APUSH Chapter 40

The Postmodern Mind- Multiplicity

A growing comfort with multiplicity not only characterized Americans' attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and identity in the later twentieth century. This same outlook energized much of the cultural and intellectual output of the era. Commentators often described contemporary Americans as living in a "postmodern" age, though few could agree on precisely what that term meant. But whatever else it denoted, postmodernism generally referred to a condition of fragmented perspectives, multiple truths, and constructed identities. The postmodern mind rejected rational, totalizing descriptions of the self or the world, and replaced modernism's faith in certainty, objectivity, and unity with an eclectic celebration of diverse and overlapping outlooks.

African American Gains

African American gains in the wake of the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s could be measured in other ways than shifting residential addresses. The number of black elected officials, for example, rose above the nine thousand mark in 2000, including more than three dozen members of Congress and the mayors of several large cities. By the turn of the new century, blacks had also dramatically advanced into higher education, though the educational gap between blacks and whites chronically persisted. The political assault against affirmative action in California and elsewhere compounded the obstacles to advancement for many young African Americans. In 2000, 16.6 percent of blacks over age twenty-five had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to 26.1 percent of whites.

Anti-Crime Bill

After a protracted struggle, in 1994 Clinton also signed the most far-reaching anti-crime bill ever passed by Congress. It included funding for 100,000 new police officers and the construction of more prisons, as well as a federal ban on some assault weapons. (The ban expired in 2004.) Several states also stiffened their law enforcement practices, until America's incarceration rate became the highest in the world. (With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States by 2014 accounted for nearly 25 percent of all prison inmates.) Yet the country's violent crime rate began to decline substantially after 1995—a striking nation-wide trend that continued into the new century.

The Feminist Revolution- Women in the Workforce

All Americans were caught up in the great economic changes of the late twentieth century, but no group was more profoundly affected than women. When that century opened, women had made up about 20 percent of all workers. Over the next five decades, they increased their presence in the labor force at a fairly steady rate, except for a temporary spurt during World War II. Then, beginning in the 1950s, women's entry into the workplace accelerated dramatically. By the 1990s nearly half of all workers were women, and the majority of working-age women held jobs outside the home. (That proportion only continued to grow in the next century.) Most astonishing was the upsurge in employment among mothers. In 1950 nearly 90 percent of mothers with children under the age of six did not work for pay. But half a century later, a majority of women with children as young as one year old were wage earners. Because most men did not compensate fully for women's entry into work by taking on a commensurate share of tasks such as cooking, childcare, and houswork, working mothers were in a classic double bind, expected to bring home the bacon and cook it, too.

The Lewinsky Affair

All previous scandals were overshadowed by the revelation in January 1998 that Clinton had engaged in a sexual affair with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and then blatantly lied about it when testifying under oath in another woman's civil suit accusing him of sexual harassment. Caught in his bold lie, the president made a humiliating confession, but his political opponents smelled blood in the water. In September 1998 the special prosecutor investigating Whitewater, who had broad powers to investigate any evidence of presidential malfeasance, presented a stinging report, including lurid sexual details, to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. That report presented eleven possible grounds for impeachment, all related to lying about the Lewinsky affair.

Suburbs

America's increasingly segmented residential landscapes reflected the stubborn racial divide. At the end of the twentieth century, minorities made up majorities within many American cities, while whites dominated the suburbs. In 2002, 52 percent of all blacks lived in central cities compared with only 21 percent of whites. Some of these urban white residents were well-to-do gentrifiers, whose restoration of decaying neighborhoods sent real estate values soaring and many minority residents packing to catastrophically deepening concentrations of poverty in the inner cores of old industrial cities. Many successful black beneficiaries of the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s followed whites to prosperous middle-class suburbs, while less affluent minorities began populating the first ring of post-World War II suburbs, now often badly deteriorated a half century after they were built. Some cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco boomed with finance, information technology, and biotech economies, while others like Detroit and Cleveland struggled to replace once-thriving basic industries. The resulting residential map of the United States was a checkerboard of racial differences as well as vivid contrasts in prosperity and poverty.

E Pluribus Plures- American Culture

American culture proved no less fractious than the nation's politics as the century drew to a close. What united many key late-century developments in American intellectual life and artistic production became— ironically enough—diversity itself.

Film and Television

An independent film movement transformed the world of American cinema in the late 1980s and 1990s, as iconoclasts like Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and Kathryn Bigelow found commercially viable strategies for pursuing unconventional cinematic visions. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), notable for their nonlinear storylines, cinematic allusions, and dark comedic stylings, were prime examples of postmodern film. Beginning in the late 1990s, cable television entered a golden era, as high-quality dramas such as The Sopranos (1999-2007) and The Wire (2002- 2008) enjoyed commercial and critical success—even with audience numbers that paled in comparison to those of the hit shows a quarter century earlier.

