After the success of the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt, which was set in San Francisco, dozens of feature films, TV movies, and television series were shot on location there. Mayor Joseph Alioto, a former attorney to movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn and Walt Disney, wooed Hollywood producers and trumpeted over $10 million in annual revenue from location shooting.

But he soon faced staunch opposition from famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the loudest voice among residents who bristled at the invasion of movie crews from rival Los Angeles. At stake were not only traffic and parking problems, but also San Francisco’s cherished image.

In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films and the popular TV series The Streets of San Francisco, Hollywood frequently depicted the city as a dangerous cesspool. Alioto sold Hollywood production as a form of tourist promotion for the city, but San Franciscans soon rallied against producers who took advantage of their hospitality only to slander the city on-screen.

As the Downtown Association of San Francisco put it, “If moviemakers persist in giving the impression that San Francisco is a crime-ridden city where police chases are an everyday occurrence, let them make their movies somewhere else.”

Despite its proximity to Los Angeles, San Francisco had only sporadically served as a location for Hollywood filmmakers in the 1950s and early 1960s. This changed late in the decade when location shooting became the dominant production method, as films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider took off while massive back lot productions like Camelot and Hello, Dolly! flopped.

Hollywood’s shift to youth-oriented films shot on location also corresponded with San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Which produced its own wave of media attention for producers to chase. Bullitt and another film, Petulia, both released in 1968, were the first commercial features shot entirely in San Francisco since the silent era, and their productions became the talk of the town as prominent socialites scored roles as extras. Bullitt soared at the box office, while reinventing the police genre and the car chase.

The first sign of disenchantment with Hollywood filmmaking stemmed from one of the most innocuous films of the era, What’s Up, Doc?, a throwback to screwball comedies of the 1930s. While shooting a car-chase finale in November 1971, filmmakers took few precautions and chipped the steps at Alta Plaza Park. This was no laughing matter for residents of the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood, as conveyed by the local headline, “Outrage at Alta Plaza.” The incident prompted the board of supervisors to consider greater scrutiny of the growing number of film productions in town.

Caen railed against “the chutzpah of these Hollywood invaders,” framing location shooting not as a local practice but as an encroachment of Los Angeles industry on San Francisco. Then he went a step further, directly tying the carelessness of filmmakers on location to their disregard in representing the city, particularly with the police genre. Figures like McMillan, Rock Hudson’s police commissioner in the television series, McMillan and Wife, were largely incompetent, but Dirty Harry was “a brute of a cop,” and other detective films like The Organization didn’t help the city’s image either.

Alioto worked to contain this early bout of negative publicity, which extended to the pages of Variety. He took the stage at the San Francisco premiere of Dirty Harry in December to assure filmmakers that, “We’ll continue to make pictures in San Francisco, and we’re not going to worry about a couple of chipped steps in Alta Plaza.” He soon put together a film committee, led by a local casting director, which conferred with local Screen Actors Guild and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees groups working to better organize and streamline production in the city.

But Alioto stood firmly on the side of Hollywood and remained personally invested in filmmaking. He courted producers in Los Angeles, and often met with visiting filmmakers in person. Deputy Mayor John DeLuca helped secure locations for major productions. This embrace of Hollywood made him vulnerable to more direct attacks by Caen.

The San Francisco shooting boom intensified in 1972 when The Streets of San Francisco became the first weekly network series filmed extensively in the city since The Lineup in the 1950s. In 1973, three of the six features shooting in town were police films, and a fourth was a mafia picture. Violence dominated the city’s screen presence, ranging from a machine-gun massacre on a bus in The Laughing Policeman to “a sniper spraying bullets around campus” for an episode of Streets.

