Patty's Got a Gun

Patricia Hearst in 1970s America

By: William Graebner

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Paperback | 19 August 2015 | Edition Number 1

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232 Pages

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2.15 x 1.4 x 0.14

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It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Armyâ"who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. But the robberyâ"and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearstâs criminal convictionâ"seemed oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era. With Pattyâs Got a Gun, the first substantial reconsideration of Patty Hearstâs story in more than twenty-five years, William Graebner vividly re-creates the atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration of mid-1970s America. Drawing on copious media accounts of the robbery and trialâ"as well as cultural artifacts from glam rock to Invasion of the Body Snatchersâ"Graebner paints a compelling portrait of a nation confused and frightened by the upheavals of 1960s liberalism and beginning to tip over into what would become Reagan-era conservatism, with its invocations of individual responsibility and the heroic. Trapped in the middle of that shift, the affectless, zombielike, âbrainwashedâ Patty Hearst was a ready-made symbol of all that seemed to have gone wrong with the sixtiesâ"the inevitable result, some said, of rampant permissiveness, feckless elitism, the loss of moral clarity, and feminism run amok. By offering a fresh look at Patty Hearst and her trialâ"for the first time free from the agendas of the day, yet set fully in their cultural contextâ"Pattyâs Got a Gun delivers a nuanced portrait of both an unforgettable moment and an entire era, one whose repercussions continue to be felt today.

Industry Reviews

"In this work, Graebner reconsiders the kidnapping and trial of heiress Patricia Hearst in the context of psychiatry, media, politics, and popular culture in the 1970s. The book is divided into two parts: the first half is a detailed recitation of the kidnapping of Hearst by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA (an American self-styled urban guerrilla warfare group active in the 1970s); the crimes committed by her; and her trial and conviction. In the second part, titled 'Reading Patty Hearst, ' the author concedes that no one knows why Hearst joined her SLA captors. He cites society's dismay with the chaos of the Nixon administration, the decline of the family, and the survival culture of the day. Patty's Got a Gun is a well-written, sophisticated speculation of why Hearst was convicted both by the jury and in the court of public opinion at the onset of the Reagan era."--Library Journal

-- "Library Journal"

"William Graebner's brilliant analysis of America's struggles over the meaning of Patty Hearst gives us not only new perspectives on the 1970s, on Americans' fundamental understandings of their world in a bicentennial year that offered little to celebrate, but also on the longing for heroism and the desire for belief in free will that Graebner believes structured the rise of Reagan-era conservatism. This is a masterful work of cultural history."

--Beth Bailey, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America

"I enjoyed this 'retrospective essay' on the remarkable story of Patty Hearst. . . . Graebner's essay offers far more than narrative. It contextualises a story that 'shocked the nation' in its historical context, midway between the permissive radicalism of the 1960s and a backlash that anticipated the new conservatism of the Reagan era. . . . Graebner combines erudition and scholarship with a sense of humour."

--Jill Radford "Times Higher Education"
"Graebner conducts an intellectual history tour de force that will enrich the scholarship of this period, providing a look into a discrete but revealing episode that exposes the era's most fervent concerns."--Bradford Martin "Journal of American History"

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