Clinton's Second Term

As Clinton began his second term—the first Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be reelected—the heady promises of far-reaching reform with which he had entered the White House four years earlier were no longer heard. Still facing Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, he proposed only modest legislative goals, even though soaring tax revenues generated by the prosperous economy produced in 1998 a balanced federal budget for the first time in three decades.

Music

As crowning exemplars of the mix-and-mash approach to cultural production, hip-hop artists from Public Enemy to Jay-Z "sampled" beats from other sound recordings, and lyrical MCs overlaid them with complex rapping schemes. Mash-up artists also gained popularity, cleverly fusing fragments from songs of different musical genres or remixing one song's vocal track over another song's instrumentals.

Clinton Comes Back- Swing Voters

As the 1996 election approached, the Republicans chose Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole as their presidential candidate. A decorated World War II veteran from Kansas, Dole had a dry wit and deadpan demeanor that did not translate into a galvanizing presence on the campaign trail. And with a rebounding domestic economy and a relatively peaceful global scene in 1996, Dole had his work cut out for him to topple the incumbent. The general election unfolded as a bland contest in which both major contenders fought for moderate "swing voters." The attention they paid to one such swing constituency—middle-class female suburbanites—helped introduce the term soccer moms into the national lexicon. Targeting soccer moms made excellent political sense because for the first time a majority of Americans now lived in the suburbs.

Bill Clinton: The First Baby-Boomer President - Democrats

As the last decade of the twentieth century opened, a slumbering economy, a widening gender gap, and a rising anti-incumbent spirit spelled opportunity for Democrats, frozen out of the White House for all but four years since 1968. Governor William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton of Arkansas weathered blistering accusations of womanizing and draft evasion to emerge as his party's standard-bearer. He selected a fellow forty-something southern white male Protestant moderate, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, as his vice-presidential running mate. Clinton claimed to be a "New Democrat," chastened by the party's long exile in the political wilderness. With other centrist Democrats, he had formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to point the party away from its traditional antibusiness, dovish, champion-of-the-underdog orientation and toward pro-growth, strong defense, and anti-crime policies. The DLC's ascendance as a business-friendly faction within the country's center-left party underscored the degree to which market-oriented thinking and policies had come to dominate American politics in the last decades of the twentieth century.

A False Start for Reform- Reforms

Badly overestimating his electoral mandate for liberal reform, the young president made a series of costly blunders upon entering the White House. He stirred a hornet's nest of controversy by advocating an end to the ban on gays and lesbians in the armed services. Confronted with fierce opposition, the president finally settled for a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that quietly accepted gay and lesbian soldiers and sailors without officially acknowledging their presence in the military. (Congress finally repealed the discriminatory policy in 2010.)

Los Angeles Riots

Beyond affirmative action, the racial divisions that still loomed large in American culture and politics became searingly apparent in Los Angeles in 1992. Like New York a century earlier, the southern California metropolis had become a magnet for minorities, especially immigrants from Asia and Latin America. When a mostly white Los Angeles jury exonerated white police officers who had been videotaped ferociously beating a black suspect, minority neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles erupted in rage. Arson and looting laid waste entire city blocks, and scores of people were killed. In a sobering demonstration of the complexity of modern American racial rivalries, many black rioters vented their anger at the white police and the judicial system by attacking Asian shopkeepers, who in turn formed armed patrols to protect their property. The Los Angeles riots vividly testified to enduring black skepticism about the American justice system.

Clinton's Legacy and the 2000 Election- Clinton's Legacy

Beyond the obvious stain of impeachment, Clinton's legacy was mixed. His sound economic policies encouraged growth and trade in a rapidly globalizing post-Cold War world. Yet as a New Democrat and avowed centrist, Clinton did more to consolidate than to reverse the Reagan-Bush revolution against New Deal liberalism that for half a century had provided the compass for the Democratic party and the nation. Further, by setting such a low standard in his personal conduct, he replenished the sad reservoir of public cynicism about politics that Vietnam and Watergate had created a generation before.

Results

Buoyed by a healthy economy and by his artful trimming to the conservative wind, Clinton breezed to an easy victory in November 1996, with 47,401,898 popular votes to Dole's 39,198,482. Dole's victory in eight southern states, however, underscored how the "solid South," once a safe Democratic stronghold, had by century's end largely become Republican territory. The Reform party's egomaniacal leader, Ross Perot, ran a sorry third, picking up less than half the votes he had garnered in 1992. But Republicans remained in control of Congress.

