# data[].attributes.body
The baby boom generation is aging and the size of families are decreasing. The working class is smaller than when the peak of the workforce was of that generation. The result is that the retiring generation isn’t able to receive their social security or other federal benefits. The reason is due to the workforce not being large enough to support them. The result is action from that group.

Berkowitz, E.D. (2011). The 1970’s as policy watershed. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/the-1970s-as-policy-watershed/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
(Prepared for the 2005 Meetings of the American Political Science Association)
In 1974, the expansive social policy system that had prevailed in the postwar era ended, and a more restrictive system that would characterize the rest of the seventies and the early eighties began to take its place. Although important programs, such as Social Security, continued to grow during the seventies, policymakers increasingly looked for ways to limit their growth. Still, the new system afforded many opportunities to nurture social welfare policies in ways that had a profound effect on America. The commitment to Social Security was largely "locked in" by an arrangement made in the expansive era that could not be broken in the restrictive era without great political cost. At the same time, institutions that were not as responsive to current economic conditions as were Congress or the president-such as the courts and the agencies that wrote regulations for civil rights laws- helped to fuel a continuing rights revolution in the face of economic adversity. In a sense, these institutions lagged behind more popularly elected entities in their perception of and response to social problems. After 1974 the causes of welfare reform and national health insurance suffered. Even as that happened, however, Congress passed civil rights and other laws that made symbolic statements or mandated private sector or local activities.
The Nature of the Postwar System
The typical arrangement of a successful postwar social welfare program involved an active federal bureaucracy that was perceived as competent by the general public, a sympathetic group of congressmen with the power to legislate on behalf of the entire Congress and often to appropriate money as well, and a well-organized and geographically dispersed advocacy group. Beyond exhibiting this familiar pattern, successful programs tended to win public acceptance because their supporters created a convincing rationale for the program that meshed with more general societal goals. Hence, the vocational rehabilitation program, created in 1920 but enjoying its greatest period of growth in the postwar era, offered social services to disabled individuals as a means of facilitating the employment of the handicapped. Proponents could argue that the program turned welfare recipients into tax payers and therefore the program represented a good investment of federal dollars. Bureaucrats even developed an argument that for every dollar spent, the program returned more than ten dollars in tax revenues. Furthermore, the program boasted a charismatic administrator named Mary Switzer, a career civil servant with a reputation for bureaucratic competence and a long institutional memory, who used her charm to cultivate good relations with influential congressmen such as Senator Lister Hill (D-Alabama) and Representative John Fogarty (D-Rhode Island). The trio of Hill, Fogarty, and Switzer remained in place for most of the fifties and sixties, and their power over the program was not affected by who was president or which party occupied the White House. Indeed, Switzer and her program did particularly well in gaining appropriations and new authorizing legislation during the Eisenhower administration. A strong political base, anchored by the vocational rehabilitation administrators in each of the fifty states and by the many educational and medical recipients of vocational rehabilitation grants, assured a continuing demand for the program's expansion.

Other examples of successful postwar social welfare programs included the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Social Security program. The NIH enjoyed a situation similar to that of vocational rehabilitation. People regarded federal investment in medical research as an important contributor to the nation's continuing economic growth. Fogarty and Hill, coached by NIH administrator James Shannon and encouraged by medical researchers and hospitals spread far and wide, made sure that the appropriations for the program increased and its bureaucratic reach, measured by such things as new institutes of health to cover particular diseases or parts of the body, expanded.

Social Security became the classic example of a successful postwar social welfare program. In 1979 Martha Derthick provided a particularly cogent portrait of this program that illustrated the reasons for its success. The program benefited from bureaucratic continuity that allowed program administrators to develop strong loyalty to the agency's mission. Program administrators collaborated with the largely permanent membership of the Ways and Means and Finance Committees, even to the extent of writing the committees' reports and making the committees' estimates of the costs of legislation. The program itself played upon an ambiguity that made it equally congenial to conservatives- who saw it as a program, rewarding wage earners, in aid of the preservation of capitalism-and liberals who recognized it as the nation's best way to expand the welfare state. An absence of political conflict was a tremendous aid to the program's expansion. So was the fact that the program had a built-in source of funds through dedicated payroll taxes and was tied to the growth of the economy. As wages rose, the collection of Social Security taxes increased. Since Social Security actuaries made the conservative assumption of level wage growth (and since Congress and the Social Security Administration used the same actuary), surpluses nearly always developed in the fifties and sixties, and these surpluses were spent on program expansion. A historian might add that this expansive system did not take hold until 1950, but the pattern held firm between 1950 and 1972.
Nixon's Approach to Social Policy
When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, little about the systems governing these programs changed. Although some of the program administrators, such as James Shannon of the NIH, reached retirement age, many of the administrators remained in place during Nixon's first term. Robert Ball, the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration who exercised considerable influence over the program and maintained close relationships with key legislators such as House Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills, kept his job as Social Security Commissioner until 1973, even though it was a presidential appointment. Democrats continued to maintain a tight control over Congress.

Nixon took it for granted that he would need to make proposals for welfare reform, national health insurance, and the expansion of Social Security. He realized, however, that, whatever he did, Congress could outbid him. As a consequence, it would be hard for him to claim credit for any social welfare initiative, a situation that reinforced his natural tendency to concentrate on foreign, rather than domestic, affairs.

Despite the difficulties, Nixon made a series of novel proposals in the social welfare field. Since each of these proposals dealt with a specific problem, each was different. As a general proposition, though, the President put forward programs that minimized the discretion of political and professional groups whom the President perceived as disproportionately Democrat in their membership. For this professional or political discretion, the president proposed to substitute cash grants, rather than services controlled by social workers; automatic benefit levels, rather than benefits left to the discretion of Congress; and state, rather than federal, administration of programs. Many of the president's proposals relied on economic incentives to induce socially acceptable behavior. A guaranteed annual income scheme would, for example, eliminate incentives for families to separate in order to claim welfare benefits, cut down on the arbitrary influence of social workers, and contain economic inducements, in the form of relatively low marginal tax rates, for people to work. The welfare constituency would change from single mothers, who were largely Democrats, to the working poor, who might be induced to join the Republican coalition. Health maintenance organizations, another concept promoted by the Nixon administration, substituted prospective health care reimbursement for retrospective reimbursement in an effort to create incentives for health care providers to reduce costs.
Social Security in the Nixon Administration
The Nixon administration did not neglect Social Security. The novel idea in that field involved automatic cost of living adjustments. Instead of waiting for Congress to pass a benefit increase, the elderly, disabled, and dependent on Social Security would be assured of benefits that were automatically adjusted to changes in the cost of living. In this manner Nixon hoped to take away the credit for Social Security benefit increases from Congress and claim some of the credit himself. In addition, he could argue, as many Republicans did, that the move would help to rationalize Social Security and replace the arbitrary system then in existence. Between 1958 and 1965, for example, Congress, preoccupied with the battle over Medicare, did not raise general Social Security benefits (although it liberalized the program in many other ways, such as creating early retirement benefits for men and benefits for the dependents of disabled workers). Such a hiatus, which punished elderly people who might well have died before 1965, would not be possible under the new system.

To obtain automatic cost of living adjustments, Nixon needed the approval of Wilbur Mills and the other Congressional leaders who had profited from the old system. Not surprisingly, Mills proved resistant to the idea, effectively blocking it in 1969 and 1970. It was becoming clear, however, that the measure had some bipartisan appeal, even if Mills opposed it. The situation was not unlike the period between 1961 and the end of 1964 in the case of Medicare. Mills blocked that program as long as he could and then, after the Democratic landslide of 1964, announced his approval of the program and played the lead role in shaping the final legislation. Something similar happened with cost of living adjustments. Robert Ball, the Commissioner of Social Security, sold Mills on a plan that permitted automatic cost of living adjustments but only if Congress failed to raise benefits in a discretionary manner. In other words, Congress would still have the freedom to pass a benefit increase on its own, but, if for some reason Congress did not take action and if prices rose high enough to trigger an automatic benefit increase, then the automatic benefit increase would take effect. With this proviso, Mills acquiesced to automatic cost of living adjustments and played the key role in their enactment.

Because of disagreements between the House and the Senate, largely over the matter of welfare reform, the process took until the summer of 1972 to resolve. In the end, Congress acquiesced to cost of living adjustments on Mills's terms. As usual, the Democratic Congress outbid the Republicans on the level of Social Security benefits. Where Nixon hoped for a five percent increase, Mills and his colleagues legislated a twenty percent increase. To justify this large increase, the actuaries at Social Security changed their basic assumptions regarding future economic activity. In particular, they abandoned the notion that wages would remain steady in the future and instead factored a wage increase into their calculations. That produced a large surplus that Congress spent on the twenty percent increase. The President got his automatic cost of living adjustments but only at the expense of the twenty percent increase. As so often the case with Social Security, the true winners appeared to be Robert Ball and the bureaucrats in the Social Security Administration who, it could be argued, got exactly what they wanted.

