashioned as it may to be to put it this way, is simply excellent history. In GETTING LOOSE Binkley makes us go on a journey through some of the most important psychological developments of that period, and their implications for today. It is an intellectually curious book, at times funny, but most of all, at once critical and evenhanded, even entertaining.

One of the ways Binkley accomplishes all of this is through examples of texts from the period (some of the most exotic are the hippie and communal and handmade alternative family newsletters) as well as narratives of the men and women who wrote them. An attempt is made to get inside the motivations and minds of the people as well as draw political conclusions about their varied and various projects. The book is filled with reproductions of some of the most iconic as well as lesser known examples of the various cultures that flourished then. Also each chapter focuses on a certain aspect of the decade in great detail, for example, the story if Ida Rolf and rolfing, the exploits of gurus like Stewart Brand, and the explosive creativity of the women's movement contribution to psychology and health. This is a dense book: there is a lot here and it all adds up to a thorough if motley and cubistic picture.

As one reads the book a genuine paradox emerges: this is that "getting loose" becomes both a kind of liberation of body, mind and spirit and from rigid "boxes" of the past. Yet at the same time getting loose itself becomes a compulsory regime of discipline. In Binkley's narrative there is no free space of uncompromised purity. Like Marx and his dialectic, the radical changes wrought by the new modes of being and behaving serve contradictory yet inextricable ends. The result is an extraordinary shift consciousness perhaps parallel to that which occurred after developments like Gutenberg's press. As Binkley succinctly puts it:

"Identity today requires reflexivity and the willingness to make substance out of one's choice of oneself, but also a tolerance for the ultimately ephemeral quality of this substance, whose fragmented story one rewrites with every mundane lifestyle choice".

Reading this I was often reminded of Clane Hayward's memoir THE HYPOCRISY OF DISCO. Clane Hayward's book is a very good book of literature, a memoir of some of the more extreme of the alternative living arrangements and from the point of view of children living with and "under" them. Like Hayward, Binkley makes you understand and empathize with the struggles of some of these pioneers to make a different and, to their mind, better world. Also like Hayward, there is a sense of pain too when it fails or goes awry. As Bruce Schulman pointed out in a more explicitly political context, there is a sense in which "doing your own thing" could be a new form of restriction, that is, a new way for conservative and purely market forces to extend their influence over all of everyday life.

GETTING LOOSE is a must for those interested in American history and in some of the changes in our lives that have come to us over the past forty-odd years. Reading it, I wished more scholars in Binkley's model shared his flair for the stories of history and comprehension of subject matter. Whereas all too often I find them a bit bland or ideological, I find Binkley immersive and scrupulous. Reading it proves there is much excitement still in the fields of sociology and American studies. I came away from GETTING LOOSE as confirmed as ever in my view that the 1970s has never been more relevant to many of the basic cultural and material matters that at times we take for granted.