The Rwandan Genocide

Burned in Somalia, Washington stood on the sidelines in 1994 when catastrophic ethnic violence in the central African country of Rwanda resulted in the deaths of half a million people. The Rwandan genocide painfully underscored a question dogging the sole remaining superpower in the post-Cold War era: What obligations did America have to intervene in military and humanitarian crises abroad?

Competition for Workers

But the very speed and efficiency of the new communications tools threatened to wipe out entire occupational categories, and even ways of life. Postal carriers, travel agents, store clerks, bank tellers, stock-brokers, and all kinds of other workers whose business it was to mediate between product and client were in danger of becoming casualties of the computer. White-collar jobs in financial services and high-tech engineering, once securely anchored in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, could now be "outsourced" to countries such as Ireland and India, where employees could keep a company's global circuits firing twenty-four hours a day. The related forces of the computer revolution and economic globalization defined the central opportunities and challenges for American workers as the new millennium dawned.

Trade Policy

Clinton encountered more immediate and potent criticism over his trade policy. He had shown political courage by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in 1993, creating a free-trade zone encompassing Mexico, Canada, and the United States. In doing so, he bucked the opposition of protectionists in his own party, especially labor leaders fearful of losing jobs to low-wage Mexican workers. Clinton took another step in 1994 toward a global free-trade system when he vigorously promoted the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and a cherished goal of free-trade advocates since the end of the Second World War. Simmering discontent over trade policy boiled over in 1999 when Clinton hosted the meeting of the WTO in Seattle. The city's streets filled with protesters railing against what they viewed as the human and environmental costs of economic globalization. Despite such protests, Clinton vigorously pursued trade-expansion initiatives throughout his presidency. As the rapidly emerging powerhouse of China loomed ever larger, Clinton soft-pedaled his earlier criticism of the Beijing regime on human rights issues and instead began seeking improved trade relations with that robustly industrializing country and potential market bonanza. Clinton crusaded for a controversial China trade bill, passed by Congress in May 2000, that made the Asian giant a full-fledged trading partner of the United States. It marked yet one more stride in the forward march of globalization.

The Politics of Distrust- Republicans

Clinton's failed initiatives and the widespread anti-government sentiment afforded Republicans a golden opportunity in 1994, and they seized it aggressively. Led by outspoken Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, Republicans offered voters a Contract with America that promised an all-out assault on budget deficits and radical reductions in welfare programs. Their campaign succeeded fabulously, as a conservative tornado roared across the land in the 1994 congressional elections. Republicans picked up eleven new governorships, eight seats in the Senate, and fifty-three seats in the House (where Gingrich became Speaker), giving them control of both chambers of the federal Congress for the first time in forty years. The 1994 midterms wiped out the remaining conservative congressional Democrats, concentrated in the South, who had served as Ronald Reagan's "boll-weevil" supporters a decade earlier. Their replacement by newly empowered southern Republicans accelerated the ideological and geographical sorting of the two parties, which in turn only intensified the political combat in Washington.

Globalization and its Discontents- Roaring Economy

Clinton's major political advantage in his second term was the roaring economy, which by 2000 had sustained the longest period of growth in American history. The Federal Reserve Board's low-interest, easy-money policies and the explosive growth of new Internet ("dot-com") businesses helped fuel the boom. Unemployment crept down to 4 percent, sending employers scrambling madly for workers, while inflationary pressure remained remarkably low. In this heady boom-time atmosphere, the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans found common ground in pursuing fateful new efforts at financial deregulation. These included loosening federal regulation of trading in the new-fangled instruments called "derivatives" as well as repealing the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that had barred commercial banks from dealing in securities. Later, amidst the financial tumult of the 2000s, the deregulatory wave of the go-go nineties came in for heavy retrospective criticism.

Communications Technology

Communications technology helped to accelerate the pace of globalization. As reflected in the rise of the decade's iconic corporation, Microsoft, computers were at the heart of the productivity gains and economic growth of the late twentieth century. The old industrial age was rapidly giving way to a new "information age" in which the storing, organizing, and processing of data were the most important industries of all. As the pace of the information age accelerated, the world shrank. The phenomenal growth of the Internet heralded an explosive communications revolution. Networked people from all corners of the planet were rapidly forming an electronic global village, where traditional geographic, social, and political boundaries could be vaulted with the tap of a keypad.

Diversity

Controversial issues of color and culture pervaded the realm of ideas in the late twentieth century. Echoing early-twentieth-century "cultural pluralists" like Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, many intellectuals after 1970 embraced the creed of "multiculturalism." The new mantra celebrated diversity for its own sake and stressed the need to preserve and promote, rather than squash, a variety of distinct ethnic and racial cultures in the United States.