President Nixon, a candidate for re-election in what would later become known as the Watergate election, signed the new bill into law at the beginning of July, 1972. Congress, which still needed to resolve the matter of welfare reform, continued to work on comprehensive social security legislation. In October Congress passed an omnibus law. The bill contained a significant expansion of Medicare to cover people with disabilities and those of any age with end stage renal disease requiring dialysis. Although the Nixon welfare reform proposals failed of passage, Congress did initiate an ambitious new federal program, known as Supplemental Security Income, that put a national minimum benefit standard in place for adult welfare beneficiaries (and, as it later worked out, many children as well) and allowed the federal government to take over the administration of previously state welfare programs in aid of the disabled, blind, and elderly. In this manner, the Nixon welfare reform initiative could not be dismissed as a simple failure. Instead it had legislative consequences in the form of Supplemental Security Income All in all, the two pieces of Social Security legislation in 1972 represented the apex of postwar social welfare legislation.
The Expansion of Social Security in 1973.
In 1973, as the Watergate scandal slowly engulfed the Nixon administration, the postwar system remained in place. To be sure the twenty percent benefit increase in 1972 and the shift in actuarial assumptions sapped some of the expansionary energy. Even the leaders of the Social Security Administration realized that a plateau had been reached with the 1972 legislation. "I just don't see anything in the way of a near-term future of the kind of quantum jump we have just had in these recent amendments," Robert Ball said at the time. On another occasion, he remarked that Social Security had reached "the level of considerable stability." Still, the automatic benefits were not scheduled to take effect until January, 1975, and Congress decided to use its discretionary power to raise benefit levels in 1973.

As the year began, the New York Times reported that, "the United States is in the midst of a new economic boom that may prove to be unrivaled in scope, power, and influence by any previous expansion in history." That rosy report lent support to the notion that the United States could afford its expanded Social Security program. In Congress, the tax committees set about their work, almost as if the twenty percent increase had not happened. In June, for example, the Senate Finance Committee voted a 5.5% increase in benefits that would become effective at the beginning of 1974. The rationale was that no benefit increases were scheduled until January, 1975 and, because of the high inflation rate, something needed to be done in the interim. Inflation, which would prove to be a major economic problem for the 1970's, appeared to be advancing at a record pace. In May, the Consumer Price Index stood 5.5% above its level of the previous year. The House concurred in this analysis, and the Ways and Means Committee paved the way for a 5.6% increase that passed both houses at the end of June. The Nixon administration, which had hoped to contain the pressure for Social Security increases by acquiescing to the 1972 changes, worried about the effect of the new Social Security increases on the budget. The Ways and Means Committee made only a slight concession to the administration's concerns, deciding to postpone the effective date of the increase to June 1974.

Congress felt justified in making these changes because the Social Security system, so far as the actuaries could tell, appeared to be relatively well financed. Each year the Board of Trustees of the Social Security trust funds made a report to Congress on the funds' fiscal health. The report issued on July 16, 1973 showed a small imbalance, expressed in the technical language of Social Security as -0.32 percent of taxable payroll. The trustees reported that the inflation rate made it likely that the first cost of living adjustment, were it to go into effect, might be 7 percent, rather than 5 percent as had earlier been predicted. The main problem, according to the trustees, was the rising disability rate, the reasons for which the trustees admitted were "not entirely clear." Disability, with its sensitivity to the employment rate, would become a major problem of the seventies. As early as 1974, the staff of the Ways and Means Committee reported that "Chronic actuarial deficiencies have developed in the Disability Insurance system over the past ten years." Disability insurance became an often-cited example of a program that appeared to go out of control during the seventies.

Disability was, however, a relatively minor component of the Social Security system, and rising disability rates could not derail the movement for Social Security's expansion. Not content with the benefit increase passed in June 1973, Congress reconsidered the matter at the end of the year, with the result that the President signed an eleven percent benefit increase at the beginning of 1974. This increase was to take effect in two stages. A seven percent benefit increase would show up in the April benefit checks and a four percent increase would take effect in July. With this new legislation, Congress quietly put aside the measure it had passed earlier in 1973. The only significant concession to those who favored a slower rate of Social Security growth came in the decision to postpone the first automatic cost of living adjustment increases until July, 1975. President Nixon, by now thoroughly embroiled in the Watergate scandal and in danger of losing his job, put a positive face on the developments. He praised the new bill as an "extremely important, far-reaching measure" and noted with pride that Social Security benefits had gone up 68.5% during his administration.
Changes in the Social Security Policy Structure
Even as these events were taking place, however, key changes were occurring in the Social Security program that, by 1975, would transform the program and end the postwar era of Social Security expansion. President Nixon would leave office in August, 1974, and the entire Watergate incident would strengthen Congress at the expense of the executive. As one significant example, Congress would create a Congressional Budget Office in 1974 that would give the Democrats an independent means of analyzing policy proposals and make them less dependent on the President's Bureau of the Budget for information. In the Social Security field, the tight collaboration between the executive branch in the form of the Social Security Administration and the Congress in the form of the tax committees loosened. Early in 1973, as part of a second term purge of left-over officials from an earlier era, Robert Ball resigned as Social Security Commissioner and the agency's reputation for administrative competence began an almost immediate decline. The implementation of the Supplemental Security Income program proved to be a particular public relations disaster for the SSA, as the change-over from state to federal administration of the adult welfare categories failed to go smoothly. None of Ball's successors would enjoy anywhere near his long tenure in office.

An even more important factor in the transformation of Social Security's policymaking structure concerned the departure of Wilbur Mills from a central position of authority. The story here concerned Mills's personal decline and the more impersonal changes related to Congressional reform that took place in his committee. What got Mills into trouble was not so much his public performance as his private conduct. Before Watergate, a Congressman=s private life had, for the most part, remained private. Members of Congress used their colleagues to cover up instances of drunkenness or patches of senility that prevented them from doing their jobs. What one did after hours, particularly off in Washington away from the prying eyes of constituents, remained one=s own business. Watergate helped to change that situation. The press now saw uncovering such behavior as an important part of its mission, necessary for getting the story behind the story.

In Mills's case, his problems began with a bad back that led to taking too many painkillers or maybe his problems resulted from a predisposition to alcoholism. By 1973 he was spending an increasing time away from Washington, under a doctor=s care. Hence, much of the business of the Ways and Means Committee, including the Social Security benefit increases of that year, occurred without him. Then his erratic behavior broke out into public view, one of the era=s moments that would remain in the public=s memory. One night in October, 1974, just two months after Ford came into office, Mills rode through Washington in his Lincoln Continental. His car was moving too fast and the headlights were off. As Mills passed through the parkland near the Jefferson Memorial at the two in the morning, the D.C. Park Police stopped his car. Out ran Annabel Battistella, an exotic dancer who performed under the name of "Fanne Fox, the Argentine Firecracker." Then, with all of her clothes on, she jumped into the Tidal Basin. The police arrested her and an obviously drunk Mills as well. His arrest made national news and, in an election season, he found it necessary to issue a public apology with his wife standing by his side. He won his election, but it would turn out to be his last. At the end of November, he popped back up in the public spotlight. This time he walked on stage while Ms. Battistella was performing in a Boston night club. Once again visibly drunk in public, he proceeded to hold an impromptu news conference. Once again, the media splashed his picture across the nation.

Wilbur Mills appeared on the stage in Boston only a few weeks after an election in which voters decided to punish the Republicans for Watergate. In such circumstances and in the glare of publicity, Mills=s behavior could not be easily overlooked or excused as a manifestation of his illness. Someone who had been outed as a drunk might not be the best person to oversee the nation=s income tax code or its Social Security system. Almost immediately, therefore, the Democrats in Congress took steps to distance themselves from Mills. On the Monday after the weekend when the Boston incident occurred, they stripped Mills=s committee of its important power to make committee assignments for other Democrats. Ways and Means, in other words, would no longer act as a committee on committees. The next day Speaker Carl Albert (D-Oklahoma) confirmed the stunning news that Wilbur Mills would not seek re-election as chair of the Ways and Means Committee. With that statement, an era in Congressional history ended.

Beginning in 1975, Gerald Ford dealt with Al Ullman of Oregon as chair of Ways and Means. Ullman never enjoyed Mills's power over legislation because between 1973 and 1975 Congress had changed the rules of the game.

Congressional reform was a popular liberal cause at the beginning of the seventies. The New York Times editorialized at the beginning of 1973 that power had to "responsible and accountable," a common sentiment during the Watergate scandal. As part of this new accountability, the party leadership deserved more power and the committee chairmen , who, according to the Times served indefinitely regardless of their competence, less. The Times favored eight year term limits on committee chairs and the open election of committee chairmen by the party caucus. The paper also objected to the closed rule that allowed the Ways and Means Committee effectively to legislate on behalf of Congress. Ways and Means did its work in secrecy, shutting out ordinary members (and presumably the voice of the people) from tax legislation.

"Mills Panel Told to Bow to Reform" read the newspaper headline in December, 1974. The reforms included the end of legislation made in closed sessions, the creation of permanent subcommittees, the expansion of the committee membership, and inclusion of at least some junior members on the committee. One objective was to shed sunshine on the legislative process. Another was to diffuse the power of the chairman and make it more certain, as the Times put it, that "the younger, more progressive members who will be appointed to the committee for the next Congress will not be frozen out of key policy-making spots on the panel."

The first Congressman to hold the position as head of the Social Security Sub-Committee of the Committee on Ways and Means was the relatively obscure James Burke (D-Massachusetts). When Robert Ball, now a private consultant, went to visit him early in 1975, he found him ill-informed on Social Security, hardly the equal of Mills.

