New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  Antiwar activists used New York as an organizational center and proving ground during the Vietnam War. Faces of Vietnamese children stared out from photographs on the walls of New York subway stations in 1965, skin twisted and mutilated by napalm. The posters, pasted there by SDS members, were only one sign of the ways in which the distant war was coming home to New Yorkers. With LBJ’s bombing of North Vietnam in February, and with over two hundred thousand American troops now on the ground in South Vietnam, the antiwar movement gained momentum and headlines. Bearing nonviolent witness in the Gandhian tradition linked several national organizations that made 5 Beekman Street, across Park Row from City Hall Park, their official home. The building housed the offices of A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger of the War Resisters League, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, the Committee for Nonviolent Action, and the pacifist magazine Liberation, all of which cooperated to oppose the war.46

  Five Beekman also harbored the new Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, run by Norma Becker, a tireless schoolteacher and Freedom Summer veteran. She oversaw an eager crew of high school and college volunteers who staffed phones, stuffed envelopes, and mimeographed leaflets at all hours of the day and night. Becker’s Charles Street apartment became the arena for some of the national movement’s most heated bull sessions. Over the next few years, New York stalwarts like Becker, Dellinger, David McReynolds of the War Resisters League, Cora Weiss of Women Strike for Peace, Linda Dannenberg of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and others would provide a coordinating organizational backbone for the antiwar movement. They were not alone; activists from other parts of the country also played key roles in the “Mobe,” the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (1967) and its successor umbrella organizations that sought to keep a precariously diverse national movement together. But Dellinger, Becker, and Weiss were ubiquitous in the Mobe’s strategic planning and operations. As the setting for marches and confrontations shifted among Washington, Berkeley, Oakland, Chicago, and campuses nationwide, New Yorkers—with their seasoning in progressive organizations, their willingness to fund liberal causes, their ability to mobilize vast numbers and individual celebrities, their street smarts and media awareness, not to mention their stubbornness and chutzpah—played pivotal roles in the movement’s genesis and survival.

  Across the city, as across the entire country, Vietnam aroused members of the swelling postwar baby boom generation, on campuses where most males were exempt from the draft, and in neighborhoods where the body bags were beginning to return. Pondering the linkages they perceived between capitalism, imperialism, and institutionalized racism, students joined New Left organizations like SDS, now a national entity whose headquarters had moved from New York to Chicago in 1965, partly to cut free from its parent organization, the more moderate League for Industrial Democracy. In a meeting in New York in December 1964, SDS leaders had begun organizing the first mass antiwar march on Washington for Easter 1965. Off the campuses, in poorer neighborhoods, America’s Asian war was also becoming a debatable issue. To at least some in Spanish Harlem and the South Bronx, including Mickey Melendez, “the ‘enemy’ looked too much like us—Puerto Ricans. American troops were destroying shantytowns in a remote country, which had an eerily similar appearance to the tropical country of our fathers.”47

  On April 15, 1967, in the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and Martin Luther King Jr. led at least one hundred thousand demonstrators—perhaps as many as four hundred thousand—from Central Park across Fifty-Ninth and Forty-Seventh Streets to a rally outside the United Nations. It was, to date, the largest antiwar demonstration in American history. In addition to busloads of marchers from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago, the city’s disparate constituencies flowed into the massive crowd. The middle-class professional women and housewives of Women Strike for Peace, some of them participants in the anti–civil defense actions of 1960 and 1961, joined the throng. A civil rights movement veteran named Abbie Hoffman helped lead a motley contingent from the East Village, which had burst forth as the East Coast’s mecca for hippies and cultural rebels. Hoffman sauntered uptown amid “[Allen] Ginsberg’s bells and chants, The Bread and Puppet Theater group, gaily dressed and stoned, a Yellow Submarine, and a lot of people who looked like they had posed for the Sergeant Pepper album cover.” “No Vietcong Ever Called Me Nigger,” asserted signs carried by protesters from Harlem. Many marchers chanted, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Some went further than demanding an end to bloodshed and actively advocated the cause against which the United States was fighting in Vietnam. Marching with several hundred fellow Columbia students, Mark Rudd, a freshman from the New Jersey suburbs, observed militants carrying the red, blue, and gold Vietcong flag. “I felt a secret thrill: Here were people declaring in public what I only dared to say in private.” At the same time, Rudd “looked up to see a group of nuns waving at us from a second-floor balcony of their fancy Upper East Side convent. Everyone in New York seemed to be against the war.”48