Anti-government Mood

Despite such legislative achievements during Clinton's first two years in office, a sour antigovernment mood persisted. A huge explosion destroyed a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, taking 168 lives, in retribution for a 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas, between federal agents and a Fundamentalist sect known as the Branch Davidians. That showdown had ended in the destruction of the sect's compound and the deaths of many Branch Davidians, including women and children. Events like the Oklahoma City bombing brought to light a lurid and secretive underground of paramilitary private "militias" composed of alienated citizens armed to the teeth and ultrasuspicious of all government. Even many law-abiding citizens shared to some degree in the antigovernment attitudes that drove the militia members to murderous extremes. Thanks largely to the disillusioning agony of the Vietnam War and the naked cynicism of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, the confidence in government that had come naturally to the generation that had licked the Great Depression and won the Second World War was in short supply by century's end. Reflecting that pervasive disenchantment with politics and politicians, several states passed term-limit laws for elected officials, although the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that the restrictions did not apply to federal officeholders.

Lasting Liberal Achievement

Even more damaging to Clinton's political standing, and to his hopes for lasting liberal achievement, was the fiasco of his attempt to reform the nation's health-care system. In a dramatic but personally and politically risky move, the president appointed his wife, nationally prominent lawyer and children's advocate Hillary Rodham Clinton, as the director of a task force charged with redesigning the medical-service industry. The task force deliberated for months behind closed doors, eventually producing a stupefyingly complicated 1,300-page plan that was dead on arrival when presented to Congress in October 1993. The First Lady was doused with a torrent of abuse for her role in producing this legislative turkey, but she eventually rehabilitated herself sufficiently to win election as a U.S. senator from New York in 2000—the first First Lady ever to hold elective office.

Bosnia

Events in the tormented Balkans in southeastern Europe provoked similar uncertainty. As vicious ethnic conflict raged through Bosnia, the Washington government dithered until finally deciding to commit American troops to a NATO peacekeeping contingent in late 1995. Yet NATO's expansion to include the new member states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1997, and its continuing presence in Bosnia, failed to pacify the Balkans completely. When Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic ́ in 1999 unleashed a new round of "ethnic cleansing" in the region, this time against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo, U.S.-led NATO forces launched an air war against Serbia. The bombing campaign eventually forced Milosevic ́ to accept a NATO peacekeeping force on the ground in Kosovo. Milosevic ́ was arrested in 2001 and put on trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he died in 2006 before the trial was completed.

Immigration in Literature

Immigration also yielded its own rich cultural harvest. Asian American authors flourished, among them playwright David Hwang, novelist Amy Tan, and Chinese-born Ha Jin, who wrote evocatively about his country of origin in novels like Waiting (1999) and War Trash (2004). Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) explored the sometimes painful relationship between immigrant Indian parents and their American-born children. Latino writers made their mark as well. Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) brilliantly bridged the worlds of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey in a dazzling concoction of street-smart Spanglish.

Welfare Reform Bill

In 1996 the new Congress achieved a major conservative victory when it compelled a reluctant Clinton to sign the Welfare Reform Bill, which made deep cuts in welfare grants and required able-bodied welfare recipients to find employment. Old-line liberal Democrats howled with pain at the president's alleged betrayal of his party's heritage. But Clinton's acceptance of the welfare reform package was part of his shrewd political strategy of accommodating the electorate's conservative mood by moving to the right.

Results

In early 1999, for the first time in 130 years, the nation witnessed an impeachment proceeding in the U.S. Senate. Dusting off ancient precedents from Andrew Johnson's trial, the one hundred senators solemnly heard arguments in the case. With the facts widely known and the two parties' political positions firmly locked in, the trial's outcome was a foregone conclusion. On the key obstruction of justice charge, five northeastern Republicans joined all forty-five Democratic senators in voting not guilty. The fifty Republican votes for conviction fell far short of the constitutionally required two-thirds majority. The vote on the perjury charge was forty-five guilty, fifty-five not guilty.

Clinton's Attempt to Leave as a Peacemaker

In his final years as president, Clinton stepped up his efforts to leave a legacy as an international peacemaker. Along with his work in the Middle East, he helped in 1998 to broker an end to "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland which for decades had witnessed violent conflict between predominantly Catholic nationalists and predominantly Protestant Loyalists. Diplomatic efforts in the Korean peninsula as well as in India and Pakistan aimed to reduce nuclear tensions in East and South Asia. But despite these gestures, the guiding principles of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era remained ill-defined and elusive.

