19: 1970s Malaise

With its penetration into slightly more than half of all U.S. households with TV sets, Roots simply blew away everything else that aired on TV that season, or in seasons past. Even 1977’s Super Bowl showdown between the Oakland Raider and Minnesota Vikings, seen in 44.4 percent of U.S. TV homes, couldn’t match the appeal of Roots.

According to Nielsen, 51.1 percent of all American TV homes tuned to ABC for the conclusion of Alex Haley’s epic story about the African-American experience

Amos says Uggams, who was performing in Las Vegas the week Roots aired, told him the mini-series “shut the casinos down. People left the gaming tables to go to their rooms to watch Roots.”

When jury selection in the Dan White trial began, Schmidt focused on making sure that no homosexuals made the jury. He asked potential jurors, "Have you ever supported controversial causes, like homosexual rights, for instance?"

In his brief, but emotional summation, Douglas Schmidt described White as "a man with a fine background" whose "pot had boiled over." He assured jurors that his client would suffer severe punishment, even if they returned a manslaughter, rather than a murder, conviction. "He will be punished," Schmidt said, "His child and his family will have to live with this. God will punish him....Just justice, that's all."

he symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

“We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.”

I think under these circumstances we are doing everything we can to take this incident and to investigate it and not to cover it up. What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.

I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work. Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more. Prices are too high, and sales are too slow. This year's Federal deficit will be about $30 billion; next year's probably $45 billion.

Now, I want to speak very bluntly. I've got bad news, and I don't expect much, if any, applause

Moreover, across 25 years, I almost never met a student athlete who could tell me how 20th-century sex discrimination had affected their own sport. None knew the basic prongs of Title IX that covered their own educational rights. Yet in the absence of a ratified Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX remains the closest legal guarantee of sex equity in American education.

the 1970s help us understand the transformation from “the American century” of the postwar years to the new era of globalization that we still live in today. Be it the transition from a unionized industrial heartland to a globalizing service and information economy; the switch from civil rights debates to campaigns for law and order, the decline of federal dominion and the rise of the tax revolt, or the birth of the Culture War – the 1970s hold the key for understanding the second half of the twentieth century.

<p>I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery."</p> <p>I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.</p>