having been commodified into cynical Las Vegas glitz. Writing in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll a year before Elvis’s death, music critic Peter Graining bemoaned the physical, mental, and moral decline of The King—a decline that seemed to mirror the political and cultural stagnation of the time:
His hair is dyed, his teeth are capped, his middle is girdled, his voice is a husk, and his eyes film over with glassy impersonality. He [. . .] cannot endure the scorn of strangers, [and] will not go out if his hair isn’t right, if his weight—which fluctuates wildly—is not down. He has tantrums onstage and, like some aging politician, is reduced to the ranks of grotesque. (qtd in Rohter and Zito)
Shortly after Elvis’s death, Esquire painfully juxtaposed the glamour of his public appearance with the physical and psychic degeneration of his person and period: he “occasionally wore dark glasses with ELVIS spelled out on the sides in diamonds [. . . and] owned a gold lamé suit that weighed more than twenty pounds,” even though he actually hated the suit, suffered from glaucoma and colitis, and, in recent fits of temper, “was known to smash up television sets and pool tables” (Bradshaw 97). Star Wars, meantime, in its characters, setting, and plot nostalgically looked backward to the 1960s. Luke Skywalker, his friends and their adventures provided the wistful cinematic reenactment of a lost children’s crusade, flower-powered and anti-establishment (Woodstock Nation This Time Victorious), even as the film offered in Darth Vader the menacing specter of politically conservative forces already poised to sweep out 1960s’ liberalism, optimism, prosperity, and interest in social justice. Together the two cultural events testify (if superficially, we know) to how by 1977 the hopes of the previous decade had come mostly to lost promise if not to a sense of outright waste and failure, even to a sense of cultural exhaustion, crisis, and anxiety.
For anxieties there were aplenty in 1977. (For that reason, we should perhaps be using Woody Allen’s all-about-anxiety movie Annie Hall as the prototypical 1977 cultural artifact, not Star Wars.) Political events were still shadowed by the specter of the Watergate era and the crisis in leadership associated with the legacy of Richard Nixon. It is hardly necessary to rehearse how thoroughly Watergate dissipated political power and hope in government in the mid-1970s. That it seems impossible today to recall a single achievement of the Gerald Ford administration—or even to remember anything that happened during the Ford administration, except for the pardon of Nixon—speaks to the sense of political ennui that followed Nixon’s disgrace, the loss of the war in Vietnam, and the erosion of confidence in 1960s-style national legislation. That Jimmy Carter could defeat Ford in the 1976 election largely on the slogan “I will never lie to the American people” testifies to how demoralized the electorate had become and how character seemed more important than the possibility of social progress through legislative achievement. When he took up the Presidency in 1977, Carter held to a high moral tone, committed himself to human rights initiatives around the world, and achieved a successful peace initiative in the Middle East; but he nevertheless contributed to the crisis in leadership by being unable to act effectively to reverse the nation’s serious economic problems and energy shortages. Though unemployment (7.4 percent when Carter took office in January) dropped somewhat during the Carter years, double-digit inflation continued to plague the nation, and the energy predicament seemed so serious and so intractable that in April 1977 the new President created the Department of Energy and declared the situation to be “the moral equivalent of war” and “the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetime” (418). Carter seemed impotent when he could not get an energy bill through Congress in the summer of 1977 and when, to solve the problem, he urged people to lower thermostats and wear sweaters.
The biggest domestic issues outside the economy and energy seemed to be women’s rights and civil rights, but there were setbacks and disappointments in that area too. Over 14,000 women attended the National Women’s Conference in Houston in the fall of 1977, but the event was at least as acrimonious as it was invigorating (the abortion issue was particularly divisive); and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment was now gaining so much support—Phyllis Schlafly was an especially vigorous opponent—that the amendment would ultimately be defeated two years later. In March 1977, an unprecedented number of Americans—probably more than 100,000,000—tuned into the ABC television mini-series Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a version of Alex Haley’s best-selling (and Pultizer-winning) book of the previous year. But despite the broad appeal of a mini-series devoted to slavery and civil rights, affirmative action programs designed to benefit women and minorities according to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were coming under serious attack. (Indeed, it could be argued that the heroic bootstrap efforts depicted in Roots made an implicit and ironic argument against the need for affirmative action.) The most celebrated affront to affirmative action was mounted in the case of Alan Bakke, who sued after his application to medical school at the University of California was rejected in 1974 even as the university had been affirmatively admitting a number of minority students: by 1977, the widely publicized case had reached the Supreme Court.6 In a not unrelated case, four families living in public housing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sued the local school district in 1977, charging that lower-class, African American children were not being afforded equal opportunity but were being placed erroneously and disproportionately in special needs classes. The case drew widespread attention, and the racialized meaning of “standard English” came to public consciousness when the plaintiff’s attorney drew upon Geneva Smitherman’s research on Black English to argue that the language needs of African American children were not being attended to in the schools. And while these controversies were playing out in the news, Anita Bryant, spokeswoman for the Florida orange juice industry, was expressing the views of many by blaming many of the nation’s ills on gay citizens and thereby compromising the movement for gay rights. That movement in many ways received its impetus from the famous Stonewall riot in New York City of June 28, 1969, and gay rights parades during the decade frequently commemorated Stonewall as they made their case for civil rights for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. After 1978, the intensity of those demonstrations intensified because in that year Harvey Milk, an openly gay San Francisco supervisor, was murdered along with the mayor of the city by a notorious bigot, Dan White.
Pennsylvania, the political and economic backdrop of Penn State, offered a microcosm of the nation’s political and economic difficulties. State House Speaker Herbert Fineman, in a local reenactment of Watergate, was convicted of obstructing justice for hampering investigations into bribery and the sale of student admissions to professional schools. Governor Milton Shapp, beset by various administrative scandals and rumors that would sweep Republican Richard Thornburgh into office in 1978, fired Commonwealth Secretary C. Dolores Tucker, the highest ranking African-American female state official, on the grounds that she had used her official position as a clearinghouse for personal speaking engagements. This move exacerbated political and racial tensions, as many Pennsylvania residents saw the dismissal of Tucker as racially motivated. Racial and political troubles intensified in Pennsylvania’s urban areas as well. In Philadelphia, second-term mayor Frank Rizzo stirred racial tensions by advocating (as early as 1976) the striking of a city charter that prohibited him from serving more than two terms as mayor. The debate around the elimination of the charter was fraught with racial divisiveness. In response to what he interpreted as attempts by black leaders to persuade black voters to reject the proposed city charter amendment, which was to appear on the 1978 ballot, Rizzo asserted that “Whites are going to vote for Rizzo” (qtd. in Featherman and Rosenberg 17). Although Rizzo claimed that his statement was merely an observation about voting habits, his words were widely interpreted as a call for bloc voting by race. In the end the proposed change to the city charter lost by a wide margin, due largely to the resistance of black voters, 96 percent of whom voted against it (2). In 1978 racial tension would express itself again when Philadelphia police, in an attempt to remove members of the African American group MOVE from their communal residence, destroyed whole city blocks in a fire; in the ensuing shootout a police officer was killed and several members of MOVE were injured.
Economically the state epitomized the economic stagnation that in 1977 was plaguing all the states in the nation’s industrial “Rustbelt.” Despite some good years for agricultural industries and an agreement with Volkswagen to establish a new plant near