  Already, however, friction over goals, strategies, and ideologies was straining the broad coalition. Were acts of nonviolent civil disobedience called for, or did rallies have to be strictly law-abiding in order to attract the largest possible number of Americans? Many religious pacifists welcomed the opportunity to violate the law. Christopher Kearns and several others had already burned their draft cards in front of the army’s induction center on Whitehall Street in July 1965. Life magazine, located five miles uptown, sent photographers to cover the event; pictures of Kearns’s act reached millions of readers across the country. Ten weeks later, near the same spot, twenty-two-year-old Catholic Worker David Miller became the first American to violate a new federal law making draft card burning a felony. Several New Yorkers would serve prison time for destroying their cards; Bronx native Bruce Dancis, president of SDS at Cornell, spent eighteen months behind bars. Others, however, like members of the Socialist Workers Party, which played an active role in the movement, saw illegal acts as alienating more staid members of the working class and thus getting in the way of an alliance between students and workers, which they hoped would bring radical change to America, beyond merely ending the war. Still others saw the movement as a prelude and precipitant to revolution. Divergent aims kept the movement in a state of tension and mutual distrust, continually threatening to erode its unity and its impact.49

  As elsewhere in America, the mid- and late 1960s were explosive in New York, and not just because of the Vietnam War. The economic boom jump-started by federal spending during World War II had permitted a million middle-class, mostly white New Yorkers to move to the surrounding suburbs. Their places were taken by poor newcomers: African Americans leaving the South and Puerto Ricans leaving their island home for opportunity in the north. They arrived in a city that was losing its manufacturing economy to the cheaper, nonunionized South and western Sunbelt—a transformation also rooted in wartime federal encouragement of new industries beyond the traditional smokestack cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Going west and south, too, were the military contracts and installations that had provided thousands of New York jobs since World War II; the shutting down of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966 was only the most dramatic of these losses. The factory and sweatshop jobs that had greeted European emigrants for over a century were missing for the hundreds of thousands of unskilled or semiskilled rural families arriving by plane from San Juan or by bus and train from the Cotton Belt.50

  By the mid-1960s, the new urban poor faced racism, housing and job discrimination, decaying slums, a de facto segregated public school system, drug addiction, and crime. The nonviolent civil rights movement gave way to a new, angry Black Power insurgency among many of the young in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville. Not since the Civil War Draft Riot was race so volatile and tense an issue. Mayor John Lindsay’
s liberal outreach to minority communities, and his policy of restraining the police in confrontations with black youths, saved New York from the devastating “race riots” that leveled whole neighborhoods in Newark, Detroit, and dozens of other cities. Even so, three black New Yorkers died, dozens of “ghetto” inhabitants and police were injured, and hundreds of stores were damaged by looting and fires during three major riots in Harlem and Brooklyn between 1966 and 1968. “If they [the police] want war, we’ll give them war,” an eighteen-year-old East Harlemite told Lindsay in 1967.51

  Liberals and black militants alike warned that, without substantive economic and political change in an increasingly divided city, the powder keg of New York might explode. The black psychologist Kenneth Clark, who had grown up in Harlem, warned in 1965 that “the dark ghettos now represent a nuclear stockpile which can annihilate the very foundations of America.” In 1968, the journalist Jimmy Breslin, who had grown up in Jamaica, Queens, asserted that “unless we give the ghettos a chance to work out their own problems . . . you’ll see shotguns on Park Avenue.” In 1969, the more conservative political scientist Daniel Moynihan, who had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side, told Richard Nixon that the “social fabric of New York City is coming to pieces. . . . Like a sheet of rotten canvas, it is beginning to rip,” and might soon be “in shreds and tatters.” National Guard regiments might find themselves facing gunfire and flames in the streets of America’s largest city, as they did in Newark, Detroit, Washington, and elsewhere.52