The reformed Congress dealt with Social Security in chastened economic circumstances. In June 1974 the trustees announced that the program was "underfinanced in the long range with a negative balance of about 3 percent of taxable payroll." The actuaries pointed to new demographic and economic factors that contributed to the problem. Looking at data from the 1970 census, they decided that their earlier estimates of fertility had been too optimistic, and it would be more rational to assume to assume a fertility rate of 2.1 babies per woman, rather than a range of 2.3 to 2.8 as had earlier been assumed. A slower rate of population growth meant a higher future percentage of aged people in the population and a heavier future burden for Social Security. The performance of the economy also continued to present a problem. Early in 1975, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index was 12.2% higher at the end of 1974 than at the beginning, the worst performance in that category since 1946. In 1974 reflecting the inflation and the economy's sluggish performance-a deadly combination that came to be known as stagflation-real spendable earnings declined by 5.4%. The economic boom predicted in 1973 did not seem to be materializing, at just the time that the Social Security system was vulnerable to inflation (which raised benefit levels) and unemployment (which lowered tax collections). Not surprisingly, then, the actuaries noted in February, 1975 that "rising inflation and unemployment are throwing the Social Security retirement system into deficit years earlier than expected." There was both a short-run and a long-run crisis. In the long run the system was under-funded. As early as 1976, system revenues might not be enough to cover system expenditures, with the result that the system would have to dip into its reserves. By the end of 1980, the reserves on hand would be dangerously low.

Support for the Social Security system remained high, but the system faced a new vulnerability. In May, 1975, President Ford received word from a top aide that "the reserve in the cash benefit funds will be impaired almost immediately and will be completely exhausted by the early 1980s." The trustees report in May, 1975 showed even worse results than before, with the worsening economy the main culprit. In the middle of the seventies, then, the program experienced an unprecedented degree of criticism. As William Simon, Ford's conservative Secretary of the Treasury noted, "Once beyond controversy, Social Security has come under persistent attack in the news media for its inequities, its financial uncertainties and its complexity. And economists have called attention to its negative effects on capital formation, employment, and economic activity generally. The common cause of these various problems lies largely in the benefit and contribution formulas prescribed by present law and in the weakness of the link between contributions and benefits."

Social Security survived its vulnerable period between 1975 and 1983 because of the many beneficiaries invested in its survival but also because it contained built-in legislative protection. As a result of the 1972 amendments, benefit levels were protected against inflation, without Congress having to do anything. President Ford did try to limit the benefit increase in 1975 to five percent as an anti-inflationary measure but got nowhere with his proposal. Putting the burden of an unpopular action on the President when the Congress had the luxury of doing nothing forced the President into an impossible position. As a direct result of historical contingency and this prevailing political dynamic, benefit levels continued to go up with the inflation rate, which meant that they went up considerably in this period.
Constraining Social Security
To be sure, the system was disciplined during the Carter and Reagan years. Carter took steps to end what came to be considered the "technical" problem of double-indexing, which referred to the fact that initial benefits were based on average wages and a formula that was also adjusted for inflation. In effect, the benefits were "double-indexed" for inflation which produced what even Robert Ball conceded to be irrationally high replacement rates. With the problem considered a technical matter, a benefit cut could be made by changing the formula and "fixing" the double indexing problem. Even so, the adjustment left behind the messy problem of people born between 1910 and 1916 who received a windfall and created a sense of grievance in those born just after.

Another form of discipline was a loss of prestige for the Social Security Administration within the federal bureaucracy. The agency had always fancied itself an elite organization with a special sense of mission and a reputation for competence. The way in which the agency implemented the Medicare program served as a model for how the government could accomplish complex tasks effectively. By 1977 the agency's reputation had declined to such a degree that Joseph Califano, President Carter's Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, decided to remove the Medicare program from the agency and create a new agency that he called the Health Care Financing Administration. Neither Califano nor many of his colleagues had a high opinion of the SSA. Stanford Ross, who became SSA Commissioner in 1978, said he was stunned at "how elderly" the agency was. "There was a kind of stultifying atmosphere," he said. Hale Champion, second in command at HEW, described SSA as "really rocky," a "once great organization" filled with people who wanted "to stand around and light votive candles," that was "over the hill." Ross made a concerted effort to shake the agency up by reorganizing it and breaking up what he regarded as little fiefdoms of power.

By the end of the administration, Carter's appointees were involved in a pitched battle with many of the key figures of the postwar apparatus, including Robert Ball, former HEW Secretary Wilbur Cohen, and former AFL-CIO lobbyist Nelson Cruikshank (who actually worked in the Carter White House but took his lead from Ball and Cohen) and even the much impaired Wilbur Mills, over a plan to cut disability benefits. In the end, working through the new subcommittee structure of the Ways and Means Committee, the administration succeeded in passing a version of the bill. It pruned back disability benefits through such features as putting a cap on family benefits and changing the way in which average wages (and hence initial benefits) were computed for people with disabilities.

Late in 1982 and early in 1983, the Reagan administration and the Democratic supporters of Social Security such as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Representative Claude Pepper, AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland and the ever attentive Robert Ball reached an agreement that settled the Social Security issue for the next decade. In return for the Republicans agreeing not to exploit the system's long-term vulnerabilities, the Democrats agreed to what might be considered a real benefit cut, rather than the technical adjustments made in the late seventies and eighties. The cut consisted of a six month delay in a cost of living adjustment. The basic structure of the program remained in place.
Health Insurance
A more direct example of the effect of the new policy environment on social policy came in the field of health insurance. After 1972 Social Security insiders such as Robert Ball saw national health insurance as the next big thing in America's welfare state. This issue had been a contentious one, almost from the time that it arose during the New Deal. Reformers thought that the government should bring the costs of health care within people=s financial reach by starting a national program of public health insurance. Members of the medical profession worried that the federal government=s entrance into the field would undermine their professional autonomy and lower the quality of care. The result was stalemate and the expansion of private, rather than public, health insurance. By 1964, however, a consensus had developed that the federal government should finance health care for the nation's elderly.

With the passage of health insurance for the elderly, or Medicare, in 1965, many people assumed that a more comprehensive program would follow. In the optimistic Great Society environment, it appeared likely that Congress would expand Medicare to cover other age groups and bring national health insurance to the United States.

Things moved in an incremental manner in the period between 1965 and 1972. In 1968 an idea arose that Medicare should be expanded to cover prenatal and infant care. Such an idea had the virtue of consistency with other Great Society proposals that centered on education and investing in the country=s future. Bringing health security to expectant mothers and infants would cut down on infant mortality and developmental disabilities and would pay for itself in the form of reduced illness and increased productivity as the children headed toward adulthood. Philip Lee, a prominent health care official in the Johnson (and later the Clinton) administration, commented that he and many others believed that kiddie care, as it came to be known, would become the vehicle to move national health insurance forward. "We thought by 1975 there would be national health insurance," he said.

Lee's sentiments reflected a more general feeling that national health insurance was inevitable. Even President Nixon, wary of most Great Society programs and no defender of Medicare, felt obligated to offer his own health insurance proposal. Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson, the peripatetic member of Nixon=s cabinet, appeared before a Congressional committee in October 1971 and pronounced himself certain that the hearings would culminate in national health insurance. Richardson presented the Nixon administration=s idea of mandating coverage. Each employer would be required to provide a basic health insurance package to its employees. Provision would be made for the unemployed or others without permanent attachment to the labor force. Liberals, led by Senator Edward Kennedy, countered with a plan that contained more complete health care that was financed through federal funds. The legislative climate was such that even the Health Insurance Association of America, a trade association representing the interests of private health insurers, felt compelled to raise money from its members in order to present its own plan, which it prevailed upon Representative Omar Burleson (D-Texas) to introduce. The industry favored voluntary private health insurance but offered to make special provisions for those who lacked the means to pay for it.

The battle for national health insurance continued through the end of the Nixon administration. The effort culminated in 1974 with the appearance of four health insurance bills that ranged from Edward Kennedy's liberal proposal to Nixon's idea of mandating private coverage. An important new addition to the mix came from the unlikely pairing of liberal Senator Kennedy and conservative Representative Wilbur Mills. It featured benefits similar to the Nixon plan, including numerous expenses that a patient would have to bear himself, but financed by the federal government through a payroll tax. "I believe this proposal," Senator Kennedy said, "is a major step toward guaranteeing good health care as a right-and can be built upon for future years."

The press reacted as if the passage of national health insurance was only a matter of time. The Wall Street Journal reported that "prospects for Congressional action this year" had improved considerably. The Washington Post added that "in recent weeks the prospects for national health insurance have brightened suddenly and unexpectedly." According to the New York Times, President Nixon, Vice President Ford, Senators Mansfield, Scott and Long and Representatives Albert, Rhodes, and Mills were all interested in passing legislation.

The labor movement, still a force on Capitol Hill, held the key to the success of the Kennedy-Mills bill and the health insurance cause more generally. If labor retreated from its strong support for the earlier (more liberal and more generous) Kennedy bill and accepted the Mills-Kennedy bill with the same enthusiasm, it would give the bill a strong liberal base of support. Conservatives might be persuaded to join in on the theory that the bill represented the best deal they could get. The Nixon administration, meanwhile, saw the movement on national health insurance as proof that it was not paralyzed by the Watergate scandal. Some Capitol Hill observers thought that the administration was eager to work something out. As the Times noted in May, President Nixon "may see in national health insurance a something-for-everyone issue that if passed would enhance his popularity."

