America Dreaming
Page 7
With this album, the Beatles were radicalized. “The cover was as relevant as the Vietnam War,” argued John Lennon. “If the public could accept something as cruel as the war, then they could accept that cover.” By the spring of the next year, the Beatles weren’t alone in their opposition to the war.
Sixties protest poster
“Hell, no! We won’t go!” became the catchphrase of Vietnam War protesters on campuses across the country. On April 14, 1967, thousands of angry screaming young people marched through Manhattan and San Francisco. They shouted “Hell, no! We won’t go!” “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” and “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! The Vietcong are going to win!” Inspired by the 1963 civil rights March on Washington, these mass demonstrations, attracting more than 250,000 participants, were organized by a broad-based coalition of non-radical, nonmilitant protesters who wanted to force President Johnson to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Surprisingly, they were joined by religious leaders, mothers, and many others, including respectable mainstream groups:
• Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam
• Business Executives Move for a Vietnam Peace
• Washington Physicians and Other Health Workers for Peace in Vietnam
• Returnees Association (ex–Peace Corps volunteers)
• Federation of American Scientists
• International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union
• Americans for Democratic Action
• a group of Rhodes Scholars
• Another Mother for Peace
By 1967, the majority of Americans were moving slowly from unquestioning support of the war to leaning against American involvement. One of the most dramatic and emblematic shifts was Jane Fonda’s position on war. In 1962, the Pentagon’s official designation for Fonda was “Miss Army Recruiting.” By 1972, after visiting North Vietnam, her unofficial sobriquet became “Hanoi Jane,” which derisively noted her support of the Communist regime the American troops were fighting.
The extraordinary swing to opposing the war began, however, not as a mainstream movement, but as an out-cropping of a small, leftist student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Though SDS was not primarily anti-Vietnam, they saw the escalation of the Vietnam War as a symptom of a much larger problem in America and thus a good place to focus their initial energy. When SDS met at Port Huron, Michigan, in June of 1962 after the spring semester had ended, the members were inspired by the democratic principles of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been so successful in organizing the lunch counter sitins and later the Freedom Summer in 1964. Like the SNCC, these college students wanted to address what they saw as the biggest problems in America. In their “Port Huron Statement,” they wrote:
ANOTHER MOTHER FOR PEACE
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit…. Many of us began maturing in complacency. As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we…might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two.
SDS saw their organization as the future of the left wing in this country. The “Old Left” was still reeling from the McCarthy era, which had marginalized left-thinking intellectuals as Communist sympathizers. At the time of the Port Huron meeting the only real left were the labor unions that were rigidly anti-Communist. SDS wanted to lead the country into an era of the “New Left” made up of students and a new generation of youths. They saw their mission as returning democracy to the people. In their view, America was being controlled by what radical sociologist C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” composed of “upper circles of the corporate, political, and military worlds.”
This elite was referred to by a number of names, including the “military-industrial complex,” “the system,” “the machine,” and simply “the man.” The New Left saw this elite as interested almost exclusively in promoting their own interests and maintaining power. From the New Left’s perspective, the consequences of “the system’s” hunger for control was leading America into a spiraling arms race, a hysterical Cold War standoff, and a system of fundamental economic inequality, all of which SDS found reprehensible.
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POLITICS AS USUAL
It is worth noting here that SDS and many of its sister organizations were operating not unlike the system they were rejecting. Like the giant military-industrial complex, they had a fondness for acronyms (SDS, SNCC, MOBE) and incomprehensibly ideological position papers. The two sides also shared a real lack of a sense of humor. They were both overly serious and valued hard work, self-discipline, and delayed gratification, rather than instant gratification and unrestrained pleasure. They were intolerant of people who disagreed with them, because they were so certain of their righteousness. As well, women in these organizations were treated as second-class citizens.
* * *
Taking a page from SNCC, SDS organized the Economic Research and Action Project in urban ghettos to help the nation’s poor. The project was an unmitigated failure, except for one thing. Like SNCC’s Freedom Summer, the experience of being exposed to poor black neighborhoods changed these white middle-class college students. After growing up in sheltered suburbs, the shock of the “real America” they saw led many to embrace a radical solution to poverty. They concluded that the entire capitalistic system was sick and had to be destroyed.
