Quiet Change

...Carroll's numbing recitation of the decade's disasters is hardly upbeat...

...Carroll's most persuasive passages assess the impact of the intentional communities that multiplied in the 1970s: extended families and co-ops, the gay and lesbian networks in major cities, even the floating communities of interest that announce their presence with citizen band radios and bumperstickers...

...David Armstrong (David Armstrong wrote "A Trumpet to Arms," a study of the alternative media in the 1960s and 1970s...

...A thoughtful scrutiny of the 1970s, rather than a grudging backward glance, reveals a more complicated picture...

...The thematic split in It Seemed Like Nothing Happened is embedded in the book's structure...

...In Carroll's democratic vision, ordinary people make social change: subtly, quietly, inch-by-inch...

...Such communities, Carroll argues, are part of the search for an "anchor" which has obsessed Americans since they were set adrift from established institutions by the sea-changes of the 1960s...

...That duality—the conflict between Left and Right, ins and outs, individualism and the yearning for community—is the subject of historian Peter Carroll's reexamination of the 1970s...

...His writing on government is competent but unexceptional...

...Carroll cites the phenomenal success of Roots as one manifestation of that search, along with the popular revival of interest in American history inspired by the Bicentennial, the preservation of old buildings that in earlier decades would have been unblinkingly leveled for parking lots, and the surge of documentary films on the hidden histories of women and radicals...

...Nobody," concluded Time, "is apt to look back on the 1970s as the good old days...

...Yet he is cautiously optimistic in recounting the successes of progressive movements of the 1970s and speculating on what they mean for the American future...

...It Seemed Like Nothing Happened is useful for challenging the facile dismissal of the 1970s as a know-nothing decade...

...There was Watergate and Jonestown, the energy crisis and the hostage crisis...

...What Tom Wolfe branded as the "Me Decade" also saw the rebirth of co-ops, collectives, and extended families that attempted to redefine community...

...If the scramble for survival carried many Americans into mysticism and fantasy, it has taken others to more earthly destinations...

...The decade in which the mass political activism of the 1960s supposedly imploded saw the rapid growth of feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, environmentalism, and militant movements among American Indians, His-panics, and Asian Americans...

...he convincingly chronicles the turbulence just below the placid surface of the American mainstream...

...The long-term drop in voter participation, Carroll argues, reflects "disenchantment with the political process, not apathy," among citizens who make "an explicitly political statement by withholding their franchise...

...Carroll punches up his sometimes slow-moving narrative with observations from ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations...

...Most Americans are familiar with the mass media's dismissal of the 1970s: that supposedly narcissistic decade of cocaine and cults, when nothing of value happened, and catastrophic public events shattered private lives with depressing regularity...

...In this context, Carroll writes, "History became an emotional commitment, a conversation, the feel of polished wood...

...In his writing about life on the bottom, however, Carroll's prose comes alive...

...But more than that, it is a thoughtful refutation of the thesis—recently propounded in Richard Nixon's Leaders—that great men make history...

...Carroll alternates chapters about established institutions such as Congress and the Presidency with examinations of life in the "alternative cultures" of women, workers, and minorities...

...There is nothing here we don't already know, perhaps because official culture is reported on so minutely—if often uncritically—in the mass media...

...When he quotes an unemployed steel worker telling Jimmy Carter at an "Energy Roundtable" that "I don't feel much like talking about energy and foreign policy, I am concerned about how I am going to survive," we are taken into the heart of daily life in these United States...

...The attempted assassinations of President Ford dramatized not merely individual madness, as conventional wisdom had it, but deep-rooted rage over inequity and inaction...