What the hell happened in the early 1990s? That’s the question posed, and (partially) answered by John Ganz in When the Clock Broke. He sees the period as a fracture point, as the postwar cultural consensus gave way and economic chickens came home to roost. Reading this book was a reminder of just how chaotic, in retrospect, the early ’90s were.
Ganz starts by explaining the financial situation many citizens faced, then swerves through the various cultural and social phenomena of the period. Globalization was already underway (and would only accelerate more later, when China joined the WTO). By the late 1980s, “Manufacturers struggled to keep up with inexpensive, high-quality imports from Japan, West Germany, and South Korea, brought in by the administration’s free trade policies and the strong dollar.”
The recession of 1991 had a long lead-in thanks to the crisis in industries like agriculture that spiraled through the ’80s, even as the image of national prosperity grew. This only created more resentment in those left behind. The only thing worse than doing badly is doing badly while being told everyone else is doing well. It was not “morning in America” for everyone.
Japan, specifically, became the bogeyman, both in the business pages and the movies. The anxiety over Japanese dominance wasn’t entirely unfounded.
Between 1987 and 1991, Japanese investors poured more than $62 billion into US real estate, with a special preference for such blue-chip behemoths as Rockefeller Center in New York and the ARCO Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, prompting public backlash at the prospect of these great obelisks of American capitalism being owned by foreigners.
The real problem was not that the Japanese were investing but what happened when they stopped. Withdrawal of Japanese money was the beginning of the great sucking sound as the recession of 1991 took hold. Japanese investments dropped more than 50 percent, which as Ganz describes, “pulled the bottom out of a struggling Southern California economy.” But that economic overview is just the start. It’s the least insane part of Ganz’s account of this period.
In the years he covers, a Klan Leader ran for office, survivalists had a shootout with the Feds, a third-party presidential candidate was cruising to double-digit support, while another candidate played the saxophone on TV, and police brutality triggered riots. That such a wild range of stuff happened in a narrow window requires a fair bit of backstory, which Ganz supplies. The political history of Louisiana brings us up to speed on David Duke’s ascension. The development of the twentieth-century LAPD serves as the background to the Rodney King case. These sections, plus the strange career of Ross Perot before his presidential campaign, mean we learn (or are also reminded of) a fair amount of unusual stuff before the 1990s. Which hints that, perhaps, this wasn’t a uniquely bizarre window. It just felt that way as the idea of a 24-hour news cycle started to take hold.