Documents from Reading the American Past

Chapter 30

Introduction to the Documents

The powerful currents of change that swept the nation during the 1960s created even stronger countercurrents that dominated the politics of subsequent decades. Most of the activist groups that had worked for social change succumbed to bitter in-fighting, fracturing their unity and sapping their political vitality. Their opponents mobilized effectively to redirect power, so they claimed, from the government to the people and to stymie what they regarded as further decay in American values. The Watergate affair, however, revealed that quite un-American values were used routinely at the highest levels of the Nixon administration. The following documents illustrate that the crosscurrents of the time raised questions about the nation's basic values and institutions: Should the Supreme Court decide whether abortions were legal? Could government provide solutions to national problems? What did America mean to the rest of the world and the millions of new immigrants from all parts of the globe?