After World War II, the new king, Mohammad Reza Shah, faced a country in crisis. He took his first trip to the United States and was greeted warmly by the American public. Upon his return, however, he had to confront the rising tide of dissent, from Communists to Islamists. It was in this context that Iran pursued a bill to nationalize its oil industry. America tried to serve as mediator between Britain and Iran, but it ended up on the wrong side of the dispute. A coup removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from power and tarnished the shah’s rule, and America’s image, thereafter.

Groups advocating change had long existed in the form of political parties, intellectuals, guerrilla organizations, and of course the clergy. Yet only in 1977 did a number of developments converge to usher in a mass movement against the state. These included a sudden rise in levels of urban unemployment sparked by slumps in the global oil market and the domestic construction sector, the government’s need to open up political space in response to the Carter administration’s demands for reforms, and missteps by the government itself in its efforts to introduce reforms and to appear receptive to middle-class needs. Allowing for some grievances to be aired without addressing their root causes only encouraged more open expressions of popular anger, resulting in largely unorganized protests and strikes, which over time gained in frequency, intensity, and size. Poor at crisis management, panicked reactions by the state only deepened what had rapidly become a serious crisis. As the social movement grew into a revolution, the state proved woefully unprepared to deal with the expansive popular anger. Devoid of a meaningful base of social support, by the final months of 1978 the monarchy’s slide toward collapse was all but irreversible.