Racial Progress and Perils- Clinton's Middle Ground

In his second term, Clinton cleverly managed to put Republicans on the defensive by claiming the political middle ground on various issues. He now warmly embraced the landmark Welfare Reform Bill of 1996 that he had initially been slow to endorse. Juggling the political hot potato of affirmative action, Clinton pledged to "mend it, not end it." When voters in California in 1996 approved Proposition 209, prohibiting affirmative-action preferences in government and higher education, the number of minority students in the state's public universities temporarily plummeted. A federal appeals court decision, Hopwood v. Texas, had a similar effect in Texas. Clinton criticized these broad assaults on affirmative action but stopped short of trying to reverse them, aware that public support for affirmative action, especially among white Americans, had diminished since the 1970s.

Audience Fragmentation

In the niche logic of popular art in the postmodern age, audience fragmentation enabled more and fresher voices to be heard. But it also ensured that, compared to previous eras, fewer national experiences and cultural events were collectively shared by large numbers of citizens. In this way, popular culture matched ongoing developments in the society at large, as turn-of-the-century America became an ever more pluralist, hybridized, and boisterously diverse nation.

Democrats in the 2000 Election

Nonetheless, as the end of the Clinton term and the beginning of the new millennium approached, the Democrats stayed on their political course and nominated loyal vice president Albert Gore for president. Gore faced the tricky challenge of linking himself to Clinton-era peace and prosperity while at the same time distancing himself from his boss's personal foibles. He chose as his running mate Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, an outspoken critic of Clinton's behavior in the Lewinsky affair and the first Jew nominated to a major national ticket.

Theater

On the stage, contemporary political themes and social commentary predominated. The AIDS epidemic inspired Tony Kushner's sensationally inventive Angels in America (1991), as well as Jonathan Larson's Tony Award-winning musical Rent (1996). Eve Ensler espoused feminist empowerment (and an end to violence against women) with comic intimacy in her Vagina Monologues (1996).

Literature by Minority Authors

Other major works of contemporary fiction, especially from the pens of female and minority authors, complemented postmodernism's ethos of pluralism and cultural diversity. Toni Morrison wove a bewitching portrait of maternal affection amidst the horrors of slavery in Beloved (1987) and in 1993 became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. E. Annie Proulx won widespread acclaim with her comical yet tender portrayal of a struggling family in The Shipping News (1993). Her moving tale of homoerotic love between two cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain" (1997) reached a mass audience in 2005 as an award-winning motion picture. James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie contributed to a Native American literary renaissance that sought to recover the tribal past while reimagining its present.

Cliffhanger

Pollsters predicted a close election, but none foresaw the epochal cliffhanger that the election would become. On election day the country split nearly evenly between the two candidates, and it was soon clear that Florida's electoral votes would determine the winner. Television news programs announced that Bush had won the Sunshine State, and Al Gore called the Texas governor to concede defeat. Yet just an hour later, Gore's camp decided that Florida was too close to call, and the vice president—in perhaps the most awkward phone call in modern politics—phoned back to retract his concession.

Architecture

Postmodern architecture made the most visible footprint on the American cultural landscape. Rejecting the austere functionalism that had dominated architecture for much of the last century, postmodernists such as Robert Venturi and Michael Graves revived the decorative details of earlier historical styles. Postmodernists celebrated a playful mix of architectural elements—"Less is a bore," as Venturi put it. The flight from stark modernism took especially fanciful forms in Frank Gehry's use of luminous, undulating sheets of metallic skin in the widely hailed Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles.

Literature Style

Postmodern literature, like art, had deep roots in the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, authors like William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon had pioneered the use of nonlinear narratives, pastiche forms, parody, and paradox in their fiction. A newer generation of writers working in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, including Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Zadie Smith, adapted these techniques for contemporary audiences. David Foster Wallace playfully lampooned North America's dystopian future in Infinite Jest (1996), complete with calendar years named after corporate sponsors, while Colson Whitehead ruminated on modern racial uplift among rival schools of elevator operators in The Intuitionist (1999).

Deficit-Reduction Bill

President Clinton had better luck with a deficit-reduction bill that passed Congress in 1993—though on a party-line vote with no Republican support, a harbinger of the bitter partisan divide that came to dominate the political scene over the next two decades. The bill's spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy combined with the increasingly buoyant economy to help shrink federal deficits. By 1998 such policies seemed to have caged the ravenous deficit monster, as Congress argued over the unfamiliar question of how to manage federal budget surpluses.