  In April 1968, three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, one thousand demonstrators, including members of SDS, the Students Afro-American Society, and outside sympathizers, launched a sit-in and occupation of five buildings on the Columbia University campus. The sense of a coming showdown, of a society to be somehow reborn as it came apart at the seams, had increasingly gripped a very vocal and active minority within the interlinked student and antiwar movements, and now this militant cadre was making its presence felt in the heart of upper Manhattan. Their grievances linked local and global issues: protest against an “apartheid” gym to be built by Columbia, which would limit use by and effectively segregate members of the nearby Harlem community; a demand for amnesty for several students disciplined for a recent antiwar demonstration; and insistence that the university sever its ties to IDA, an intercollegiate think tank that provided research on carpet bombing and the defoliant Agent Orange for the Pentagon. Student demonstrator James Simon Kunen noted that IDA had a “secret research facility” in Pupin Hall, “a building which already bears the distinction of having been the birthplace of the atom bomb.”53

  For a week, as Columbia’s president Grayson Kirk, fearful of sparking a riot in Harlem, held back the police, students and supporters roamed the occupied buildings and voted on strategy and tactics. On April 30, Kirk finally called in the police. Patrolmen in riot gear dragged 705 students, many through a gauntlet of blows from nightsticks, fists, and feet, out into paddy wagons waiting at the Broadway curb. Over one hundred people, including fourteen police officers, ended up in hospitals with injuries. The following day, police and students clashed in a free-for-all on campus; dozens more were injured, including an officer who was permanently disabled when a student jumped on him from a second-story window. Radical students sustained a boycott of classes through the end of the semester. The university expelled over 70 sit-in participants but never built the planned gym and cut its ties with IDA that summer.54

  A new, angrier student movement emerged from the Columbia confrontation, both locally and nationally. “We are out for social and political revolution, nothing less,” declared sit-in leader Mark Rudd, who was expelled and became a traveling speaker and organizer for SDS. His SDS colleague Tom Hayden called for “two, three, many Columbias,” and for “bringing the war home.” In 1969, campus takeovers sparked by the war, demands for increased minority enrollment, and calls for Afro-American Studies programs erupted at City College, Queens College, and Brooklyn College, and again at Columbia. At the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School, and other secondary schools, teenaged radicals linked up with SDS and organized their own underground newspapers (the “Revolutionaries Who Have to be Home by 7:30,” Nicholas Pileggi labeled them in the Times).55

  While radicals contemplated violent revolution, the mainstream of the city’s antiwar movement, including liberals ensconced in the city’s political establishment, continued to embrace more limited goals. Mayor Lindsay, a liberal Republican who, as a representative from Manhattan, had been the third member of Congress to go on record against the war, became an outspoken critic of Lyndon Johnson’s and then Richard Nixon’s continuation of the conflict. Lindsay underscored how the financial cost of the war was diverting money away from social spending in cities that desperately needed it, helping to kill LBJ’s own dream of a “Great Society,” which, once and for all, was supposed to banish poverty from American life. New York City itself was a “prisoner of war,” Lindsay contended, with tax revenues that could pay for hospitals, teachers, police, and other municipal services drained off by the Pentagon; the mayor estimated in 1970 that New Yorkers were paying $3 billion a year in federal taxes for the war and another $6 billion for other defense expenditures. Lindsay narrowly won reelection in a three-way race in 1969, in which his opposition to the war helped cement a winning coalition of voters. Yet Lindsay also derided draft card burning and other provocative tactics as “negative, bizarre, and often self-indulgent.” Rather than flying the Vietcong flag and rampaging on campuses, the young should copy those who “got haircuts, shaved, put on ties, and went into politics.” Many had already anticipated Lindsay’s advice, campaigning for the antiwar Democrats Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in 1968.56

