One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Political Exhaustion in the 1970s

Question for Discussion: How does the film, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), help us understand Americans' cynicism and political exhaustion in the 1970s?

Reading: Schrag, "The Forgotten American" ;
Quart and Auster, pp. 97-119;
Ebert, "1975 Review of Cuckoo's Nest" ;
Ebert, "2003 Review of Cuckoo's Nest" ;
Dirks, "Review of Cuckoo's Nest"

Tips for doing better on American
History and Film Exams

Movie: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) ;
Scenes from Network, Chapter 26 (1976), DVD;

Critical Reviews of One Flew Over
......the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975):
Internet Movie Database

Memorable Quotes from One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest

Roger Ebert review of Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

American Culture & Society in the 1970s

An Appreciation of Ken Kesey on his Death, 2001
Ken Kesey's book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
Walter Freeman: Father of the Lobotomy
Irving Goffman, Asylums (1961)
Schrag, The Forgotten American, 1969
The All in the Family Show, 1970
The Major Events of the 1970s and early 1980s:
From All in the Family Website
Lewis, The Cultural Mood of the 1970s
Samuel Huntington "The Crisis of
Democracy" Report (1975)
Trilateral Commission: The Crisis of Democracy, 1975
Howard Beale, Democracy as a Dying Giant, 1976
Carter's 1976 Democratic Convention Speech
President Carter, The Crisis of Confidence, 1979
About Schmidt (2002): Internet Movie Database
Memorable Quotes from About Schmidt
John Dean: Worse than Watergate,
Deans argues that President Bush
should be Impeached

"Well, in a nutshell, it said: "The American people are turning sullen. They've been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they've turned off, shot up, and they've fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps." So, this concept analysis report concludes, "The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them." I've been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows. I don't want conventional programming on this network. I want counterculture, I want antiestablishment."
Diana Christensen, Network (1976)

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. (shouting) You've got to say, 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!...You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

Howard Beale, Network (1976)
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Democracy as a Dying Giant

"Because in the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain. I don't mean that the United States is finished as a world power. The United States is the richest, the most powerful, the most advanced country in the world, light-years ahead of any other country. And I don't mean the Communists are gonna take over the world because the Communists are deader than we are. What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods. Well, the time has come to say, 'Is dehumanization such a bad word?' Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world, not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things... "
Howard Beale, Network (1976)

President Carter: The Crisis of Confidence (1979)

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.....

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed. Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.
Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like it, and neither do I. What can we do?
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.
One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: "We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America."
We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.
We ourselves are the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self- interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

President Carter, "The Crisis of Confidence" (1979)

Shrag, The Forgotten American, 1969

"There is hardly a language to describe him, or even a set of social statistics. Just names: racist-bigot-redneck-ethnic-Irish-Italian-Pole-Hunkie-Yahoo. The lower middle class. A blank. The man under whose hat lies the great American desert. Who watches the tube, plays the horses, and keeps the niggers out of his union and his neigh borhood. Who might vote for Wallace (but didn't). Who cheers when the cops beat up on demonstrators. Who is free, white, and twenty one, has a job, a home, a family, and is up to his eyeballs in credit. In the guise of the working class—or the American yeoman or John Smith—he was once the hero of the civics books, the man that Andrew Jackson called "the bone and sinew of the country." Now he is "the forgotten man," perhaps the most alienated person in America."