Publicity photo picturing David Wayne and Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But, once again, it was a comedy, albeit a police comedy, that drew public outcry. Freebie and the Bean featured a pair of cops, who “were hopelessly inept or corrupt,” according to Police Sergeant Bill McCarthy, who oversaw filmmaking in the city. The police department, which was responsible for safety and security during location shoots, refused to endorse the San Francisco setting. They withheld official badges and decals for the movie detectives, and all references to the city had to be struck from the script. (Of course, any viewer with a basic knowledge of San Francisco could identify the city in the background.)

Fatefully, the script also called for a spectacular car chase (a staple of police films following Bullitt and The French Connection) in which a car would fall from the lower deck of the Embarcadero Freeway. Working on a tight schedule and further delayed by November rains, filmmakers convinced the Department of Public Works to make an ill-advised decision, closing off the Stockton Street Tunnel during morning rush hour.

Caen pulled no punches, opening his column by noting the “honest taxpayers” who were forced to be late for work. He mentioned another incident where ten wrecked cars parked at one location blocked residents from pulling out of their parking spaces. He added the following exchange:

   Fumed one irate woman, “who needs these people, anyway?”

   Cop: “Alioto”

In a short, pithy column, Caen bluntly suggested that the regular citizens of San Francisco were the ones paying for Alioto’s movie aspirations. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, the future mayor and U.S. senator, joined the fray, suggesting new legislation to set rules on location filmmaking. Supervisor Dorothy von Beroldingen threatened to hold public hearings on location shooting. The film committee and labor leaders managed to convince the board not to proceed any further, but the days of easy cooperation were over.

San Francisco’s appeal for filmmakers had largely rested on that cooperation, in combination with its unique, scenic cityscape. By 1975, a glut of police films had all but exhausted its novelty as a location. Meanwhile, public enthusiasm waned and logistical problems multiplied as a small, densely populated city struggled to accommodate so many production crews. Following the blockbuster The Towering Inferno and Francis Ford Coppola’s critically acclaimed The Conversation, filmmaking in the city declined through the second half of the 1970s. As generous incentives flooded in from other regions eager to attract filmmakers, San Francisco no longer had to worry about Hollywood invaders.

In the end, the most powerful handgun in the world failed to put a dent in San Francisco’s reputation. The postcard image survived the harrowing depictions of Dirty Harry, its sequels, and its many imitators. The city moved on, and so did the movies.

San Francisco’s production boom preceded the aggressive, international competition for location production that has defined Hollywood filmmaking ever since. Places that succeed, like Canada or Louisiana, still weigh the cost versus the benefit, although largely in financial terms.

San Francisco raised a rather different question about Hollywood production: What is at stake in the way that movies portray a given place, and are filmmakers accountable for that depiction?

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Pildas hadn’t looked at the pictures in years, until a curious reporter, who had heard about his work, approached him and put some of his photos online in 2013. He realized people were interested in the lively and sometimes seedy world that he had captured. These historic black-and-white photos are now on display at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in “Hollywood Boulevard—The ’70s,” an exhibition of 50 images, some of which can be seen in the gallery’s storefront windows on the very street the photos were taken.

Pildas first got to know the neighborhood in 1971, when he was an art director at Capitol Records. He’d walk to Musso and Frank Grill for lunch or to a newsstand on Cahuenga Boulevard for a magazine and take in all the action on the street.

“I got to see all this humanity,” Pildas remembers. “People tripping down the street, hippies, hookers, drug addicts, and people dressed to the nines in middle of the day—either left over from the night before or because they were on their way to an audition.”

He left the job at Capitol Records but returned to the neighborhood in 1972 with his camera. He took portraits of people standing on the Walk of Fame or in front of a photo booth, holding up the little strip of photos that the machine had just spit out.

He also took a series of “sneaky” photos of people sitting on bus benches, by pre-focusing the camera, jumping in front of them, and taking pictures. “I was there and gone before anybody could object,” he says.

There was a serendipitous element to some of the images. In “See’s Candies,” Pildas was looking to create some color contrast in a scene of two white hippies dressed in all white clothing, standing in front of a stark white storefront. Then, he saw an African-American man in a dark jacket and pants coming down the street. “When he got right between the two guys, I clicked the shutter,” Pildas explained.