Labor and its liberal allies however, had to think in strategic political terms that caused them to speculate in political futures. Maybe the next Congress that would be elected in 1974 at a time when the Watergate scandal resonated with Americans would be more liberal than the sitting Congress and hence more willing to pass national health insurance along the lines that labor preferred. Maybe this next Congress would be veto proof and thus render the administration irrelevant. The Times hinted that liberals could be stalling in the hope that a "broader bill" would emerge in 1975. In August, 1974 Leonard F. Woodcock of the United Automobile Workers noted that it might be better to wait until the next year. Persuaded by this reasoning, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO issued a negative report on the Kennedy-Mills bill bill. "While on balance Mills-Kennedy is an improvement over the Nixon bill," the Council stated, "it falls short of meeting the needs of America." Clearly, organized labor wanted to wait.

As things turned out, the United States never came closer to enacting national health insurance. Although the Democrats did win the hoped-for victory in 1974, the new Congress that met in 1975 faced a balkanized committee structure that made gaining agreement on a complex matter like national health at a time of divided government that much more difficult. In addition, the economy deteriorated to the point where all ambitious social policy ventures were doubtful undertakings. Some sort of policy hinge point had been reached. It was a rational move in 1974 to hope for something better than the Kennedy Mills bill and wait for the national election. The Democrats ultimately lost the bet, despite their electoral success, because of circumstances that could not have been clearly foreseen in the crucial negotiating months over health insurance in the spring of 1974.
The Failure of Big Ticket Items
A similar dynamic applied to welfare reform. It was another big ticket item that the Carter administration pressed on Congress in 1977. But it was difficult to compromise the interests of those who saw welfare reform as a means toward bureaucratic efficiency and reduced costs and those who regarded welfare reform as a vital measure in aid of the poor and likely to increase social spending. The many social welfare programs involved in welfare reform, all of which had bureaucratic protectors in Congress, meant that, regardless of the costs, the matter of welfare reform was difficult to negotiate in a political sense, particularly when the subcommittee structure added another degree of protection to individual programs.

Big ticket items were more difficult to pass after 1974 than before, but that did not mean that nothing was passed. With more legislative windows open in the expanded Congressional system, more things got passed. Where before an unsympathetic word from Wilbur Mills might kill a proposal, the new system afforded more avenues of appeal. Individual policy entrepreneurs, who had always been prevalent in the Senate, had more room to operate. In 1974, for example, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Issues such as the public response to the battered child syndrome continued to generate their share of legislation.
Disability Rights
The disability rights movement served as a case in point. In the expansionary postwar era, disability fell into a realm of public policy devoted to medicine, vocational guidance, and income maintenance. These strategies had the common characteristic of putting people with disabilities in the hands of professional caretakers or consigning them to a life of inactivity.

In the seventies, a feeling began to grow, first among the parents of children with disabilities, then among people who had once had polio, and finally among those with other disabilities, that a different response was required. These members of the disability community sought education, jobs, and other tangible benefits not as discretionary privileges to be granted by doctors, rehabilitation counselors, school administrators, or other gatekeepers but as fundamental rights. The rights strategy shifted the burden of adjustment from people with disabilities to society itself. In this distinctively seventies view, the deficits of people with disabilities mattered less than did the defects in the environment. Contrary to the post-war wisdom, people with disabilities did not need to be changed or simply maintained. Instead, the environment that surrounded them needed to be altered in order to accommodate them. Physical barriers, such as high curbs and steep steps, had to be removed; attitudinal barriers, such as prejudices on the part of employers who interpreted difference as inability, needed to be broken down.

The disability rights revolution, in common with the other civil rights movements of the post-war era, first took hold in the courts. In the late sixties and early seventies, lawyers, who worked in such settings as the Mental Health Law Project, advocated legal protections for people who lived in insane asylums or facilities for the mentally retarded. The crusading lawyers won favorable judicial rulings on such subjects as "minimum constitutional standards for adequate treatment." In 1972, public interest lawyers and the parents of children with disabilities gained significant victories in the field of education for the handicapped. In the cases of Mills v. Board of Education and PARC v. Pennsylvania, the federal district courts held that disabled children had a right to a "free and appropriate public education." With these rulings in hand, the advocates went to Congress and asked the legislators to put the wording of these decisions into statute law. In response, Congress passed the Education for all Handicapped Children Act of 1975 which ignored the fiscal stringencies of the era and President Ford=s desire not to create new entitlement programs and ordered school districts across the nation to provide a free appropriate education for all handicapped children.

Here was another example of how the post 1974 policy environment functioned. The law relied on advocates coming to Congress and asking Congress to enact judicial decisions into law. Congress "played back" a number of court decisions and elevated them to the status of law. The question of cost was finessed in part by mandating local activity rather than activating federal expenditures.

The most important of the disability rights laws extended Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into new areas. In 1972 the re-authorization of the vocational rehabilitation program became enmeshed, for reasons unrelated to social welfare policy, in a political controversy between Nixon and the Congress. Nixon vetoed two different versions of the law before Congress came up with an acceptable alternative. Somewhere in the middle of this protracted battle, someone got the idea of using the legislation to extend the provisions of Title VI to people with disabilities. That suggestion sent an aide to Senator Jacob Javits (R-New York) scurrying out of the room to look for the wording to Title VI. In this manner, what became Section 504 was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was inserted into the bill. Unlike the later 1975 laws, no group of legal advocates or anyone else pushed to include this provision. Section 504 elicited almost no attention in Congressional hearings and Congressional committee reports. Those who followed the legislation were concerned about its various grants in aid to the states, universities, and hospitals. Section 504 was an afterthought, one that seemed in keeping with the still liberal spirit of the times.

After passage of the law and with the onslaught of the economic and political troubles that ushered in the seventies, the Republicans in the executive branch began to view Section 504 with alarm. They realized that its innocuous language-"No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity conducted by an Executive agency"-masked its long reach. The new law meant that all hospitals, schools, colleges, urban transportation systems, and a host of other institutions would have to be accessible to people with disabilities. As a consequence, officials in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare hesitated to put the law into operation. They stalled for the rest of the Ford administration, worried that it might cost as much as $26 billion to make facilities that received federal funds accessible to the handicapped.

During the life of the Ford administration, disability rights groups, such as the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD) that had been created in 1975, education groups such as the American Council of Education, and groups representing particular interests of local governments such as the American Public Transit Association all became aware of the law and tried to influence the regulations. What was interesting that the battle took place not in the Congress but in the regulatory realms of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Unlike their superiors, the lawyers who worked in the Office of Civil Rights entertained a general sense of sympathy toward the cause of civil rights. They considered the problems in writing the regulations to center on how effectively to transfer legal principles developed on behalf of blacks to people with disabilities. These regulators, who were certainly out of step with the Nixon and Ford administrations, were far less constrained by fiscal conditions than were people working at the Office of Management and Budget or the authorizing committees in Congress. Those outside of the Office of Civil Rights were better able to delay the implementation of the regulations than they were to influence their contents.

In the end, the regulations for Section 504 emerged as something of a partisan political issue that played itself out in presidential politics. Jimmy Carter, the Democratic challenger, pledged that he, unlike Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, was in favor of disability rights and would put Section 504 into effect. After Carter's election, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed the regulations but only after protestors from the ACCD picketed in front of his house and in front of the San Francisco regional headquarters of his department.

One might dismiss this story as an example of symbolic politics that had little real effect on social policy. Yet the number of people with disabilities, depending on how one defined the concept, was, according to a 1978 estimate, on the order of 36 million or one person out of every six. If that were true, then people with disabilities were a larger minority group than either blacks or Hispanics, and their political independence made them a political prize worth courting. Changes in educational, transportation, or employment policy on their behalf had the potential to make a difference in many realms. Indeed, the physical design of America changed in the seventies. Curb cuts began to appear on the corners of city streets. Rest rooms acquired wider toilet stalls, urinals mounted lower on the walls, and faucet handles that could be pushed or pulled. Ramps appeared in public buildings. Subway systems no longer depended solely on stairs and escalators to move people in and out of stations. Elevators and public buses had audio devices that called out the stops to facilitate the use of public facilities by people with visual impairments. Automatic teller machines, which were just beginning to make their appearance during the seventies, acquired instructions written in braille. Theaters and ball parks contained sections with no seats for the convenience of patrons in wheelchairs. The relatively unheralded disability rights movement, therefore, succeeded in making major changes in the American built environment at a time when other social policy initiatives were stalled.
Conclusion
The 1970's did mark a watershed in public policy. The key point of discontinuity, however, was not the start of the new decade but the conjunction of events that took place in 1973 and 1974. After the great divide in social policy that occurred in 1974, major policy initiatives often failed to be enacted and many social programs had difficulty maintaining their real level of spending in the inflationary economy. The programs that were exceptions to this rule were those with commitments "locked in" during the previous era or programs that benefited from the actions of the courts and regulatory agencies. Actions taken in 1972 in the case of Social Security and 1973 in the case of vocational rehabilitation produced "lagged" social consequences. Actions not taken in 1974, such as failing to enact the Kennedy-Mills, also produced important consequences. In all cases, the phenomenon of the seventies as a policy watershed exercised an important influence over the development of American social policy.

How to Cite this Article (APA Format): Berkowitz, E.D. (2011). The 1970's as policy watershed. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/the-1970s-as-policy-watershed/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
(Prepared for the 2005 Meetings of the American Political Science Association) In 1974, the expansive social policy system that had prevailed in the postwar era ended, and a more restrictive system that would characterize the rest of the seventies and the early eighties began to take its place.

