In the 1980s the Reagan administration, partly due
to its pro- corporate and anti-big-government stance,
attempted to eviscerate the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), first, by drastically cutting its funding
and, second, by taking the teeth out of much of the
environmental legislation passed in the 1970s. Ron-
ald Reagan brought into the government a number
of anti-environmentalists, including James Watt as
secretary of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch (Buford)
as head of the EPA. Vehemently opposed to the
regulation of business and focused on the need to
develop and use resources, they encouraged groups
in industries such as ranching, mining, and logging
to be advocates for the “wise use” of resources. In
1981 Watt stated, “We will mine more, drill more, cut
more timber to use our resources rather than simply
keep them locked up.”^1
The Reagan administration’s pro-corporate
position reflected concern about the nation’s ability
to remain a strong contender in the increasingly com-
petitive global marketplace. For nearly forty years fol-
lowing World II, Germany and Japan had been demil-
itarized and were busy building modern factories to
replace their war-damaged industrial infrastructures,
while the United States was still spending large sums
to maintain its military power. In the Northeast and
Midwest, factory towns were abandoned and inner
cities decayed, as factories moved south or overseas
in search of cheap labor and freedom from the con-
straints of labor laws and environmental regulation.
It was not until the disintegration of the Soviet
Union at the end of the 1980s that the United States
was willing to turn its attention to its own aging infra-
structure and the shift to a services-based economy.
However, by the 1980s newly industrialized coun-
tries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim, includ-
ing Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea, and in
Latin America, including Brazil, had joined Germany
and Japan in competing with the United States for
manufacturing jobs, and the nation’s blue-collar jobs
continued to disappear into foreign factories, some
owned by American corporations or their subsidiar-
ies and others by entrepreneurs in the newly industri-
alized countries.
After World War II, many farm jobs also disap-
peared, as farmers sold off their land to real estatePart VII
Confronting Economic and Social
Realities, 1980–1999