Pildas is thinking about returning with his camera to Hollywood Boulevard, a part of Los Angeles that he loves—especially the area around Cahuenga, where you’re likely to find head shops, trashy lingerie stores, and unoccupied storefronts these days. “There are still people on street—drug addicts, homeless people,” he says. “You can still find the gritty part of society.”

“Hollywood Boulevard—The ’70s” is on view through September 13, 2015, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

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But in the summer of 1966, after reading the exploits of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, the thought of returning to college seemed a waste of my youth. Three weeks into my junior year, I dropped my classes, “borrowed” my parents’ car while they were on a six-week trip, and headed to San Francisco. On the day they were set to return, I drove back home to San Diego.

My parents went berserk when I told them I would not be following the preordained game plan for my life. They figured a college degree would make me more likely to marry a Naval officer. They wanted me to stay in school and live at home in Coronado so they could keep an eye on me. But that was the last thing I wanted for myself. Like Thomas Wolfe, I couldn’t “go home again.”

I decided to sign up for the war on poverty. In December, I was accepted into the Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) program along with 45 other predominately middle-class, white recruits between the ages of 18 and 26.

During the six-week training in San Diego, an offhand comment by a community organizer proved to be the most accurate and memorable lesson I learned. He told us returning to our middle-class neighborhoods with a different perspective on poverty would be the most important contribution we could make. Soon after his remarks, I expressed concern regarding my ability to help resolve housing issues for a Spanish-speaking single mother I had been assigned to assist. My training supervisor said the phone calls I made for her, with my Anglo-sounding name and voice, would open doors the woman could never budge on her own. The phrase “white privilege” hadn’t been coined yet, but at 20 years old, I got my first inkling of what it meant.

My assignment in the greater Los Angeles area was to Venice’s predominately African-American Oakwood neighborhood. As a VISTA volunteer, my primary task was to survey people in the community about home ownership and income. We hoped our effort would culminate in a report that demonstrated the need to maintain affordable housing for working-class families. Home ownership was low in the area, but apartments and small houses provided affordable smog-free living, close to the beach.

The year I moved there, local community leaders called Venice “the last oceanfront ghetto in America.” Directly to the south, Marina del Rey had opened two years earlier as the world’s largest man-made small craft harbor for luxury boats. The proximity of privilege struck fear in the hearts of nearby working-class and under-employed Venice residents. The drab, seedy Venice neighborhoods might become fodder for further redevelopment of the coastline.

My first night in Venice in late March 1967 was jarring. After attending a party for a departing volunteer, three of us walked back to the rented house I shared with two female volunteers. My companions included a street-wise New Yorker and an 18-year-old Princeton dropout from Texas. Within minutes, a group of eight or so adolescent boys stopped us to ask for a match. The New Yorker whispered to keep walking, but the Texan chose to stop and talk. Within a few seconds, he was on the ground, being kicked. As we rushed back to help, I felt disbelief and anger. In my world, friendly people were not hurt by 12-year-olds on bikes.

The boys backed off, and we were able to get our bleeding friend to his feet. The New Yorker yelled, “Run!” and we started down the street, pursued by the boys. Just like in the movies, we banged on a few doors and were rebuffed, then ran up a flight of stairs. The thud of footsteps was close behind when a woman opened the door to her apartment, and we were safe.

A couple of days later the Texan flew back home, with an eye injury that required specialized care. Soon after, there was national (and even international) coverage of the assault. It turned out the Texan was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s nephew. He eventually returned to California and holed up in the attic bedroom of his girlfriend, who was my roommate. He rarely ventured into the community again.