Political Racial Differences

Racial divisions in the 1990s also manifested themselves politically in massive partisan disparities among black and white voters. African Americans proved themselves among Bill Clinton's most fiercely loyal supporters, giving him 83 percent of their total vote in the 1992 election and 84 percent in 1996. As a politician, Clinton had for decades demonstrated an easy and authentic personal connection with the African American community. But far more significant than any Clinton-specific factor was the electoral sorting of the two major parties, with racial minorities becoming ever larger and more consequential components of the Democratic electoral base.

Reforms

Recognizing the new realities of the modern American household, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which mandated job protection for working fathers as well as mothers who needed to take time off from work for family-related reasons. Over the course of the decade, some employers began providing paternity leave in recognition of the shared obligations of the two-worker household. Such leave was overwhelmingly unpaid, however, and the concept of gender equality in family leave policies remained more aspirational than real in most workplaces.

Results

Reflecting pervasive economic unease and the virulence of the throw-the-bums-out national mood, nearly 20 percent of voters cast their ballots for independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, a bantamweight, jug-eared Texas billionaire who harped incessantly on the problem of the federal deficit and made a boast of the fact that he had never held any public office. Perot's colorful presence probably accounted for the record turnout on election day, when some 100 million voters—55 percent of those eligible— went to the polls. The final tally gave Clinton 44,909,889 popular votes and 370 votes in the Electoral College. He was the first baby boomer to ascend to the White House, a distinction reflecting the electoral profile of the population, 70 percent of whom had been born after World War II. Bush polled some 39,104,545 popular votes and 168 electoral votes.

Policies

Rosy estimates that the federal budget would produce a surplus of some $2 trillion in the coming decade set the stage for the presidential contest. Echoing the Republican creed of smaller government, Bush argued for returning the budget surplus to "the people" through massive tax cuts and for promoting private-sector programs, such as school vouchers and a reliance on "faith-based" institutions to help the poor. Gore proposed smaller tax cuts, targeted at middle-and lower-class people, and strengthening Social Security. In an era of peace, foreign policy figured hardly at all in the campaign, although Bush struck a moderate note when he urged that America should act like "a humble nation."

Scandal and Impeachment- Scandals Throughout the Presidency

Scandal had dogged Bill Clinton from the beginning of his presidency. Critics brought charges of everything from philandering to illegal financial transactions. A mobilized conservative movement, with its own humming media infrastructure in both print and talk radio, amplified each new accusation and aggressively pursued any whiff of scandal throughout the Clinton years.

Result

That ruling gave Bush the White House but cast a dark shadow of illegitimacy over his presidency. Bush officially won Florida by 537 votes out of 6 million cast, and he squeaked by in the Electoral College, 271 to 266. The national popular vote went decisively to Gore, 50,999,897 to 50,456,002. For the first time since 1888, a candidate won the White House with fewer popular votes than his opponent. Calls to abolish the Electoral College, however, were few and muted. African Americans voted for Gore over Bush by a ratio of ten to one, signaling the deepening racial polarization of party politics at the turn of the new century. Many black Floridians, meanwhile, complained that election officials had unfairly disqualified their votes and even turned them away from the polls, recollecting the kind of obstacles that long had kept blacks from voting in the "Jim Crow" South.

Multiracial People

The Census Bureau further enlivened the debate when in 2000 it allowed respondents to identify themselves with more than one of the six standard racial categories (black, white, Latino, American Indian, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander). Signifying a mounting revolution in attitudes toward race, nearly 7 million Americans chose to describe themselves as biracial or multiracial. As recently as the 1960s, interracial marriage was still illegal in sixteen states. But by the early twenty-first century, many Americans, including such celebrities as golfer Tiger Woods and actress Rosario Dawson, were proclaiming their mixed heritage as a point of pride. One notable American, an ambitious son of a Kenyan father and white Kansan mother named Barack Obama, wrote thoughtfully about navigating the complex waters of racial identity in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, a decade prior to launching himself on the national political stage.

Impeachment

The House quickly cranked up the rusty machinery of impeachment. As an acrid partisan atmosphere enveloped the Capitol, House Republicans in December 1998 passed two articles of impeachment against the president: perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice. Crying foul, the Democratic minority charged that, however deplorable Clinton's personal misconduct, sexual transgressions did not rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" prescribed in the Constitution. The House Republican managers (prosecutors) of impeachment for the Senate trial replied that perjury and obstruction were grave public issues and that nothing less than the "rule of law" was at stake. As cries of "honor the Constitution" and "sexual McCarthyism" filled the air, the nation debated whether the president's peccadilloes amounted to high crimes or low follies. Most Americans apparently leaned toward the latter view. In the 1998 midterm elections, voters reduced the House Republicans' majority, causing fiery House speaker Newt Gingrich to resign his post. Although Americans held a low opinion of Clinton's slipshod personal morals, most liked the president's political and economic policies and wanted him to stay in office.

