Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s

Foley (American political culture, Univ. of Groningen, Netherlands; coeditor, Home Fronts: A Wartime America Reader), a well-established chronicler of 1960s protest movements, argues persuasively that the 1970s and 1980s did not show a decline in grassroots movements but were in fact marked by issue-focused reactions and responses rooted in personal (often family-related) experience. These were volatile decades that saw the advent of busing to integrate schools, Title IX legislation that made gender discrimination in school and collegiate sports illegal, the uncovering of pervasive corporate environmental irresponsibility, the federal legalizing of abortion, and the emergence of AIDS. Foley's chapters on the grassroots responses to these and other circumstances make for a riveting narrative in which he gives equal weight to activists and public opinion on both sides of the debates he examines. Foley's greatest heroes may be the residents of Love Canal, NY, who, on discovering they were living on top of toxic landfill, organized successfully to get federal remediation, epitomizing the transformation of ordinary men and women into dogged front porch political actors.