# data[].attributes.body
became one of the most successful vocal groups in rock music history. The group helped create the sound track of the 1977 hit motion-picture musical Saturday Night Fever. The sound-track album became one of the best-selling albums in popular music history.

“Bee Gees.” Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, June 2018, p. 1. EBSCOhost, discovery.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=59b42c8b-24e9-3f85-bc1e-7c9083e8b05a.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

# data[].attributes.body
rock and roll started in the 1940s but became so popular it still was soaring in the 1970s. it became one of the most popular music in the world!

Newman, Jason. "Rock and Roll." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2023, americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/263266. Accessed 2 May 2023.

# data[].attributes.body
The male dominated industries took a hit in the 1970s with women moving into these fields of work. Lawyers, Accountants, and doctors, all field that saw a greater than 100% increase in women employed. Although they earned the job they still had to fight for the pay. Women continued to push the pay gap closed and they pushed hard. The biggest barrier for them were the men on top that didn’t want to promote a women to the higher job.

# data[].attributes.body
In the 1970s a new type of american dance and music was in popularity it was called disco. the type was a dance style nightclub. First hit song was "never can say goodbye" by Gloria Gaynor.

"Disco." Britannica School, Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 Feb. 2000.

# data[].attributes.body
The 1970s brought a new era to the american people with the introduction of digital entertainment and personal computers. The invention of video games emerged in the 1970s with the creation of Pong leading to the establishments of many other arcade games soon to follow. On the personal side of Americans, the access to computers increases and now no longer the size of a bed room. Digital storage also increased in data storage while decreasing the physical size. This was the invention of the floppy disc.

# data[].attributes.body
In the early 1970s a new agency was formed called the EPA. The EPA was formed in response to the increase of pollution, and the EPA was made to fight those pollution and reserve our earth for the future, some accomplishments were earth day, clean up in federal facilities, 4 million dollars for the improvement of water treatment facilities.

https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
List of links to documents shedding light on the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s birth and early years

# data[].attributes.body
In april of 1970 a new national holiday was created, it was called Earth Day. During earth day thousands of people around the nation went out and picked up litter and cleaned the world around us.

Thomas, Lauren. "Earth Day." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2023, americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/2229773. Accessed 2 May 2023.

# data[].attributes.body
Tennis match that King beat Riggs a male chauvinist bringing women to speak out and apply for male positions to get equality. The starting of the battle of the sexes.

"Billie Jean King." Britannica School, Encyclopædia Britannica, 17 Aug. 2021.

# data[].attributes.body
The conclusion of the Apollo missions occurred in the 1970s with the final five flights. The missions served as a way to discover the moon further. They carried the LRV a rover that allowed even more science on the lunar surface to be conducted. The LRV joined for three missions. Along with the LRV, NASA launched the Skylab to learn what it takes to make space inhabitable for astronauts to study the effects of zero gravity.

Mohon, Lee. “1970s.” NASA, 5 June 2020, www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/images/marshall-through-the-decades/1970s.html.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1970sThe 1970s saw the final five flights of the Apollo Program including three uses of the Marshall-developed Lunar Roving Vehicle for the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions.

# data[].attributes.body
in the 1970s the Soviet Union purchased 10 million short tons of grain from the United States this trade deal that benefited both countries, with being the USSR able to feed there population and the United States able to get money to boost there economy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is a preview. Log in through your library.

In the 1970s the Soviet Union became a major importer of grain, giving rise to fears that it could extract an undue share of the gains from East-West trade through the monopsonistic power of its state-trading organs and by keeping its buying intentions secret. Offer curves depicting Soviet trade are constructed using two alternative characterizations of Soviet trade decision making. We show that the grain agreement between the two countries negates most of the bargaining advantage attributed to the Soviet trade monopoly and may open the Soviet Union to exploitation by the United States.

Journal Information

The purpose of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics is to provide a forum for creative and scholarly work in agricultural economics. Submitted manuscripts focus on the economics of natural resources and the environment, agriculture, and rural and community development. Papers are problem-oriented and demonstrate originality and innovation in analysis, methods, or application. Analyses of problems pertinent to research, extension, and teaching are included, as well as interdisciplinary research with a significant economic component. Review articles that offer a comprehensive and insightful survey of a relevant subject, consistent with the scope of the journal, are also included. All articles published are held to the same set of scholarly standards.

Publisher Information

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. OUP is the world's largest university press with the widest global presence. It currently publishes more than 6,000 new publications a year, has offices in around fifty countries, and employs more than 5,500 people worldwide. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing program that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and academic journals.

Rights & Usage

This item is part of a JSTOR Collection.
For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions
American Journal of Agricultural Economics © 1983

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Soviet-American Grain Agreement and the National Interest on JSTOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a preview. Log in through your library. In the 1970s the Soviet Union became a major importer of grain, giving rise to fears that it could extract an undue share of the gains from East-West trade through the monopsonistic power of its state-trading organs and by keeping its buying intentions secret.

# data[].attributes.body
The US relied heavily on the oil reserves of the Middle East. These oil reserves were controlled respectively by the nations the remain in. The US wanted to keep the oil reserve safe and supplying the American people, but that would come to be just the problem. The US sent monetary and military aid to Israel, but instead of the support being used for protection of the oil reserves it was used to attack the surrounding countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. This put the US in a difficult position inevitably resulting in the oil embargo of the 1970s.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
The Job Safety Law of 1970: Its Passage Was Perilous

# data[].attributes.body
OSHA or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is a government agency put in place by Nixon. The goal of the agency was to increase the safety of the workplace. OSHA brought many health concerns to light, including asbestos and the dangers coal mining had on the lungs. Many believed that the government was overstepping when OSHA was passed but the justification lies on the premise that, “To the extent that the way goods are produced affects people other than the employer and the employee, the interest of those others may justify a role for the government.”

maclaury, judson. “The Job Safety Law of 1970: Its Passage Was Perilous | U.S. Department of Labor.” Dol.gov, 2019, www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/osha.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Three decades ago Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to help protect the Nation's workers on the job, following a 3-year struggle.
By Judson MacLaury

On December 29, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Williams-Steiger Occupational Safety and Health Act, which gave the Federal Government the authority to set and enforce safety and health standards for most of the country's workers. This act was the result of a hard fought legislative battle which began in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson unsuccessfully sought a similar measure. However, the roots of government regulation of workplace hazards date back to the late 19th century.
State Factory Laws
In the factories that sprang up after the Civil War, chemicals, dusts, dangerous machines, and a confusing jumble of belts, pulleys, and gears confronted inexperienced, often very young workers. The reports of State labor bureaus in the 1870's and 1880's were full of tragedies that too often struck the unwary or the unlucky. The Massachusetts report of 1872 described some particularly grisly accidents. These tragedies and the industrial accident statistics that State labor bureaus collected, spurred social reformers and the budding labor movement to call for State factory safety and health laws. In 1870, the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor urged legislation to deal with "the peril to health from lack of ventilation." In 1877, Massachusetts passed the Nation's first factory inspection law. It required guarding of belts, shafts, and gears, protection on elevators, and adequate fire exits. Its passage prompted a flurry of State factory acts. By 1890, nine States provided for factory inspectors, 13 required machine guarding, and 21 made limited provision for health hazards.

The labyrinth of State job safety and health legislation covered a wide range of workplace hazards but was badly flawed. There were too many holes in the piecemeal system and numerous hazards were left uncontrolled. The laws had to be amended often to cover new hazards. Many legislatures failed to provide adequate funds for enforcement. Inspectors, who were often political appointees, were not always given the legal right to enter workplaces. State with strong safety and health laws tended to lose industry to those with less stringent ones, which made States competitive and limited their legislative efforts.

The Progressive Era and the growth of mass circulation newspapers and national magazines helped forge a national movement for workers' safety and health. In 1907, 362 coal miners were killed at Monongah, W. Va., in the worst U.S. mine disaster. This widely publicized tragedy shocked the Nation and led to the creation in 1910 of the U.S. Bureau of Mines to promote mine safety.

That same year William B. Hard, a muckraking journalist, published an article in Everybody's Magazine titled, "Making Steel and Killing Men," based on his firsthand investigations of a Chicago mill. Hard estimated that every year, out of a work force of 10,000 workers, 1,200 were killed or seriously injured. He urged the steel industry to use its technical knowledge to reduce this casualty rate. U.S. Steel, spurred by mounting accident tolls, had already begun to collect accident statistics. Safety programs in subsidiaries dated back to the 1890's. In 1908, U.S. Steel formed a safety committee with instructions from the company president, Judge Elbert Gary, to cut the accident rate as much as possible. A highly successful "safety first" movement developed from this which spilled over to other industries and led to the creation of the National Safety Council in 1915.