"The reaction is directed at almost every visible target: at integration and welfare, taxes and sex education, at the rich and the poor, the foundations and students, at the "smart people in the suburbs." In New York State the legislature cuts the welfare budget; in Los Angeles, the voters re-elect Yorty after a whispered racial campaign against the Negro favorite. In Minneapolis a police detective named Charles Stenvig, promising "to take the handcuffs off the police," wins by a margin stunning even to his supporters: in Massachusetts the voters mail tea bags to their representatives in protest against new taxes, and in state after state legislatures are passing bills to punish student demonstrators. ("We keep talking about permissiveness in training kids," said a Los Angeles labor official, "but we forget that these are our kids.") "

"And yet all these things are side manifestations of a malaise that lacks a language. Whatever law and order means, for example, to a man who feels his wife is unsafe on the street after dark or in the park at any time, or whose kids get shaken down in the school yard, it also means something like normality—the demand that everybody play it by the book, that cultural and social standards be somehow restored to their civics-book simplicity, that things shouldn't be as they are but as they were supposed to be. If there is a revolution in this country—a revolt in manners, standards of dress and obscenity, and, more importantly, in our official sense of what America is—there is also a counter-revolt. Sometimes it is inarticulate, and sometimes (perhaps most of the time) people are either too confused or apathetic—or simply too polite and too decent—to declare themselves."

"The frustrated middle. The liberal wisdom about welfare, ghettos, student revolt, and Vietnam has only a marginal place, if any, for the values and life of the working man. It flies in the face of most of what he was taught to cherish and respect: hard work, order, authority, self-reliance. He fought, either alone or through labor organizations, to establish the precincts he now considers his own. Union seniority, the civil-service bureaucracy, and the petty professionalism established by the merit system in the public schools be-come sinecures of particular ethnic groups or of those who have learned to negotiate and master the system. A man who worked all his life to accumulate the points and grades and paraphernalia to become an assistant school principal (no matter how silly the requirements) is not likely to relinquish his position with equanimity. Nor is a dock worker whose only estate is his longshoreman's card. The job, the points, the credits become property...."

"At the moment when a parsimonious taxpayer begins to shell out for what he considers an extravagant state university system the students go on strike. Marijuana, sexual liberation, dress styles, draft resistance, even the rhetoric of change become monsters and demons in a world that appears to turn old virtues upside down. The paranoia that fastened on Communism twenty years ago (and sometimes still does) is increasingly directed to vague conspiracies undermining the schools, the family, order and discipline. "They're feeding the kids this generation-gap business," says a Chicago housewife who grinds out a campaign against sex education on a duplicating machine in her living room. "The kids are told to make their own decisions. They're all mixed up by situation ethics and open-ended questions. They're alienating children from their own parents." They? The churches, the schools, even the YMCA and the Girl Scouts, are implicated. But a major share of the villainy is now also attributed to "the social science centers," to the apostles of sensitivity training, and to what one California lady, with some embarrassment, called "nude therapy." "People with sane minds are being altered by psychological methods." The current major campaign of the John Birch Society is not directed against Communists in government or the Supreme Court, but against sex education..."

"The issue, finally, is not the program but the vision, the angle of view. A huge constituency may be coming up for grabs, and there is considerable evidence that its political mobility is more sensitive than anyone can imagine, that all the sociological determinants are not as significant as the simple facts of concern and leadership. When Robert Kennedy was killed last year, thousands of working-class people who had expected to vote for him-if not hundreds of thousands—shifted their loyalties to Wallace. A man who can change from a progressive democrat into a bigot overnight deserves attention."

Lewis, The Cultural Mood of the 1970s

We can only understand the 1970s as a decade of disillusion, cynicism, bitterness, and anger by examining it in t he context of the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate and the Cold War. The American people were increasingly disillusioned with the government and their democratic institutions in the 1970s. The Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Watergate damaged Americans' faith in their government and their leaders. Burdened with this political disillusionment, American society in the 1970s was also underseige by economic decline and declining standards of living. For many Americans, the 1970s became a decade of transition--marked by confusion, frustration, and an overwhelming feeling that America had lost its direction, as if the very future of the "American experiment" and the "American Dream" might be in question. In the 1970s, Americans were faced with unresolved conflict and problems that challenged the very heart of the post-war liberal consensus; they faced economic stagnation and recession, increasing poverty, decline in their standards of living, fears that the American Dream was becoming harder and harder to achieve, and bitter divisions over America's fundamental cultural values.