By 1965, SDS turned its attention to the government’s escalating involvement in Vietnam. Though the government refused to call it a war, the American public knew what it meant that the U.S. military was supporting South Vietnam against the Vietcong rebels and North Vietnamese troops. It was a war, just like the Korean War a decade earlier. For members of SDS, the war seemed to be at the core of everything wrong with the country. It was the will of the nation’s “power elite,” not the will of the people.
While SDS was moving toward organizing a major Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C., for the upcoming spring, out West at the University of California at Berkeley, students were organizing for a different reason. During the fall semester of 1964, college administrators banned civil rights groups from recruiting workers for civil rights organizations’ Mississippi projects along Telegraph Avenue. Traditionally, this location had been where groups set up tables to distribute information. Most organizations ignored the ban, but when five students were called before the disciplinary committee for breaking the new rule, hundreds showed up and demanded to be punished as well. By October 1, the confrontation had escalated out of control when the administration ordered a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) worker arrested and the removal of tables set up in front of the main administration building. Students spontaneously surrounded the police car. A standoff ensued with more than 4,000 students joining in the protest.
Afterward, the two most prominent political groups on campus, the Young Republicans and the SNCC, created the Free Speech Movement (FSM). This coming together of diverging political positions became a hallmark of much of the student demonstrations. Like SDS’s march on Washington, the FSM believed in nonexclusion, self-determination, and mass action. A student sit-in and rally was organized for December 2. Mario Salvio, one of the leaders of FSM, addressed thousands of rallying students:
There is a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run
it, to the people that own it, that unless you’re free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.
Joan Baez followed Salvio with Dylan’s generational anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” The rally ended with everyone singing the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” Shocked by this student outburst of rebellion, the administration responded aggressively and called in the Berkeley police, who arrested 773 students. Outraged by the authorities’ high-handed actions, a student strike immediately followed. Eventually, the administration caved to their demands. The movement won concessions that allowed political speech on Telegraph Avenue. Berkeley historian W. J. Rorabaught observed that the FSM “led many students to challenge the status quo….They became feisty and contentious…. The Free Speech Movement unleashed a restless proving of life.”
Within months, students and faculty were beginning to mobilize for their rights and their beliefs on campuses across the nation. In March of 1965, faculty and graduate students at the University of Michigan organized the first teach-in on the Vietnam War. The premise of the teach-in was for professors, instructors, and students to share information, argue, and discuss the war. The importance of this was that participants no longer trusted what the government or the mass media were saying about America’s role in Vietnam. They took on the responsibility of educating themselves.
One month later, on April 17, 1965, SDS led a group of fringe organizations, including Quakers, pacifists, and leftists, in a protest march on the grounds of the Washington Monument, trying to emulate the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Though Vietnam, with just over 40,000 troops deployed, was still barely on the radar for most Americans, SDS and the other groups—more than 25,000 participants—wanted to draw attention to the military’s increasing involvement. In his speech to the crowd, Paul Potter, the president of SDS, linked the war in Vietnam to larger problems in American society. He told the gathering that something had gone wrong with America. The war in Vietnam was a sign of a failure of democracy because it benefited the interests of “the system” at the expense of the lives of the youths who were being killed. In a country that had not come to a democratic consensus to go to war, but had just accepted the government’s decision to do so, it was imperative that a real consensus—a Movement—now form. The individuals who made up that movement had to be ready to accept the consequences of going against their government and the status quo. At the rally, Potter said:
To build a movement rather than a protest or some series of protests, to break out of our insulations and accept the consequences of our decisions, in effect to change our lives, means that we can open ourselves to the reactions of a society that believes that it is moral and just, that we open ourselves to libeling and persecution, that we dare to be really seen as wrong in a society that doesn’t tolerate fundamental challenges…. All our lives, our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend on our ability to overcome that system.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
—Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”
By late 1965, the protests against the war began to pick up. About 120 colleges and universities held teach-ins. Like the sit-in movement five years earlier, the teach-ins showed young people that they no longer needed simply to accept what they were told by people in authority. They could question, they could challenge, and they could act. Highlights included a national teach-in in Washington that was broadcast to 100,000 students on 100 campuses; a thirty-four-hour marathon teach-in in Berkeley, attended by 15,000; and local demonstrations on the International Days of Protest in October. From this moment forward, campuses became the center of anti–Vietnam War protests.
