1973: The Year That Changed Everything?

A book about a national psychological crisis.

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.

Killen, an assistant professor at City College of New York, offers “a psychogram of a country that was dealing with the consequences of Vietnam, Watergate, and economic meltdown—a profile of a year of uncertainty and disorientation but also of tremendous vitality and creativity.” He caroms through a grab bag of events and cultural happenings to create a fascinating, if impressionistic, portrait of the time, touching on, among other things, film studies, Vietnam, the airline industry, cults, and President Richard Nixon’s political machinations. It all comes across as a kind of academic riff.

Occasionally he reaches odd conclusions. He writes of Watergate, “What, after all, was the spectacle unfolding on America’s TV screens, if not an oedipal one, culminating in the symbolic killing of the nation’s ‘father’?” He argues that the rash of airplane hijackings in 1973 was an expression of castration anxiety and says similarly of Andy Warhol’s would-be assassin, “If revolutionary feminist Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto represented the threat of castration, then Warhol presided over the ambiguously counterrevolutionary society of the seventies as a kind of castrated father figure—albeit one in whom castration was paradoxically a sign not of weakness but of mysterious vigor.”

Moments like those can be baffling, but there’s also plenty of clear-sighted analysis. For example, he offers an incisive look at An American Family¸ the 12-part PBS series that followed the daily life of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, California. Many people at the time felt that the American family was in crisis, buffeted by the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, rising divorce rates, and legalized abortion. The show’s producer, Craig Gilbert, bought into this view and said he wanted to document family life before it became obsolete. He chose a prosperous family seemingly living the American dream and installed a surveillance system in their home to track their every move. The resulting series was one of the biggest media events of the year. Millions tuned in to watch the Louds eat breakfast, play with the dogs, fight, and finally fall apart. By the time the show aired, Pat and Bill Loud had divorced.

The show stumbled into many of the issues that would become flashpoints in the ensuing culture wars. There was tension between secular Pat Loud and her religious mother; Bill fretted over his sons’ lack of a work ethic; his business slumped with the economy; Lance, the oldest son, came out of the closet as gay and moved to New York. Lance, who later drifted in and out of Andy Warhol’s entourage, at least was perceptive enough to recognize that no one really acts naturally when being recorded, and he happily performed for the camera, offering his own commentary. “Television ate my family,” he declared at one point.

Commentators seized on the show to argue the perils of women’s rights, homosexuality, and the media. Lance was a particularly polarizing figure. The critic Anne Roiphe deplored his “flamboyant, leechlike homosexuality,” while others declared him a hero for coming out on television. Killen tells us that many saw the show as an “allegory of American’s fall from a state of innocence.” He also finds a parallel between the Louds’ inviting PBS to essentially bug their home and Nixon’s bugging the Oval Office. The Watergate trials battled An American Family for prime-time ratings, and Nixon’s bizarre behavior in effect competed with the Louds’.

The sight of people making spectacles of their “private” behavior is now a cornerstone of popular culture. In the age of The Real World and Newlyweds, we accept and even enjoy surveillance. But reality television is hardly the only legacy of that watershed year. The culture wars that Killen argues started in 1973 are still being waged, and our political landscape is still very much shaped by what was perhaps the most polarizing event of that year: Roe v. Wade. With Governor Mike Round of South Dakota recently signing legislation that makes it a felony for doctors to perform abortions except to save the life of the mother, and Planned Parenthood vowing to challenge the law, it’s beginning to look like 1973 all over again.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.