Let's look for a moment at some of the major problems that Americans faced in the 1970s. Many of these problems already existed before the 1970s, but seemed to many Americans to now be getting worse and more intractable. In the 1970s, we saw increasing divorce rates, with up to one in two marriages ending in divorce. We see a rise in female-headed households caused by these divorces, which forces single women to work to support their families. We see increasing numbers of women working, both to support their families and try to make up for their family's declining standard of living.. We see the increasing breakdown of the family, and a rise in juvenile delinquency. We see the increase in drug-use throughout all levels of society. We see increasing rise in crime and violent crime. We see the growth of equality and opportunities for both women and blacks. We see a rise in premarital sex and couples living together outside of marriage. We see the increasing presence of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals in American society. We see the increasing use of sex to sell products to all levels of society. We see the liberal, white middle-class increasingly abandoning their churches and religions. We see working-class and conservative Americans returning to religion, and particularly the rise of TV ministries. We see the increasing loss of millions and millions of high-paying factory jobs. We see seventy percent of all new jobs created in the 1970s in low-paying service jobs. We see increasing numbers of women and children in poverty. We see ten to fifteen percent inflation per year in the 1970s. We see the real income of American workers fall on average two percent a year each year from 1973 to 1981. As a result of many of these changes, many Americans were losing their faith in the American Dream, their society, their government, and their future.

The real tragedy of the 1970s was that because Americans had increasingly lost their faith in their government, they did not trust or believe that their government could solve these problems. As the decade wore on and Americans perceived many of these problems to be getting worse, they only became even more disillusioned with their government. Many asked why their government didn't try to do something about what many saw as the decline of the American culture, society, and economy. Didn't the government care about the needs of the American people? Wasn't the government to help Americans overcome these problems?

In the summer of 1976, Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter sensed this growing American disillusionment with their government. He realized that if we was going to become President and lead the American people in trying to solve these problems, he would need their trust and support. But this is the enormous problem he faced: How could he as President win back the faith and trust of the American people after Vietnam, Watergate, and all the other revelations of government corruption and mismanagement? It got so bad that in the summer of 1976, the Congress had released evidence that the CIA had opened Americans' mail illegally, had assassinated foreign leaders, had overthrown democratic government, and even planted false stories in American newspapers. How could Carter overcome all this evidence of corruption and rottenness at the core of our government.

In his July 1976 speech at the Democratic Convention, Carter addressed American's growing distrust of government. He begins by laying it all on the line:

"In recent years, our nation has seen a failure of leadership. We've been hurt and we've disillusioned. We've seen a wall go up that separates us from our government."

Here Carter is describing the larger threat to our democratic institutions caused by the Cold War. The government has literally created a wall between itself and the American people. By lying to the American people, by not trusting them to make the right decision to lead our country, the government has denied the people their democratic right to shape and control their government and society. By creating this wall between the government and the people, the government was undermining our democracy and denying the people their right to give their right to control and shape the government.

Carter goes on to call for our country to heal from these wounds:

"It's now a time for healing. We want to have faith again! We want to be proud again! We just want the truth again! It's time for the people to run the government, and not the other way around."

But why should Americans trust their government? Carter now addresses a central wound that Americans are still angry about:

"It's time for our government leaders to respect the law no less than the humblest citizen, so that we can end once and for all a double standard of justice. I see no reason why big shot crooks should be free and the poor ones go to jail."

Here Carter is referring to Americans' anger over the Nixon pardon. It seemed to many that Nixon had got away with his crimes. Americans wanted their government and their leaders to not be above the law, and to carry out their legal obligations to protect our democratic institutions.

Faced with Americans distrust of their government and politicians, Carter closes his speech by reminding Americans that we are a democratic society in which, as Lincoln said, "government is of, by, and for the people":

"That all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that the power of government is derived from the consent of the governed."