The "Pittsburgh Survey," a detailed study of living and working conditions in Allegheny County, Pa., done in 1907-08, had a special impact on job safety and health. One of the major topics of the investigation, which was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, was industrial accidents. The survey found that the injured workers and the survivors of those killed on the job bore the economic brunt of accidents, even thought most were the employers' fault. The authors of the survey agreed that, for reasons of social equity, employers should bear a substantial share of the economic burden, giving them more incentive to eliminate the causes.
Workers' Compensation Started
Years before the Pittsburgh Survey, the idea of compensating injured workers from an insurance fund to which employers would contribute had gained a foothold in this country, though it was not at first promoted as a preventive measure. Prince Otto von Bismarck had initiated the first workers' compensation program in Germany in 1884, and the idea soon spread throughout Europe. In the United States, a few States tried to establish early compensation systems. Organized labor successfully opposed the concept, precisely because it was intended as a palliative, not a preventive measure. In 1908, Congress passed, with President Theodore Roosevelt's support, a limited workers' compensation law for Federal employees. Encouraged by this example, several States appointed study commissions. However, until the Pittsburgh Survey, compensation was treated mainly as a humanitarian measure.

The survey's call for an economic incentive to encourage accident prevention struck a responsive chord. It quickly became a key part of the rationale for workers' compensation. This seemed to tip the scales. Both labor and business rallied in support. In 1911, Wisconsin became the first State to successfully establish a workers' compensation program. Within one year it was joined by nine other states and by 1921 most States had followed suit.

Ironically, it was as a preventive measure that workers' compensation accomplished the least. The general level of this type of insurance premium was already so low that there was no real incentive for a company to invest heavily in safety improvements to be eligible for the slightly lower rates offered firms with good safety records. Very few States included compensation for disease, although much was already known about occupational illness. Still, insurance company safety experts helped improve their clients' safety programs and the establishment of compensation gave the safety movement a moral boost.

An idea that developed alongside of workers' compensation probably produced more significant long-run results. If the States would create industrial commissions with authority to establish specific safety and health regulations, it would not be necessary to go back to the legislatures and amend the factory laws in order to cover new hazards or change requirements. A workers' compensation advocate, John R. Commons of the University of Wisconsin, found this system in use in Europe and urged its adoption in the United States. Wisconsin, in another pioneering move, created the first permanent State industrial commission which developed and enforced safety and health regulations, after hearing comments from labor, management, and others. This idea was widely accepted and became a guide for future State and Federal regulation of occupational safety and health.
Early Federal Action
The Federal Government was relatively inactive, though not dormant, on safety and health until the era of workers' compensation. In 1790, the First Congress passed an ineffective merchant seaman's act which gave the crew of a ship at sea the right to order the vessel into the nearest port if a majority of the seamen plus the first mate believed it was unseaworthy. In 1887, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission partly because of the large numbers of railroad workers killed or injured in train wrecks. In 1893, at the urging of the commission and the railroad unions, Congress passed the "coupler bill" which banned the notoriously dangerous link-and-pin method of coupling cars.

Industrial disease studied. After the turn of the century, the Federal Government quietly began investigation into industrial diseases. In 1903, the U.S. Bureau of Labor began publishing graphically detailed studies of death and disease in the dusty trades, as well as other safety and health topics. In 1910, the Bureau published a study by a labor law advocate, John B. Andrews, on the horrors of phosphorus necrosis ("phossy jaw"), a disfiguring and sometimes fatal disease of the jawbone suffered by workers in the white phosphorus match industry. This shocking study jolted the Nation to demand action. In 1912, Congress passed the Esch Act, which placed a prohibitive tax on white phosphorus matches. The Diamond Match Co. agreed to release its patented substitute for general use.

By a lucky stroke, U.S. Commissioner of Labor Charles Neill met Dr. Alice Hamilton (now considered the founder of industrial medicine in America) at a 1910 European conference on occupational accidents and diseases. Hamilton, at the time just beginning her career, was in the midst of pioneering investigations into the lead trades as director of the Illinois Occupational Disease Commission. Neill invited her to work as a special investigator for the Bureau of Labor. She accepted and until 1921 traveled around the country visiting lead smelters, storage battery plants, and other hazardous workplaces. In 1911, she published a study of the white lead industry that was the first of a series of Bureau of Labor reports known as the "Federal survey." Hamilton had a free hand but lacked authority to enter plants other than by moral suasion. She found many examples of foul conditions and gross neglect and some "remarkable instances of wise and humane employers."

Department of Labor formed. In 1913, Congress created the Department of Labor and one of its main purposes was "to improve working conditions." A Senate resolution specifically called on the newly appointed Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson, to report on industrial diseases and accidents. Wilson, an ex- coal miner and mine union official, needed no prodding. A "miner" poet, Wilson described the horror of a mine disaster in this excerpt from "The Explosion," originally written in 1903:
Stalwart men were but as feathers
Driven with a cyclone's fire.
Fast their flesh and sinews shriveled,
Scorched and roasted with the fire.
Under Wilson, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (formerly the U.S. Bureau of Labor) started compiling regular accidents statistics in the iron and steel industry and gradually included other industries. Wilson sought to establish the principle that, instead of feeding men "into the maw of unhealthy occupations ... the thing to do is to make the unhealthy occupations healthy."

Working Conditions Service created. The entry of the United States into World War I precipitated a crisis in health and safety conditions in the hard-pressed war production industries. To meet this challenge, Congress initiated the Working Conditions Service. The service inspected war production sites, advised companies on reducing hazards, and helped States develop and enforce safety and health standards. When the war ended, the service was allowed to expire, but the Labor Department ordered its records saved for the time "when public and legislative opinion again shall have become focused upon the necessity for a constructive organization of this character."
Labor Standards
Frances Perkins appointed. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor and first woman Cabinet member. She brought to the Labor Department long experience in occupational safety and health with the State of New York. To help assure that workplaces would be "as safe as science and law can make them," Perkins created a Bureau of Labor Standards in 1934 as a rallying point for those interested in job safety and health. This was the first permanent Federal agency established primarily to promote safety and health for the entire work force. The Bureau helped State governments improve their administration of job safety and health laws and raise the level of their protective legislation.

Congress enacted three laws as part of Roosevelt's New Deal which augmented the Federal Government's role in protecting people on the job. The Social Security Act of 1935 allowed the U.S. Public Health Service to fund industrial health programs run by State health departments. This made the Public Health Service, which had begun doing industrial health studies in 1914, the national leader in this field. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set a minimum wage and banned exploitative child labor, gave the Labor Department the power to bar workers under age 18 from dangerous occupations. The Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936 allowed the department to ban contract work done under hazardous conditions.

Maritime rules. By the late 1950's, the Federal-State partnership which Frances Perkins had cultivated was no longer adequate to deal with growing threats to workers' safety and health, so gradually the Federal Government took a more prominent role. In 1958, Congress passed a seemingly minor amendment to the Longshoremen's and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act. It gave the Labor Department authority to set safety and health standards for the very small work force covered under this law. In addition to protecting workers in one of the Nation's most hazardous industries, the amendment closed "the last remaining 'no man's land'" in safety enforcement. The Secretary of Labor was authorized to seek penalties against willful violators, but not against those who only carelessly broke the rules. After holding public hearings, the department began enforcing standards in 1960. Compliance was good, and the high accident rates declined sharply.

In December 1960, shortly after the congressionally ordered maritime rules became effective, the department issued on its own a set of mandatory safety and health standards under the Walsh-Healey Act. The department had previously issued most of these standards in a "Green Book" of informal guidelines to aid Federal and State inspectors. States had been encouraged to inspect Federal contractors and enforce their own rules. Now they were barred from applying their standards and had to enforce the Federal rules instead. For the first time, the Federal occupational safety and health requirements were applied to the whole range of industry.

The new rules were not popular. Because there had been no hearings or prior announcement, labor and industry were caught by surprise and miffed that they had not been consulted. Business protested strongly to the Labor Department against making the rules mandatory. The National Safety Council deplored this "monumental set of rigid regulations."The department took the criticisms to heart, and in October 1963 it announced proposed revisions, with hearings held in March 1964.

Business opposition had been building up for 3 years and reached a peak at the hearings. They ran for 2 weeks, and the transcript filled 1,347 typed pages. More than 100 witnesses appeared, mostly from industry. Business felt that the new rules were not only illegal, but also technically deficient and would inhibit innovation. By substituting Federal for State regulations, the Labor Department generally undermined State safety programs, it was argued. Business also felt that the new policy weakened its own long-established pattern of voluntary safety efforts.

Coordination of programs. The powerful wave of criticism that climaxed at the 1964 hearings prodded the Department of Labor into a serious examination of all its safety programs in order to develop a more coordinated safety and health policy. A study by an outside consultant found in the department a fragmented collection of safety programs and laws. It recommended consolidation of all these safety programs under a single agency, which was done somewhat in 1966.

A movement to protect the natural environment from the ravages of mankind and technology began growing while the Labor Department was seeking to improve and expand its protection of workers' safety and health. Large-scale Federal air and water pollution control programs were developed, helping to increase awareness and concern about the occupational environment.

Spurred by this movement, in 1965 the Public Health Service produced a report, "Protecting the Health of Eighty Million Americans," which outlined some of the recently found technological dangers. It noted that a new chemical entered the workplace every 20 minutes, that evidence now showed a strong link between cancer and the workplace, and that old problems were far from being eliminated. The report called for a major national occupational health effort centered in the Public Health Service.

The AFL-CIO urged President Lyndon Johnson to support the report's recommendations. On May 23, 1966, Johnson told a meeting of labor reporters that "the time has ... come to do something about the effects of a workingman's job on his health." The Departments of Labor and Health, Education and Welfare promptly set about to develop legislation for such a program. A joint task force was then to combine both departments' ideas and submit a proposal to the President. However, Labor and HEW could not agree on which department would control a national program and by late 1966 the task force was deadlocked.