Arafat

The Middle East remained a major focus of American diplomacy right up to the end of Clinton's tenure—and beyond. In 1993 Clinton presided over a historic meeting at the White House between Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat. They agreed in principle on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and political self-rule for the Palestinians living there. But hopes flickered two years later when Rabin fell to an assassin's bullet. Clinton and his second-term secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, spent the rest of the 1990s struggling in vain to broker the permanent settlement that continued to elude Israelis and Palestinians. Arafat died in 2004 with his dream of creating a Palestinian state still unrealized.

Terrorists

The Middle East served as the regional source for another thorny problem in the 1990s: the growth of radical, anti-American Islamist terrorism, organized most effectively in the transnational network known as Al Qaeda ("the base" in Arabic). Members of the terrorist organization carried out simultaneous bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 230 people. Operatives bombed the USS Cole in Yemen two years later, killing 17. The wealthy, Saudi-born leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, declared war against all Americans and their allies in a fatwa issued in 1998. He denounced America's growing military presence in the Middle East (especially on the sacred soil of the Arabian Peninsula) and its unyielding support for Israel in the face of intensifying Palestinian nationalism.

Polarization

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the democratization of its client regimes in Eastern Europe ended the four-decade-old Cold War and left the United States the world's sole remaining superpower. Americans welcomed these changes but seemed unsure how to exercise their unprecedented economic and military might in this new international scenario. The culture wars that had started in the 1960s fed ferociously partisan political squabbles that distracted the nation from the urgent task of clearly defining its role in the age of globalization. Amidst this deepening partisan polarization, a sustained ten-year economic expansion powerfully shaped American society and politics in the 1990s. The second half of the decade was a particularly giddy boom era, as an exuberant financial sector and ascendant information technology firms helped to propel the economy to near-full employment—and the federal budget to record surpluses. But the good times were not to last.

Searching for a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy- Foreign Policy

The end of the Cold War dismantled the framework within which the United States had conducted foreign policy for nearly half a century. Throughout his presidency, Bill Clinton groped for a diplomatic formula to replace anticommunism as the basic premise of American diplomacy. Absorbed by domestic issues, Clinton at first seemed uncertain and even amateurish in his conduct of foreign policy. He followed his predecessor's lead in dispatching American troops as part of a peacekeeping mission to Somalia. But after Somali rebels killed more than a dozen Americans, the president quietly withdrew the U.S. units in March 1994, without having accomplished any clearly defined goal.

Sex-Segregation in the Workforce

The greater burdens of parenthood on women than on men helped explain the persistence of occupational segregation and pay disparities through the 1990s. Women were far more likely than men to interrupt their careers to bear and raise children, and even to choose less demanding career paths to allow for fulfilling those traditional roles. Partly as a result, women continued to receive lower wages compared with men doing the same full-time work, and they also tended to concentrate in lower prestige, lower paying occupations—the so-called "pink-collar ghetto." These disparities continued beyond the 1990s. Women made 77 cents on the dollar compared to men as late as 2012. And although they made up more than half the population, women in 2010 accounted for just 33 percent of lawyers and judges (up from 5 percent in 1970) and 32 percent of physicians (up from 10 percent in 1970).

Debate

The nation's classrooms became battlegrounds for the debate over America's commitment to pluralism. Multiculturalists attacked the traditional curriculum as "Eurocentric" and advocated greater focus on the achievements of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. In response, critics charged that too much stress on ethnic difference would come at the expense of national cohesion and an appreciation of common American values.

Music and Dance

The postmodern sensibility carried over into other art forms. Classical music composers like John Adams and John Zorn broke down boundaries between "high" and "low" styles and blended diverse musical genres and traditions in experimental mixtures. Choreographers such as Steve Paxton and Twyla Tharp paired everyday movements with classical techniques and gave their dancers license to improvise.

Republicans

Their Republican challenger, George W. Bush, won the nomination on the strength of his father's name and his years as governor of Texas. Bush surrounded himself with Washington insiders, including vice-presidential nominee Richard Cheney, and, in a clear jab at Clinton, promised to "restore dignity to the White House."

O. J. Simpson

Then just three years later, again in Los Angeles, the televised spectacle of the trial of former football "hero" O. J. Simpson for allegedly murdering his white former wife, fed white disillusionment with the state of race relations. After months of testimony that seemed to point to Simpson's guilt, the jury acquitted him, presumably because certain Los Angeles police officers involved in the case had expressed racist sentiments. The reaction to the Simpson verdicts revealed the yawning chasm that separated white and black America, as most whites believed Simpson guilty, while a majority of African Americans felt that the not-guilty verdict was justified.

