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was tied to the expanded costs of the Vietnam War. The United States could not both expand the money supply and honor the redemption of dollars into gold at a fixed price, so it gave up on the latter. The breakdown of the dollar-exchange standard led to modern history’s first peacetime era of major national currencies unlinked to either gold or silver. The result, for several years, was high inflation, partly as national central banks adjusted to their newly established freedom of maneuver, and the lack of a clear monetary anchor. By the 1980s, the world’s central banks had adjusted to the new era of flexible exchange rates and had brought inflation rates back down. Yet by the time this happened, conservative politicians and free-market ideologues were insisting that the burst of inflation during the 1970s was proof of the incapacity of government to manage the economy.

Source: Data from Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables (Tables 1.2, 3.1, and 8.4).

Many factors contributed to soaring oil prices. Partly the soaring oil prices reflected the overheated monetary conditions described. Another element of the high oil prices was the surge in oil demand relative to supply that resulted from years of rapid global economic growth. A third element was politics. The Arab nations gained control over their oil reserves in the early 1970s as supply conditions tightened and as postcolonial geopolitics unfolded. The rise of OPEC alone would have boosted oil prices in the period. Yet the Arab countries temporarily went one step further by launching a boycott of Western markets following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. All in all, the decade was marked by high and unstable oil prices, and profound macroeconomic instability as a result.

11. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

12. At a key moment, Democratic senators from the Sunbelt contributed to the defeat of a prolabor bill in 1978, with Florida senator Richard Stone explaining that the prounion measures would “impede the progress of the sunbelt to attract jobs” (ibid., pp. 188–89).

13. Ibid., p. 193.

14. See Table 17.1 of the Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables.

15. See Table 3.1 of the Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables.

16. See Table 3.2 of the Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables.

17. Ibid.

18. International Energy Agency, Data Services.

19. For the change in income inequality, most recent data are for 2008. For the national poverty rate, earliest available data are for 1959. For earnings of full-time male workers, most recent data are from 2009.

20. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, data set for “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” updated July 2010.

Chapter 5: The Divided Nation

1. I have categorized the Sunbelt and Snowbelt as follows: The Sunbelt: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. The Snowbelt: Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

2. Larry Dewitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” U.S. Social Security Administration, 2010.

3. Lyndon Johnson knew that he was delivering the South to the Republican Party when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On signing the Civil Rights Act, he supposedly turned to an aide and declared that he had delivered the South to the Republicans for a generation. It is a testament to his moral courage that he nonetheless acted so boldly.

4. Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 141–44.

5. For 1970 and 1990 Hispanic population data, see U.S. Census