Along with the housing survey, I volunteered at the public school down the street. One of my tasks was to read stories to the younger students. A book the children especially enjoyed was about John Henry, the African-American folk hero. A few of the children on our block would chant X-rated ditties to themselves while they played; I hoped the ballad about the steel-driving man would stick in their heads and replace those words. Similar to John Henry, their parents had to hammer away to build something constructive in the face of the poverty and disillusionment they faced every day.

Like most of our neighbors, my roommates and I lived in a clapboard house. It had three bedrooms, was four blocks from the ocean, and rented for $100 per month. It was built in the early 1900s and aside from the attic, had an expansive kitchen, separate dining room, wood-paneled windows, and hardwood floors.

We furnished the house with cast-offs from the street or Goodwill, but local neighborhood children thought everything we had was beautiful. A small house in the back was supposedly occupied by Venice’s most successful drug dealer/pimp, according to undercover drug agents. They wanted us to conduct surveillance of him. We said no, but finally understood why expectant-looking men frequently knocked at our front door in the evening.

The small house where we lived is gone now, and the property alone is worth well over a million dollars. Apartment buildings have been transformed into luxury condominiums. The Oakwood area of Venice is no longer the last oceanfront ghetto in America; it looks like a wealthy and quaint beach town.

But the experience I had living in Venice, talking to people who struggled to make ends meet while maintaining hope for the future, never left me. I spent my career as a community college counselor, in awe of underprivileged students who chose college as the path to a better life. We did not win the war on poverty, but many of us returned home with an appreciation and knowledge of the daily battles fought by so many Americans.

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By 1976, when I was eight years old, my parents realized it was cheaper to buy a house in a better school district than to keep sending three kids to private school. Beverly Hills had good public schools and Spanish-style homes from the ’20s. They settled on a Spanish-style house at 438 S. Rodeo Drive, south of Olympic Boulevard, and, not long after buying it, took us to see it. It didn’t look 1920s. There were white shag carpets, sliding glass doors, and heavy gold paint everywhere. And no pool! What were they thinking?

By the time we moved in, the house had changed a lot. Goodbye, shag carpet; hello, dark wood floor. Goodbye, sliding glass; hello, French doors. Goodbye, gold; hello, white. The house was done up in 1970s style, and our dining table was a giant redwood trunk with a thick piece of glass on top. The couches were huge and overstuffed, with deco lines and gray flannel upholstery that was always at risk from kids and dogs. I loved the kitchen. It had two wall ovens. Two! Homemade beef jerky going slow in one while dinner cooked in the other. The counters had a built-in motor for NuTone appliances, but the previous owners had made off with the attachments, so my friends and I found a new use for the motor, putting our fingers on it and running it faster and faster in a game of chicken.

The new house, now restored, was better suited to the tastes of my parents, who both came from the East and were used to older residences. My dad, a New Yorker by birth, was an on-screen character actor and voiceover guy. During the ’70s and ’80s you couldn’t go a week without seeing him on TV or hearing his voice on the radio. My mother grew up in South Carolina and then went to Parsons School of Design in New York in the early ’50s. Some time during those years she met Jasper Johns, who drew some sketches of her. (She was fond of saying, “If I’d known he was going to be ‘Jasper Johns’ I probably wouldn’t have thrown them out. Oh, well.”) She was a costume designer, mostly for plays and movies, and I loved going thrift (not vintage) shopping on Melrose with her.

Beverly Hills in the mid-1970s was no longer a small town, but some of that atmosphere remained. You might see Mel Tormé at Food King on Cañon or Fred Astaire at the post office on Santa Monica. Everyone went to the same dentist, and all the birthday presents came from the same toy store (you knew it by the wrapping paper). The women at Saks knew my mother’s name (“Hello, Mrs. Oppenheimer”). We walked to school with our friends and stopped at Castle Liquor for candy. We roller-skated through Century City, past the Shubert Theatre and into the mall. You didn’t need money at either the Century City Gelson’s or Owen’s Market on Pico. They’d look up your family’s account on the Rolodex and send a bill.