Immigration

Though Clinton signed the welfare reform bill into law, he explicitly denounced provisions that tightly restricted welfare benefits for legal and illegal immigrants alike. These measures, together with other GOP congressional initiatives like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and a proposal to declare English the country's "official language," reflected a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment as the numbers of newcomers climbed toward an all-time high. The Southwest, from Texas to California, felt the immigrant impact especially sharply, as Mexican migrants—by far the largest contingent of modern immigrants—concentrated heavily in that region. Though anti-immigrant sentiment galvanized many voters, it also risked alienating the country's rapidly growing Latino population.

Republicans

Trying to wring one more win out of the social issues that had underwritten two Reagan and one Bush presidential victories, the Republicans emphasized "family values" in 1992 and, as expected, nominated George H. W. Bush and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle for a second term. But Bush's listless campaign could not keep pace with the super-energetic and phenomenally articulate Clinton. Bush claimed credit for ending the Cold War and trumpeted his leadership role in the Persian Gulf War. But pocketbook problems as the economy dipped into recession swayed more voters than pride in past foreign-policy victories.

Art

Visual artists also felt the eclectic urge. Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Kara Walker combined old and new media to confront, confound, and even offend the viewer. Jeff Koons and Shepard Fairey borrowed industrial materials and pop culture imagery to blur the hidebound distinction between highbrow and lowbrow cultures. Their pastiches of disparate fragments, often presented in ironic fashion, came to symbolize postmodern art.

Criticism of the Republican Revolution

Welfare reform marked a landmark legislative victory for the so-called "Republican Revolution" in Congress. But if President Clinton had overplayed his mandate for liberal reform in 1993, Republicans proceeded to overplay their mandate for conservative retrenchment. Many Americans gradually came to feel that the Gingrich Republicans were bending their conservative bow too far, especially when the new Speaker advocated provocative ideas like sending the children of welfare families to orphanages. In a tense confrontation between the Democratic president and the Republican Congress over proposed cuts to Medicare and education spending, the federal government was forced to shut down for a total of twenty-seven days at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996. Congress and the president eventually agreed to a budget package, but not before the shutdown bred a backlash against the GOP that helped President Clinton rebound from his political near-death experience.

Counting Votes in Florida

What ensued was a five-week political standoff over how to count the votes in Florida. Democrats argued that some ballots were confusing or had been misread by machines and asked for recounts by hand in several counties. Republicans claimed that such recounts would amount to "changing the rules in the middle of the game" and thus thwart the rule of law. After weeks of legal bickering with the presidency in the balance, the Supreme Court finally intervened. By a five-to-four vote along partisan lines, the Court reasoned that since neither Florida's legislature nor its courts had established a uniform standard for evaluating disputed ballots, the hand counts amounted to an unconstitutional breach of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

Niche Nation- Media's Impact

When it came to popular arts—music, film, television— the postmodern cast of much late and turn-of-the-century work was even more pronounced, and for good reason. Basic changes in communications technology and media markets simultaneously enabled artists to mix disparate elements in new ways while rendering commercial popular culture itself evermore micro-targeted and niche-oriented. From the rise of cable television, which smashed the dominance of the Big Three broadcast networks, to the coming of the Internet, with its endless capacity to forge specialized networks of the like-minded, late-twentieth-century communications technology fragmented the consuming public in such a way as to give new voices the potential to find sustaining audiences.

Breakdown of the Nuclear Family

Women's full-scale entrance into the workforce— and the relative economic autonomy it brought them—inevitably affected family practices and structures, provoking passionate political conflicts over "family values." Indeed, the traditional nuclear family, once prized as the foundation of society and the nursery of the Republic, suffered heavy blows in the late twentieth century. The old ideal of a family with two parents, only one of whom worked, was now an obsolete way to picture the typical American household. By the 1990s one out of every two marriages ended in divorce. In the 1960s, 5 percent of all births were to unmarried women, but three decades later one out of four white babies, one out of three Latino babies, and two out of three African American babies were born to single mothers. But if the traditional family was increasingly rare, the family itself remained a bedrock of American society at the close of the twentieth century. Children in households led by a single parent, stepparent, or grandparent, as well as children with gay or lesbian parents, encountered a degree of acceptance that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. Teenage pregnancy, a key source of single parenthood, was on the decline after the mid-1990s, as were divorce rates. The family was not evaporating, but evolving into multiple, apparently viable forms.