James T. Patterson > Quotes

“The Graduate, an Oscar-winning movie that appeared in late 1967, dramatized these changes. It featured a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who was in no way a hippie, a user of drugs, or a political radical. But he seemed unconnected to traditional values. Alienated from many things, he felt no kinship with fraternity men at his university or with materialistic adults of the older generation.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“A teacher expressed the feeling of many Americans: After Watergate, it's crazy to have trust in politicians. I'm totally cynical, skeptical. Whether it's a question of power or influence, it's who you know at all levels. Nixon said he was the sovereign! Can you believe that? I was indignant. Someone should have told him that this is a democracy, not a monarchy.32”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Truman charged that Republicans were "Wall Street reactionaries," "gluttons of privilege," "bloodsuckers," and "plunderers." GOP legislators in the 80th Congress, he said, were "tools of the most reactionary elements" who would "skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed." Dismissing Dewey, "whose name rhymes with hooey," Truman said, "If you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you're a bigger bunch of suckers than I think you are." "Give 'em hell, Harry!" the people shouted back. "Pour it on!"59”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Polls indicated that while women were growing increasingly sensitive about gender discrimination, only a small minority liked to be called "feminists." The majority of housewives, indeed, told pollsters that they were largely content with their lives. Many resented being told by "elitists" that raising families was boring.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“It then became obvious that ethnic differences (like class distinctions) refused to boil away. Even fairly well established groups, such as Irish-Americans, often nursed old resentments and clung to neighborhood enclaves.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Most important, Kennedy's commission encouraged women activists on both the state and federal levels to develop networks and to talk seriously about curbing long-standing divisions within their ranks. In this way, Kennedy unintentionally aroused expectations that encouraged a much more self-conscious feminist movement after 1964.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Everything finally unraveled for McCarthy in early 1954. In March and April, Edward R. Murrow, a widely respected investigative reporter, ran a series of programs concerning McCarthy on "See It Now," a CBS network production. It was the first time that television—which had expanded by then to 25 million households—had exposed him in any major way. For the most part Murrow let McCarthy's bullying words and truculent actions speak for themselves.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“A week later fifty-four sit-ins were under way in fifteen cities in nine states in the South.60 It was obvious from the way that the spark of protest jumped from place to place that black resentments, which had somehow failed to ignite other sit-ins between 1957 and 1959, had exploded. The sit-ins of 1960 arose, as did the civil rights movement in later years, from the collective efforts of unsung local activists: they sprang from the bottom up. Many later leaders, unknown in 1960, jumped into action.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Still, the exaggerations of Johnson and other liberals at the time came to haunt them within a few years. Talk about the "healing miracle of modern medicine" and about the capacity of Medicare and Medicaid to deliver it was as Utopian as talk about "wars" against poverty or the wonders of "compensatory education." Medicare and Medicaid survived to become important—and extraordinarily expensive—entitlements. But in time they raised widespread questions about the hyperbolic claims of Johnson and the wisdom of American liberalism.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“A Gallup survey in 1962 indicated that only about one-third of American women considered themselves victims of discrimination. Eight years later the proportion had risen to a half, and by 1974 to two-thirds. By any standard these were striking measures of social and cultural change.18”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“In its broadest sense, the scandal of Watergate arose from the tumultuous and destabilizing trends of the 1960s, especially the war in Vietnam and the deviousness and power-grabbing associated with the rise of an imperial presidency.2”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“By 1971 the United States had an unfavorable balance of international trade for the first time since 1893.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“As it turned out Miranda did not much change the practices of law enforcement: police and prosecutors managed to figure out ways of maneuvering around the decision.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Their behavior indicated that the stigma of being on welfare, which had been powerful throughout American history—even in the Depression—had lost some of its force. So had the tendency of poor people to defer to people in authority. These were among the most profound and lasting developments of the 1960s.90”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Environmentalists had enjoyed modest successes during the New Frontier-Great Society years: a Clean Air Act in 1963, a Wilderness Act in 1964, a Clean Water Act in 1965, and an Endangered Species Act in 1966. In 1967 movement leaders coalesced to form the Environmental Defense Fund, a key lobby thereafter.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“These and other measures, however, seemed relatively inconsequential in 1965 compared to a Big Four that passed by the end of the session: federal aid to elementary and secondary education, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and a civil rights act to guaranteee voting rights.