I was lucky with playmates. My best friend lived directly across the street. Four other pals lived on my block. Another four lived on the streets on either side of ours. We’d play out in front of the house, roller-skating up and down the streets–from Pico to Olympic–and the only thing we had to worry about was falling. We’d take the bus to Westwood or walk up into the shopping area alone. It all felt very safe.

My brother, the oldest of us kids, started at Beverly Hills High in his junior year, my older sister as a freshman. In an amazing show of sisterly love, she’d let me, seven years younger, tag along with her and her friends after school. We’d go to the Clifton’s Cafeteria in the Century City Mall. Or she’d take me to 99-cent double features at the Lorraine Theater, where we saw Singin’ In The Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Sometimes we went to Flippers Roller Rink at the corner of Santa Monica and La Cienega.

When you compare it to now, the pressure to be “cool” or “in” back then was negligible. MTV, which came along a few years later, changed things. Trends used to be confined to neighborhoods or regions. But MTV made them global. Suddenly, you had to have the right pants, right shoes, right purse.

I started at Beverly Vista, one of the four elementary schools, in third grade. We used to say that the snobbiest kids went to Hawthorne; next up was El Rodeo; and then Beverly Vista. The “poor kids” went to Horace Mann. Yes, I know: ridiculous. Beverly Vista had a mix of incomes–from single parents living in apartments to families in houses (some fancier than others). I don’t think anyone wondered where their next meal was coming from, but I know that some of my friends didn’t have as much extra income as some others.

As small-town-like as Beverly Hills felt in my day-to-day, I knew about its reputation in the wider world. Giving my address to fellow campers at the end of the year always felt pretty awkward, especially the “Rodeo Drive” bit. And saying, “Oh no, not the fancy part! We’re south of Olympic!” didn’t carry much weight, either.

That I lived in a very wealthy part of town became much clearer in high school. You’d see classmates get new BMWs for their 16th birthdays. The troubles kids got into were fancier, too. Half the girls were getting pregnant (and then un-pregnant) or acquiring eating disorders or doing cocaine. But one thing I appreciate now is that Beverly Hills High put such a strong emphasis on academics. This was true not only of teachers and staff but of other students as well. Being smart was cool. Sure, if you had the right clothes, car, or drugs, being stupid would work too, but smart was best.

One change to the city was a big influx of refugees (albeit very wealthy refugees) from Iran after the revolution of 1979. The adults in the neighborhood took more of an interest in it than we kids did, and some of those adults took a dim view of the gaudy new mansions that were getting built amid streets of little bungalows. As kids, though, we didn’t really see much to care about. At Beverly Vista, if we weren’t going to be friends, it wasn’t because you were from Iran. There were way more important reasons not to be friends–such as liking Rush instead of Journey.

High school was different. A lot of the Persians from the other elementary schools were competitive and cliquish, and non-Persians weren’t let in easily. You’d hear a lot of Farsi in the halls, along with new colloquialisms like “Fuck you, you fucking dude fuck” delivered in noticeably foreign inflections. There was an “us-against-them” attitude that went both ways, and the cultural interplay could get pretty odd. One girl had a wedding during the spring break of her junior year. It was an arranged marriage. But in a tribute to her Beverly Hills lifestyle and the 1980s, she wore a white leather wedding dress from North Beach Leather on Sunset.

Recently, Beverly Hills lost a fight to prevent the Los Angeles subway system from tunneling under Beverly Hills High School, but the resistance to the project was characteristic of a place that has always had a bunker mentality when it comes to the rest of world. Its residents fought hard to stop a 101-to-405 connector freeway that was supposed to bisect the city roughly along the path of Santa Monica Boulevard. The freight lines that once ran down Santa Monica Boulevard ceased operation in the 1980s. Beverly Hills residents pay a premium to live there and go to school there, and they don’t want it to be disrupted. Most of the time, they get their way.