Mining tragedy breaks deadlock. In 1967, it was revealed that almost a hundred uranium miners, an abnormally high number, had died of lung cancer since the 1940's. Up to a thousand more such deaths were expected. In 1947, when large-scale uranium mining was getting underway, the Atomic Energy Commission discovered that radiation levels in these mines were dangerously high. The Commission, in cooperation with the Public Health Service, began a long-term health study of the miners. A number of Federal agencies had limited jurisdiction over uranium mines, but none had clear responsibility for them, and there was very little enforcement.

The lack of action took on tragic overtones with the revelations of 1967, and public attention focused on the Federal Radiation Council. Created in 1959 to advise the President on protective measures to take against all types of radiation hazards, the council was composed of representatives from concerned agencies. In 1967, it had just completed a study of the uranium mines and was expected to recommend a standard shortly. However, when the council met on May 4, 1967, it became deadlocked between a standard that the Atomic Energy Commission recommended and a tougher one preferred by the Labor Department.

The next day, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, impatient with inaction, announced a bold step. Previously, Wirtz had been reluctant to act because he felt that uranium mining was not properly a Department of Labor area. However, without holding public hearings, Wirtz adopted under the Walsh-Healey Act the standard he had unsuccessfully advocated before the Federal Radiation Council.

This move had a decisive impact on the shaping of a national job safety and health program in 1967, as the Departments of Labor and HEW promoted their competing proposals. The Bureau of the Budget accepted the Department of Labor's recommendations.
Johnson Bill Fails
In January 1968, President Johnson called on Congress to enact a job safety and health program virtually identical to that developed by the Labor Department. Johnson said it was "the shame of a modern industrial nation" that each year more than 14,000 workers were killed and 2.2 million injured on the job. Citing inadequate standards, lagging research, poor enforcement of laws, shortages of safety and health personnel, and a patchwork of ineffective Federal laws, Johnson argued that a comprehensive new law was needed.

The Johnson proposal, quickly introduced as legislation, gave the Secretary of Labor the responsibility of setting and enforcing standards to protect 50 million workers. The bill also had a general duty clause requiring employers to "furnish employment and place of employment which are safe and healthful." It gave inspectors legal authority to enter workplaces without management's permission without prior notice. Violators could be fined or jailed, and the Secretary could black-list transgressors who held government contracts. The Labor Department would help interested States to develop their own programs in lieu of the Federal one. The Department of HEW would provide the Labor Department with scientific material for new safety and health standards.

Congressional committee hearings on the Johnson proposal began in February 1968. Secretary of Labor Wirtz, who led off the hearings, cited two casualty lists facing America at that time: the military toll in Vietnam -- and the industrial toll at home. Wirtz claimed that 3 of 4 teenagers entering the work force would probably suffer one minor disabling injury or more during their work life. He also displayed shocking photographs of gory industrial accident scenes. Wirtz felt that the main issue was "whether Congress is going to act to stop a carnage" which continues because people "can't see the blood on the food that they eat, on the things that they buy, and on the services they get."

The proposal aroused opposite strong reactions. Organized labor supported the bill. George Meany, AFL-CIO president, headed a long list of union witnesses at the congressional hearings. A noted occupational health researcher, Irving R. Selikoff, of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and consumers' advocate Ralph Nader added their voices in support. However, industry, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, vehemently opposed the broad powers which would be given to the Secretary of Labor. Industry campaigned hard against a "crash program" that would undermine the rightful role of the States.

Ironically, the Labor Department itself may have hurt the bill's chances. In March 1968, it published the booklet, "On the Job Slaughter," containing gory photographs similar to those Secretary Wirtz had displayed when testifying. When industry found out that many of the pictures were 20 to 30 years old, it accused the Labor Department of deception.

The Johnson proposal failed in 1968. President Johnson's decision not to run for re-election, domestic violence in the inner cities, demonstrations against the Vietnam War -- these and many other events diverted congressional and national attention from dealing with workers' safety and health. The bill never came to a vote in Congress.
Safety and Health Board Proposed
By 1969, the idea of a general job safety and health law had taken hold. Beginning in 1965, Congress passed several laws protecting various groups of workers. The Service Contracts Act of 1965 and the Federal Construction Safety and Health Act of 1969 provided missing links in the protection of Government contractor employees. The 1966 Metal and Non-metallic Mine Safety Act protected non coal miners. A mine explosion in 1968 causing 68 deaths in Farmington, W.Va., spurred Congress to pass the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969.

In the context of Federal action, President Richard Nixon presented his version of a comprehensive job safety and health program to Congress in August 1969. After his inauguration, he had called on his Cabinet departments to sift through his campaign speeches for election-year promises. They were to report to him on what they were doing to meet these pledges. Under Secretary of Labor James D. Hodgson, who was particularly interested in workers' safety and health, was "delighted" to find that in a speech in Cincinnati, the Presidential candidate had called for Federal action on that problem. The White House asked Hodgson to prepare a bill, and he began work immediately, consulting extensively with labor and management.

The Nixon Administration's proposal bypassed the question of whether Labor or HEW should have control and offered instead a five-person board that would set and enforce job safety and health standards. The Labor Department would be limited to inspecting workplaces and HEW would do research. Nixon emphasized use of existing efforts by private industry and State governments. The main Federal concern would be with health research and education and training, and only secondarily with direct regulation.

Legislation embodying the Nixon proposal was introduced in Congress and for the second consecutive year hearings began on a national job safety and health program. Hundreds of witnesses from labor, industry, government, and the safety and health community gave thousands of pages of oral and written testimony. In addition to hearings in Washington, there were field hearings around the country at which rank-and-file workers in steel mills, automobile plants, and other industries testified.

Secretary of Labor George Shultz emphasized at the hearings that the Nixon bill was part of a continuous historical process. Secretary Schultz believed that a consensus had finally evolved on both the need for a Federal law and its general form. He exhorted Congress to "work out our differences and get something done."
Labor Opposes, Business Applauds
This turned out to be easier said than done. Democratic Congressmen, and some Republicans, raised strong objections to the bill. Many felt that, with two departments already involved, a safety board would create administrative confusion. Labor union supporters opposed any such board and wanted the programs lodged in the Labor Department. The proposed enforcement scheme came under fire because it only penalized willful, flagrant violators. Critics felt that this would take away much of the deterrent effect, because employers would be tempted to ignore Federal safety and health standards until after they were inspected. Exemptions of small employers, a 3-year delay in the bill's effective date, and a reliance on "consensus" standards devised by industry groups also drew Democratic opposition.

Organized labor had enthusiastically backed the Johnson bill, but it completely opposed the Nixon proposal. It agreed with congressional critics that the Labor Department was the proper locus of authority over safety and health. Unions felt that strong action was needed to deal with the hazards of the workplace, especially alarming new chemical dangers. As Anthony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union put it: "The mad rush of science has propelled us into a strange and uncharted environment . . . . We grope in the dark and we can light only a few candles."

Buried in the battle of witnesses for and against the Nixon proposal were some thought-provoking comments by Irving Selikoff. He described the suffering of construction workers who succumbed to asbestosis from applying asbestos insulation to buildings. Refusing to blame any one group, he asked rhetorically, "Who killed Cock Robin?" Selikoff's answer was: "No one .... His has been an impersonal, technological death .... We have all failed."

In a crucial switch, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which had led the fight against the Johnson proposal, came out in favor of the Nixon bill. The National Association of Manufacturers and other industry group added their support. The main reason for the Chamber's switch was President Nixon's proposal to put a special safety and health board in charge of the Federal program, instead of giving the Labor Department that duty, as the Johnson proposal would have done. Business also was impressed with the fact that the Administration had listened to industry's views in drafting the legislation. Behind the change of heart was acceptance by business that, while the idea of Government regulation of conditions in the workplace was distasteful, some kind of safety and health law was inevitable.
A Seesaw Battle
Early in 1969, two Democrats, Representative James G. O'Hara of Michigan and Senator Harrison Williams, Jr., of New Jersey had presented bills that were similar to the Johnson proposal of 1968. Despite Republican efforts in 1970 to bottle up the bills in committee, they - and not the Nixon bill - were introduced on the floors of the House and Senate shortly before the Congressional elections. Opponents succeeded in delaying consideration of these labor-backed measures until after the election, in hopes that it would prevent passage.

The strategy was partially successful. In the Senate, the first to act in the post-election "lameduck" session, Republicans offered an amendment substituting the Nixon proposal for the Democratic measures and came just two votes short of succeeding. With the division this close, compromise seemed likely. Senator Jacob Javits, New York Republican, offered an amendment under which the Secretary of Labor would set safety and health standards, and a separate commission would oversee Labor Department enforcement, serving as a kind of court of appeals for parties who disagreed with the Secretary's decisions. Senate Democrats and the Nixon Administration supported the compromise and the Senate passed it.

In the House, a grassroots effort which the Chamber of Commerce waged against the Democratic proposal during the election campaign drained off some support. Republican William A. Steiger of Wisconsin offered an Administration-backed bill to substitute for the O'Hara bill introduced earlier in the year. In a major defeat for labor, which had stoutly resisted any efforts at compromise, the Steiger amendment passed easily and a House- Senate conference committee met to hammer out the differences between the two bills.