But why would Carter have to remind Americans of this? Every school children should know this? But Carter understood that Americans had begun to question this, to no longer believe that their government represented them and acted to protect the common interests of all Americans. In order to restore peoples faith in their government and society, Carter would have to demonstrate to Americans that they could trust their government and that government could act to protect the interests of all Americans.

But in addition to Carter's diagnosis, there were other less democratic diagnoses of America's problems. In 1975, the Trilateral Commission , an international organization of leading politicians and industrialists from the United States, Europe, and Japan, released a report entitled, "The Crisis of Democracy." Unlike Carter, these global political and economic elites concluded that America was suffering from too much democracy. According to Holly Sklar, the Commission concluded:

"The Trilateral Commission stated that " The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups." "...secrecy and deception ...are...inescapable attributes of...government," as it tried to "solve" the "crisis" caused by an "excess of democracy" in the 1960s."

The Commission actually states that "democracy is only one way of constituting authority....[and] in many situation the claims of expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority." The Commission concludes that the only way for democracy to work is to encourage apathy and withdrawal from politics by Americans. Only by limiting democratic participation and relying on politicians and experts, the Commission concludes, will democracy work. They even admit that "this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively." This is precisely the kind of arrogance that has led the government to create a wall between itself and the American people. If government leaders don't trust the people to shape and control their government and society, we are not a democracy! And if the people don't believe that they can shape and control their government and society, then we're not a democracy! Notwithstanding the Trilateral Commission's conclusions, this is the real crisis of democracy in the United States in the 1970s.

It is this political arrogance and disdain for democracy that led American leaders to get us into Vietnam, to lie to the American people, and to try to silence the democratic voices of the people in the 1960s and 1970s. Having discovered the lies and this arrogance, Americans were angry, bitter, and disillusioned with their government. By 1979, this disillusionment was crippling Jimmy Carter's Presidency. It was impossible for Carter to bring the nation together and lead the Americans forward in the late 1970s. Facing his own failure to lead, President Carter called together intellectuals, writers, cultural critics, and religious leaders to advise him on what to do. After this two week process, Carter announced he was going to give a speech to the nation to diagnose and solve America's problems.

In his July 1979 speech, "America's Crisis of Confidence," Carter told Americans that they suffered from a malaise, a disease of the soul, a crisis of confidence in their government, society, and future. Carter quoted one American who said, "I feel like ordinary people are excluded from political power." He argues that Americans are losing their faith "not only in government itself, but in their ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of democracy." He admits that some of this crisis of confidence was caused by government inaction and inability to address the growing problems facing America in the 1970s. Carter concludes with a desperate call for a renewal of confidence:

"We simply must have faith in each other. Faith in our ability to govern ourselves and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face."

But Carter doesn't give Americans any real reasons why they should now have confidence in their government and society. He has reminded Americans of our greatness in the past, but has offered no real program to return America to that greatness and confidence in ourselves in the future.

Confronted with a failed Presidency, Americans rejected President Carter in his campaign for re-election in 1980s and elected Ronald Reagan President. Reagan promised to restore American's confidence in their government, society, and economy. He promised to restore the American Dream and Americans' confidence that hard work and diligent would pay off in a bright, richer future for themselves and their children. Reagan won the election because he was not Carter. Americans desperately turned to Reagan, hoping that he could lead the nation out of its economic, social, and political crisis. But when Reagan himself lied to the American people, allowed the government to become corrupt and even criminal, and was caught selling arms to a terrorist nation and running arms to the Contras, both of which were against the law, many Americans became even more bitter about their government and society. They had placed all of their hopes in Reagan only to discover that he too was a part of the problem. Who could Americans now turn to to help lead America out of this mess? Would Americans be so gullible next time when a politician promised that he would restore American and people's faith in their government? In some ways, President Reagan only further damaged Americans' faith and trust in their government. So the legacy of bitterness, cynicism, anger, and distrust from the 1970s is still very much a part of American society in the 1980s and 1990s. What can restore Americans' confidence is still largely an unanswered question.