My parents sold the house on Rodeo decades ago. Today, I live in East Hollywood, and, as much as I loved growing up in Beverly Hills, I can’t imagine ever living there again. The Westside feels different to me now. There’s more traffic, more attitude. Besides, I’m nostalgic by nature, and no one wants to be with the woman who says, “Oh, that’s where Camp Beverly Hills used to be.” That’s almost as much of a nuisance as a subway tunnel. So my departure should probably be considered a gift to my old hometown–that once–wonderful, and maybe still wonderful, place to be a kid.

Jenny Seta lives in Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of Allie_Caulfied.

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With four small kids and few modern appliances (air-conditioning and dishwashers remained mysterious to me until my teens), my mother hired an African-American woman to help her with the cooking and cleaning a few afternoons a week. At the end of her first day, she gathered her coat and purse and said goodbye. On her way out the door, she opened her purse for my mother to examine. My mother, a left-liberal daughter of Carmel, was stunned–and horrified.

I entered the 1970s focused on the one thing boys my age in North Carolina agreed was most important: basketball. I played for the team at my liberal private school, founded decades before school desegregation. Several of my teammates were black, with robust Afros, so we had some fun with the brand new “white-flight” academies we sometimes played against. We’d all run on to opponents’ courts for warm-ups muttering black-power chants, just to enjoy the stares from the small-town home crowds. This made the white kids on our team certain we were cool. Who knows what our black teammates actually thought of us, amid the ample confusions and complications of middle-school life, but they went along with the posturing.

What we all had some sense of was that the world we lived in was very different from the world of our parents. Private prejudice hardly disappeared, but discrimination in public life was rapidly losing its acceptability, even in the South. The biggest changes came in the 1970s. “The Sixties” actually happened in the Seventies for the vast majority of Americans far from Greenwich Village, Berkeley, and Haight-Ashbury.

Building out from the successes of the civil rights movement, egalitarianism and social inclusiveness seeped through American culture in the 1970s. A new wave of non-European immigrants and refugees washed ashore, mostly from Latin America and Asia. Disabled children found formal inclusion in public school classrooms; a 1975 law required that they be educated in the “least restrictive environment.” And gays and lesbians began their long climb to today’s open inclusion, even in the U.S. military. The first gay-pride march unfolded in New York in 1970, and the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its list of “mental disorders” in 1973.

The largest changes of that momentous decade came to the largest “minority” group: women. Girls also had a basketball team at my school in 1970, and they shared our gym. But they played a different game. They used six players, and two had to remain on either side of midcourt–presumably so they wouldn’t have to run too hard. Girls were still to be protected. They were to “glisten, not sweat.”

The passage of Title IX in 1972 began to put an end to this. Girls and young women were now accorded equal access to athletic facilities and opportunities. The percentage of females participating in school sports skyrocketed. By the end of the 1970s, being athletic had become a mainstream part of girls’ lives in America. In combination with the sexual revolution and the spread of information about women’s health, such physicality suggested a changed understanding of American female identity.

Legal forms of female exclusion ended in the 1970s. In 1973, the Supreme Court banned the listing of jobs in male and female categories. Elite private universities and boarding schools began admitting women, as did the nation’s military service academies. The percentage of women in graduate and professional schools shot up. “First woman” stories abounded in the professions during this decade: first woman rabbi, first woman Episcopal priest, first woman commercial airline pilot, and, in 1981, the first woman U.S. Supreme Court justice.

The erosion of male-female segregation in work and many other spheres of life affected nearly every American family. Before the 1970s, female authority over men in the workplace was extremely rare; today it is commonplace. By the time I entered college in the Bay Area in 1976, living in a coed dormitory did not seem exciting or peculiar for more than a few days. There was little that was romantic or sexy about the 7:00 a.m. appearance of the other sex on the way to the shower in the other bathroom.

If “racist” and “sexist” became serious insults in the 1970s, the same decade saw one other momentous shift: a steep decline in Americans’ faith in government and a turn toward free-market principles. The country became more economically conservative, in other words, at the very same time that it turned more socially liberal.