One of the many ironies that would arise amid this movement was the fact that parents were sending their sons and daughters to college to help them succeed within the system and continue the prosperity. While at college, these same students were introduced by their
professors and instructors to the very principles of questioning the system. This was particularly true in respect to Vietnam. At the same time, college campuses became havens for young men to avoid the draft. Any full-time male college student received an automatic deferment from the draft. As a result, actions to secure the future of the establishment actually undermined it.
SDS quickly became the leader in the Anti-War Movement. Chapters began sprouting up on nearly every campus in the country, and by 1968, the organization had more than 40,000 members. Despite the success of SDS in holding the largest peace demonstration up to that point in American history, and despite the growing concern of draft-age men about the war, the organization began to back away from its leadership role in the Anti-War Movement. Its leaders were more concerned with broader ideological issues and believed that protesting against the war would only divert attention from the greater sickness in American culture. This decision proved to be a major miscalculation. The vast majority of young people in America were more concerned with losing their lives in Vietnam than with changing any system.
In some ways, SDS was correct in its self-analysis. The threat that someone from the Boomer Generation would be drafted and sent to Vietnam was small. During the war, one third of the soldiers in Vietnam had been drafted. The rest were volunteers. In addition, there was a myriad of ways in which to avoid the draft, one of which was to stay in school. Nevertheless, for young people coming of age during this time, even the likelihood of being drafted was sufficient to make their concern primary. Few really believed that the spread of Communism in that tiny country, no larger than the state of New Jersey, would truly be a threat to America. They had been brought up to cherish individual fulfillment. Fighting an unknown enemy in Asia did not fit that criterion.
The process of building anti-war actions led to the creation of broad-based local anti-war coalitions. Two areas of focus came out of the March on Washington and the teach-ins: First, a national coalition needed to be formed to coordinate protests; and second, the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam was essential.
…the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Between 1965 and 1968, protesters raised the level of confrontation with the “war makers.” In mid-1965, protesters burned their draft cards and Congress made it a crime. By the next year, returning soldiers joined the Movement, and the first organized campus protests took place against Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, an incendiary substance used to burn down the jungles of Vietnam but that also served to burn the flesh off victims. The New York Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, which brought hundreds of organizations together for demonstrations, led a major anti-war parade in Manhattan. At the same time, the Vietnam Day Committee—composed of free-speech activists, pacifists, and other radicals—attempted to shut down the Oakland Army Terminal, a departure point for men and matériel going to Vietnam.
By the end of the year, the Parade Committee and its partners formed the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE). On April 15, 1967, 500,000 people marched in the streets in New York and San Francisco in what was called the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. At the New York rally, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out for the first time on a non–civil rights issue.
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghetto without having first spoken out clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. We are at a moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must deci
de on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest…. I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart…. This war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for.
Around the same time, the editorial page of the New York Times, one of the country’s most respected newspapers, turned against the war. On October 21, 1967, 150,000 marched on Washington in a direct political confrontation with the Pentagon and President Johnson’s war policy. The leaders of this march were two counterculture jesters, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. In the coming year, they would make headlines for their antics and the organization of the Yippies! (As in Youth International Party—with an emphasis on “party” and the exclamation point intended.) Rubin and Hoffman’s rise to leadership marked a shift in the movement from one of hope to the beginnings of cynicism, as they brought a gallows humor to the movement that reflected the growing sense of futility that many radicals felt. With the government clearly not changing its policies, many were beginning to conclude that only desperate measures would force change.
Despite all of these marches and protests, the Johnson Administration was unresponsive. This wasn’t a war President Johnson wanted. He’d inherited it from Kennedy, and he was not going to be the first American president to lose a war. The administration continued to increase America’s involvement in Vietnam despite a shift in its policy from protecting the world against Communism to simply trying to save face. According to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, by 1965 the main goal of U.S. policy in Vietnam was to “avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.” This meant propping up the corrupt South Vietnamese government. For America, one of the world’s superpowers, to lose a war in a tiny country like Vietnam was unfathomable and had to be resisted at almost any cost. Protests from a minority of the American population were not going to change this emotion-based, rather than strategic, policy.