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Some working-class whites, of course, could not afford to move. Many of these people lived in closely knit, ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods where ownership of property was both a treasured value and a primary asset.50 They could not—would not—leave. They banded together to preserve the state of their neighborhood, relying less on covenants—a middle-class ploy—than on direct action. The result was what one careful study has called an "era of hidden violence" and of "chronic urban guerilla warfare."51”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Acheson then jumped into action with a dramatic and deliberately florid statement of what was later to be known as the "domino theory" of foreign interconnection. "We are met at Armageddon," he began: Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the East. It would also carry infection to spread through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France. . . . The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. . . . We and we alone were in a position to break up this play.44”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“In practice Truman's loyalty program was careless of civil liberties. The very word "loyalty" was problematic, encouraging zealots to bring charges on vague and imprecise grounds. While employees had the right to hear of charges against them, accusers could withhold anything they designated as secret. Government workers did not have the right to know the identity of their accusers—often agents of the FBI—or to confront them in the hearings.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“But the Great Society did not do nearly as much to improve the economic standing of people as did the extraordinary growth of the economy. When this stopped—in the 1970s—the flaws in LBJ's programs seemed glaring. Hyperbole about the Great Society aroused unrealistic popular expectations about government that later came to haunt American liberalism.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Congress also did little to deal with poverty, education, or mounting urban problems. It seemed especially deaf to what was soon to become the greatest domestic controversy of all: race relations.90 Many of these issues, having been slighted, provoked ever-greater social and political divisions by the late 1950s. In the 1960s they dominated a much more activist legislative agenda.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Thanks in part to the rapid mechanization of cotton production in the early 1940s, which ultimately threw millions of farm laborers out of work, and in part to the opening up of industrial employment in the North during the wartime boom, roughly a million blacks (along with even more whites) moved from the South during the 1940s. Another 1.5 million Negroes left the South in the 1950s. This was a massive migration in so short a time—one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history—and it was often agonizingly stressful.22 The black novelist Ralph Ellison wrote in 1952 of the hordes of blacks who "shot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our springs—so sudden that our gait becomes like that of deep-sea divers suffering from the bends."23”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“In 1950, 10 percent of families had television sets and 38 percent had never seen a TV program. Although 33 million of America's roughly 38 million households in 1945 had radios, these were for the most part bulky things cased in wooden cabinets, and they took time to warm up. Some 52 percent of farm dwellings, inhabited by more than 25 million people, had no electricity in 1945.1”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Along with the booming economy, which after 1962 seemed capable of almost anything, the magnified mystique of the presidency stimulated ever-greater expectations among liberals and others who imagined that government possessed big answers to big problems. The revolution of popular expectations, a central dynamic of the 1960s, owed a good deal of its strength to the glorification of presidential activism that Kennedy successfully sought to foment.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Still, it is a stretch to regard the beats as initiating a major cultural trend in the late 1950s, let alone to see them as comprising a "movement" that threatened a larger cultural center in the United States. Estimates of those who actually became beats range from several hundred to a thousand or more, only 150 or so of whom did any writing. They had little if anything in common with many other cultural rebels, such as fans of rock 'n' roll, or with political leftists, at the time.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Many of those who railed against family break-up assailed the rise of welfare, especially the Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which mainly aided low-income divorced, separated, or single women and their children. The rolls of AFDC, like divorce and illegitimacy, rose rapidly in the 1960s, from 3.1 million recipients in 1960 to 4.4 million in 1965 to 6.1 million in 1968. Costs of the program, which was supported by both the federal and state governments, increased during the same eight years from $3.8 billion to $9.8 billion.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Thanks in part to the commission, Kennedy issued an executive order ending sex discrimination in the federal civil service. In 1963 he signed an Equal Pay Act that guaranteed women equal pay for equal work.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Congress, responding with patriotic fervor, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it was called, with only desultory debate.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.92”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

“Between September 1969 and May 1970, there were at least 250 bombings linked to white-dominated radical groups in the United States. This was an average of almost one per day. (The government placed the number at six times as high.) Favorite targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal offices. In February 1970 bombs exploded at the New York headquarters of Socony Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics.”
― James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974