  But the more radical wing of the movement was moving in its own direction. By mid-1968, many in the New Left were turning their backs completely on the notion that peace, or any meaningful social progress, could come out of the existing political system. “Our goal was a much more fundamental change,” Mark Rudd later wrote, “not just ending the war but ending the capitalist system that had caused the war. . . . Electoral politics were beneath our concern.” The split in temperaments, styles, and goals was not overcome, dividing the city’s and nation’s left-of-center constituency against itself. Seventeen years later, Rudd met a man who had walked out of a Hiroshima Day rally in Central Park in August 1969, never to return to the antiwar movement. “A bunch of crazies took over the speakers’ platform and began screaming about violent revolution,” the man told him, not realizing that Rudd had been one of the “crazies.” “It seemed like most of their hate was aimed at the other people in the movement. . . . I guess I didn’t want any part of a movement which had so much hatred and violence.” In New York as elsewhere, the antiwar movement that had initially united liberals and leftists, pacifists and revolutionaries, ultimately sharpened the divisions between them.57

  The Vietnam War looked different in the sprawling working-class and middle-class Irish, German, Polish, and Italian American neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, populated by the families of construction workers, unionized technicians, clerical workers, shopkeepers, drivers, police officers, and firefighters. When criticism or doubts about this war surfaced, as they certainly did, they collided with strongly held values: a heartfelt patriotism, a devotion to the flag, pride in family legacies of military service, membership in unions and Democratic Party clubhouses with ties to Lyndon Johnson, and, in some cases, allegiance to the fledgling Conservative Party or the right wing of the Republican Party. (While LBJ had garnered over two million city votes in 1964, eight hundred thousand New Yorkers had voted for the ultraconservative Barry Goldwater.) Their newspaper of choice, the Daily News—the nation’s highest-circulating daily paper—belittled protesters as “Peaceniks” and “Vietniks,” and celebrated when GIs placed “Old Glory” atop captured Communist positions. Many shared the Catholic conviction that Com
munism was the enemy of everything right and true. Growing up in a family of Puerto Rican and Cuban émigrés, Mickey Melendez had been taught that “Communists were atheists who would destroy our way of life and would not hesitate to brainwash all of us and submit our whole society to misery forever.”58

  No community in the city or nation was more divided by the war than Roman Catholics. Time and again, it was militantly pacifist Catholics—Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers, radical priests and nuns, concerned laypeople—who undertook some of the movement’s most daring actions, inviting jail sentences by burning draft cards and raiding government offices to destroy or steal military records. But the institutional church, personified by New York archbishop and cardinal Francis Spellman, who was also Catholic military vicar for the US Armed Forces, consistently backed the war; on a visit to South Vietnam, he pronounced it “a war for civilization.” Many devout Catholics shared Spellman’s sentiments.59

  Many blue-collar New Yorkers also resented the privilege of draft exemption enjoyed by college protesters and harbored the bitter conviction that student radicals and antiwar liberals looked down their noses with arrogant disdain at the working stiffs of the “outer boroughs.” Mayor Lindsay and his liberal supporters symbolized another New York, one that seemed to blend Manhattan-based snobbery, appeasement of poor blacks and student radicals, and a lack of patriotism, all in one distasteful bundle. “The rich liberals, they look down on my little piece of the American dream, my little backyard with the barbeque here,” a Brooklyn construction worker remarked in 1969. Many whites reacted with anger, frustration, and a sharpened conservatism to rising crime, what they saw as the encroachment of blacks and Latinos into their neighborhoods, the civil rights movement, hippies, and the emerging women’s and gay rights movements. “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate,” young whites shouted at blacks in Brooklyn’s East New York in 1966. “Go back to Africa, Niggers!” some of them also yelled.60