However, the odds were now stacked in labor's favor. The conference committee members reflected the liberal views of the Democratic House and Senate committee chairmen who selected them. When the conferees met in December, they adopted the more liberal Senate bill almost unchanged. The only significant point on which the Senate yielded was deletion of a provision allowing the Secretary of Labor to close down a plant under conditions of imminent danger. The Senate immediately approved the measure and sent it on to the House. When Secretary of Labor Hodgson announced that President Nixon approved the bill, Republican opponents in the House abandoned plans to fight the conference committee version, and it passed easily.

All sides praised the final bill. President Nixon lauded it as a significant piece of social legislation. Although he disagreed with specific provisions, he believed that it would help attain "the goal we all want to achieve" - the protection of Americans on the job. The Chamber of Commerce termed it "a substantial victory" for those in industry seeking a fair yet effective law. AFL-CIO President George Meany called it "a long step ... toward a safe and healthy workplace."

President Nixon signed the milestone Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 in a ceremony at the Labor Department. George Meany and other labor figures, leaders in the business community, and prominent members of Congress were present. The ceremony ended the bitter 3-year legislative struggle on a note of harmony and bipartisanship. It marked the culmination of a historical movement that first found expression in the Massachusetts factory act of 1877.

Judson MacLaury is the historian for the U.S. Department of Labor. This article originally appeared in the Monthly Labor Review of March 1981.
NOTES
1. Employees protected by other Federal occupational safety and health laws are excluded from coverage, as are State and local government employees, but participating States provide comparable coverage.

2. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1872, pp. 421-25; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1870, p. 197; and John R. Commons and John B. Andrews, Principles of Labor Legislation (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1916), pp. 327-28.

3. William B. Hard, "Making Steel and Killing Men," Everybody's Magazine, November 1907.

4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 428, "Proceedings of the Industrial Accident Prevention Conference," 1926, pp. 35-36; David S. Beyer, "Safety Provisions in the United States Steel Corporation," in Crystal Eastman, ed., Work Accidents and the Law (New York, Charities Publication Committee, 1910), pp. 244-45; David Brody, Steelworkers in America, the Nonunion Era (New York, Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 166-68.

5. Eastman, Work Accidents and the Law.

6. Roy Lubove, "Workmen's Compensation and the Prerogatives of Voluntarism," Labor History, Fall 1967; James Weinstein, "Big Business and the Origins of Workmen's Compensation," Labor History, Spring 1967, pp. 162-170.

7. Lubove, pp. 278-79; Robert Asher, "Radicalism and Reform: Workmen's Compensation in Minnesota, 1910-1930," Labor History, Winter 1973, p. 36; Herman M. and Anne R. Somers, Workmen's Compensation: Prevention, Insurance, and Rehabilitation of Occupational Disability (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1954), pp. 333-35.

8. Commons and Andrews, Principles of Labor, pp. 430-36; Gordon M. Haferbecker, Wisconsin Labor Laws (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), pp. 20-23.

9. Henry W. Farnam, Chapters in the History of Social Legislation in the United States to 1860 (Washington, Carnegie Institution, 1938), pp. 242-46.

10. C.F.W. Doehring, "Factory Sanitation and Labor Protection," U.S. Bureau of Labor, Bulletin 44, 1903; John B. Andrews, "Phosphorus Poisoning in the Match Industry in the United States," U.S. Bureau of Labor, Bulletin 86, 1910.

11. Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (Boston, Little, Brown and Co., 1943), pp. 7, 121-29.

12. S. Res. 68, 63rd Cong., Congressional Record, Vol. 51, p. 11395.

13. New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 28, 1913.

14. Letter, William B. Wilson to John B. Andrews, Nov. 13, 1914, Secretary of Labor files, National Archives.

15. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report, 1919, pp. 198-204.

16. Frances Perkins, People at Work (New York, John Day Co., 1934), p. 50; Arthur W. MacMahon and John D. Millett, Federal Administrators (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 372.

17. Assistant Secretary of Labor, John J. Gilhooley, Mar. 20, 1958, in U.S. Cong., Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Hearings on "Amending Longshoremen's and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act" (Washington, 1958), pp. 13-17; U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report, 1960, p. 192; U.S. Department of Labor, "Maritime Safety Program, Five Year Report, 1960-64."

18. U.S. Department of Labor, "Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act, Basic Safety and Health Requirements," Mar. 2, 1942 (Washington, 1943); Federal Register, Dec. 28, 1960, pp. 13809-25.

19. Letters from Walter Reuther to Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, Dec. 21, 1961, John B. Olverson, Jan. 26, 1961, and G.C. Stewart, Oct. 9, 1961, Secretary of Labor files, National Archives.

20. U.S. Department of Labor, "Public Hearing on Proposed Revision of Safety and Health Standards for Federal Supply Contracts," March 17-27, 1964, Department of Labor Library.

21. Thomas A. Chittenden, "A Study of Occupational Safety Responsibility of the Department of Labor" (Washington, 1964), pp. 1, 2, 53-58; Secretary of Labor's Order 12-66, July 19, 1966.

22. "White House, 1967 Legislation (Task Force on Occupational Health and Safety)," folder, Secretary of Labor files, National Archives.

23. Federal Radiation Council Meeting, May 4, 1967, Secretary of Labor files, National Archives.

24. Department of Labor Press Releases, May 5, May 9, 1967, Departmental Historian's Office.

25. Letter, David Swankin to Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson, Nov. 3, 1967, Secretary of Labor files, National Archives.

26. Lyndon Johnson, "President's Message to Congress on Manpower and Occupational Safety and Health Programs," Jan. 23, 1968, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 110-11.

27. U.S. Cong., House Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings on "Occupational Safety and Health" (Washington, 1968); U.S. Cong., Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Hearings on "Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1968" (Washington, 1968).

28. 1968 Senate Hearings, p. 2.

29. James D. Hodgson was Under Secretary while George P. Shultz served as Secretary of Labor from 1969 to mid-1970. When Shultz left, Hodgson was appointed Secretary and served until 1973.

30. James D. Hodgson, interview with author, June 12, 1979.

31. Richard Nixon, "Occupational Safety and Health Message to Congress," Aug. 6, 1969, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Vol. 5, No. 32.

32. U.S. Cong., House Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings on "Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1969," (Washington, 1970); U.S. Cong., Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Hearings on "Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970," (Washington, 1970).

33. House Hearings, pp. 312-413.

34. Ibid., pp. 1181, 1194.

35. 1970 Senate Hearings, pp. 1078-79.

36. The New York Times, Dec. 18, 1970.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Job Safety Law of 1970: Its Passage Was Perilous

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Three decades ago Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to help protect the Nation's workers on the job, following a 3-year struggle. By Judson MacLaury

# data[].attributes.body
During the oil crisis in 1973 gas became a huge shortage and people were forced to lower their speed on highways, turn their thermostats down in order to prevent the economy from fully collapsing.

"Gas Crisis." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2023, americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1246210. Accessed 2 May 2023.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Nixon's Foreign Policy - Short History - Department History - Office of the Historian

# data[].attributes.body
Nixon changed his approach to foreign policy in the 1970s with the introduction of a realpolitik root. Nixon, along with the help of Secretary of State Kissinger, moved to push connections with the USSR and China. He did this as an effort to “thaw out” the Cold War. America wanted out so Nixon did so accordingly with as easy of an exit as he could make. Realpolitik was used by Nixon to not only benefit the American society but foreign, too.

“Nixon’s Foreign Policy - Short History - Department History - Office of the Historian.” State.gov, 2019, history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/nixon-foreignpolicy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
NOTE TO READERS
"A Short History of the Department of State" has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice.

Nixon's Foreign Policy

President Nixon pursued two important policies that both culminated in 1972. In February he visited Beijing, setting in motion normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China. In May, he traveled to the Soviet Union and signed agreements that contained the results of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks (SALT I), and new negotiations were begun to extend further arms control and disarmament measures.

These developments marked the beginning of a period of "détente" in line with a general tendency among Americans to favor a lower profile in world affairs after the Vietnam War, which finally ended in 1975 with the last withdrawal of U.S. personnel. While improvements in relations with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China signaled a possible thaw in the Cold War, they did not lead to general improvement in the international climate. The international economy experienced considerable instability, leading to a significant modification of the international financial system in place since the end of World War II.

During the Nixon Administration, international scientific, technological, and environmental issues grew in prominence. In October 1973, Congress passed legislation creating the Bureau of Oceans and International Environments and Scientific Affairs (OES), to handle environmental issues, weather, oceans, Antarctic affairs, atmosphere, fisheries, wildlife conservation, health, and population matters. The Department had difficulty filling the new Assistant Secretary position until January 1975, when the former Atomic Energy Commissioner, Dixie Lee Ray, took the job. However, she resigned six months later claiming that OES was not playing a significant policy role.

Although Secretary Rogers still had broad responsibility for foreign policy, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and international organizations, the Department of State resented its exclusion from key policy decisions, and the Secretary continually fought to make his views known.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nixon's Foreign Policy - Short History - Department History - Office of the Historian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NOTE TO READERS "A Short History of the Department of State" has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice. President Nixon pursued two important policies that both culminated in 1972. In February he visited Beijing, setting in motion normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China.

# data[].attributes.body
The EPA or Environmental Protection Agency has a major role in the way that the US’s environment is sustained. This government agency was put in place by Nixon to help better the nations land. They test and survey different parts of the country for various reasons. The picture shown is a research farm of the EPA in Nevada where they have tested water, plant life, and animal sustainability at this location.