The traumas of that decade–defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, oil crises, and stagflation–convinced most Americans that the country was badly off track. Activist government of the New Deal kind, after 40 years, lost its credibility. Citizens looked increasingly to the private rather than the public sector to solve big problems.

With the end of the draft in 1973, market logic now determined who would defend the nation in the new all-volunteer military–whoever wanted the job, or had no better employment option. California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 lit a national tax revolt wildfire that has helped de-legitimate taxes ever since. The new spirit was for letting private citizens keep their own money. A tide of deregulation began in 1975 with the airline industry. This has since utterly changed the experience of flying, which is now cheaper but more crowded and less pleasant. The enthusiasm for deregulation of the financial industry helped bring on our current economic downturn in 2008.

The ascent of free-market principles contributed to both liberating and coarsening American life in the 1970s. The counterculture’s slogan of “Do your own thing” met the libertarian desire to eliminate government constraints on individual freedom. The impact was not a victory for social or religious conservatism. Deregulation and free markets did not “conserve” anything, especially not communities. Unrestrained capitalism is instead one of the greatest engines of change in modern history. “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they do what they please,” warned the originator of modern social conservatism, Edmund Burke, two centuries earlier. “We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.”

Free-market enthusiasts didn’t wait to see. They instead encouraged letting people “do what they please” with their money. Two industries long associated with vice began, as a result, to metastasize during the 1970s. First, gambling spread in the form of new state lotteries and the first casinos outside Nevada, beginning in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1978. Today gambling opportunities have seeped into nearly every corner of the American landscape, and most citizens don’t give it a second thought.

Second, pornography emerged from the shadows to become much more mainstream. Deep Throat played in regular theaters in 1972 (including on my college campus four years later), and three years after that the invention of video-cassette recorders let people view in private whatever they wished. Today a smorgasbord of pornography awaits any cable television customer or hotel guest.

The legacy of the 1970s liberating and coarsening of American culture has shaped the contours of our society today, as any conscientious parent can tell you, with a sigh. The old expression, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” might be better expressed today as “What happens in Vegas, goes everywhere else, too.” I think of this as the “Nevada-ization” of American life.

One final result of the rise of free-market principles over the past 35 years has been the growing gaps of wealth between richer and poorer Americans. Globalization and technological innovation have also contributed to inequality. The reduction of taxes and the withering of the welfare-state safety net, along with decades of emphasis on liberating capital, have made the United States an even better country in which to be rich–and an even tougher nation in which to be poor. At the same time that we have become more equal in social terms, we have become less equal in economic terms. This explains some of voters’ confusion about whether we are a more liberal or more conservative nation than we used to be. We are both.

How should we feel about this? Social egalitarianism appears to be deeply popular–Americans wish fervently to believe that their land is one of opportunity for all, an idea bolstered by continuous immigration. Explicit discrimination against any group of people is widely reviled. Even many conservatives proudly noted that Barack Obama’s 2008 election proved the fairness and opportunity of American society.

Growing economic inequality is more divisive and troubling. For some on the right, it is natural: a result, they believe, of hard work and innate ability. But for a much larger number of citizens, the decline of a vast and economically secure middle class seems to undercut the very promise and achievement of American life. Whatever its limitations, the Occupy Wall Street movement has articulated the growing unease with rampant market-driven individualism, unbalanced by any larger sense of the common good and collective purpose. Is the United States ultimately just a land of individuals concerned primarily with piling up individual riches and achievements? This was never the goal of either traditional conservatives or liberals, both of whom were deeply committed to the quality of the communities in which they lived. I lived with both those kinds of folks when I was growing up in pre-1970s North Carolina, and the older ones among them–now gone on–would be ill at ease in contemporary America’s egocentric culture.

Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann is the E.N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He taught previously for 12 years at Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2011).

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

*Photo courtesy of Reading/Simpson.

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