DID BIDEN’S MEETING WITH CARTER CHANGE THE TIMELINE? Nightly’s Myah Ward emails from North Carolina: I was driving from Charlotte to Boone, N.C., for my brother’s college graduation on Tuesday when I realized it wouldn’t be an easy task to fill up my gas tank. Most of the stations I passed were filled with lines of cars and had more pouring in from the main road. If they weren’t slammed, there were yellow empty bags covering the pumps. I had half a tank and decided to wait until I made it to a smaller mountain town. When I pulled off the highway, the gas station only had premium gas left. It cost $50 — instead of the usual $25 — to fill up. An older man who looked to be in his seventies had five massive, multi-gallon jugs and was filling them up with premium gas, one by one. I wasn’t surprised by the shortage. I knew there would be some ripple effects from the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. But the extent to which it’s affecting the East Coast, and particularly North Carolina where roughly 70 percent of stations are out of gas, mainly has to do with panic buying. The White House tried to calm the situation today, asking people not to hoard fuel. The pipeline restarted operations today. Being in my twenties, I didn’t have flashbacks to the 1970s as I panicked over where I might get my gas. But as I watched the older man to my left hoard the fuel, I wondered if he was scarred from two oil crises that decade. I called University of Nebraska-Lincoln historian Thomas Borstelmann, the author of “The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality,” to ask if history — gas lines, inflation fears, conflict in the Middle East — is repeating itself. This conversation has been edited. Are we reliving the 1970s? No. There are ways in which certain patterns do come back, but they always come back in different forms and different circumstances. So things can look recognizable, but they’re not the same. But does this gasoline shortage feel familiar to you? The American obsession with access to automobiles, and to endless, inexpensive fuel for those automobiles is an enduring 100-year pattern now, of Americans feeling that that’s something close to our constitutional rights. And our failure for 50 years now to do anything serious about becoming much more efficient in our use of fuel and moving past internal combustion engines. From a bigger perspective, which is what historians do, the gas shortage looks like a shorter-term problem. It could get much bigger and could become national, but that has to do with larger questions about the quality of our infrastructure and the danger of ongoing attacks, Russian-backed or Chinese-backed or simply criminal-backed. We missed the opportunity in the ’70s to seriously reduce our usage of fossil fuels. How about inflation fears? Inflation that emerged in the early 1970s, in ’73 and ’74, right when the first oil crisis kicked in as a result of the 1973 war between Israel and its neighbors, that pattern of inflation was specific to the two factors: the spending on the Vietnam War, on top of the spending on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. And that double whammy is what really, without increasing taxation to pay for either of those, created an inflationary spiral that lasted essentially for nine years, until it was beaten back in the early 1980s. That’s not where we’re at now, to put it mildly. We’ve also seen a lot of social unrest this year, particularly surrounding police killings of Black people. It always feels like we’re both getting worse and getting better at the same time. For anybody who’s of my generation, it’s wildly obvious that we are much more effectively integrated here in the public sphere, at least, racially integrated and a more diverse and tolerant society on matters of gender and sex and everything else, in ways that would be unrecognizable. If you brought back somebody who died in 1961, they would be stunned at what we look like in 2021. And they would be deeply impressed by it. But then they would also be like, “Really? The cops are still killing Black people? We thought maybe you guys would stop doing that.” Do you think we remember the 1970s unfairly? Yes. In my book, I’m making an argument that we misremember the ’70s in some really profoundly problematic ways. People thought of it for at least for 30 or 40 years afterward as just kind of a lost period of people with bad haircuts and bad disco music, sideburns and those ugly wide ties. And then also of defeats. Political defeats in terms of the Watergate scandal in the U.S. and the loss of respect for public figures. The military defeat in Vietnam. The economic defeats of inflation and stagflation, really. Plus unemployment being very high. But the other part of the story is that there’s this vigorous reassertion of reformism that emerges out of there. You can’t be a female person and think that the ’70s is anything but an amazingly exciting time period. Because that’s the first time that women are beginning to be treated like full human beings in this country. To see the ’70s as a time of defeat is a male view of the world. My argument essentially is that the U.S. became a much more egalitarian place in its public sphere in the 1970s — more accepting, more tolerant of gay people as well. So it becomes a less repressive place, but it also becomes less equal. The U.S. has become economically less and less equal since the 1970s, in terms of the distribution of wealth, in terms of patterns of salaries and wages as well. So we’ve become both more equal sort of socially, culturally, and less equal economically. That happens in the ’70s, as I see it.
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