Squeezed between the turbulent “Sixties” and the Reaganite “Eighties,” the 1970s was long seen as an inconsequential decade, one in which “nothing happened.” Of course, this view has been resisted, as in Edward Berkowitz's Something Happened (2006), and recently the era has been receiving its due, among others in Dominic Sandbrook's Mad as Hell (2011), with its focus on the emerging antiestablishment currents. The significance of the decade is now increasingly seen in its transformative effect, a view anticipated some ten years ago by Bruce Schulman's The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (2002). It was in these pivotal years that the modern era began.

In one sense the idea of a watershed diminishes the 1970s, perpetuating the notion that it lacked a distinctive history of its own. Studies of “the long 1960s” like to extend that decade at least to 1974, while studies of the 1980s often begin with the Carter administration, noting the array of trends that anticipated those of the Reagan years. Somewhere in the middle of the decade, it seems, the “Sixties” ended and the “Eighties” began. The global context does suggest a watershed in the mid-1970s, associated with the so-called “crisis of politics,” characterized by the declining public trust in government in Western societies, the apparent bankruptcy of Keynesianism, faltering economic growth, the wasting of “smokestack” industries, and the shortage of energy. The sense that the old world was changing was reinforced by the rise of new issues promoted by antipoverty, consumerist, environmental, youth, and women's movements. What Eric Hobsbawm had called the “golden age” was apparently over for the developed capitalist world, not least for the United States. The fall of Saigon in 1975 marked an extraordinary humiliation; the United States was arguably becoming “just another country.”

Something was indeed happening, and Jefferson Cowie brilliantly illuminates a large part of it in this book, which focusses particularly on the hopes and disappointments of the American working class. In some respects much of what Cowie examines is not new. We know about deindustrialization and the fragmentation of the work environment, the overtures of the Nixon administration and later the Reaganites towards the working class, the belligerent rise of conservative think tanks and business lobbies, the entry of evangelical religion into politics, and the disappointments of the Carter administration. But Cowie embraces all these elements and more, imparts new insights, and finds connections. He is adept at integrating popular culture into the broad currents of social and political change, assuming that working people reveal something of themselves through their culture, or at least through their response to the cultural forms they are offered. Country or “redneck” music, the disco scene, such films as Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Saturday Night Fever and Taxi Driver, and a range of performers, especially Bruce Springsteen, are all vital parts of Cowie's story, each wonderfully teased for meaning. The formidable research is clothed in vibrant prose, even if the syntax wavers a little on occasion.

Cowie's purpose is to show how the hopes of the early 1970s, when a number of labor-focussed insurgencies seemed to herald a new age of working-class politics, were remorselessly eroded as the economy stumbled, conservatives turned to cultural issues and patriotic symbolism to woo the disaffected, and the business class mounted a powerful antiunion offensive. But the evisceration of the workers was in large part the result of internal weaknesses. The old New Deal coalition, in this reading, always was a “fragile juggernaut.” Unions which had emerged apparently powerfully in the 1930s came to be controlled by entrenched and sometimes corrupt establishments unresponsive to the changing conditions of the labour market, while the demands unleashed by the civil rights, gender and identity politics movements could not easily be reconciled with those of white male workers in an age of economic retrenchment. Successive attempts to fashion a broad-based coalition, grounded on an economic or class strategy, were doomed. By the end of the 1970s the working class had effectively disappeared from American public life and in 1980 white blue-collar voters helped to deliver the election to Reagan. The 1970s, concludes Cowie, marked “the end of a historically elusive ideal: the conscious, diverse, and unified working class acting as a powerful agent in political, social, and economic life” (369). The 1970s, it seems, was both a cloven decade and a transformative one.