The Twenty-sixth Amendment (Amendment XXVI) to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote
to citizens of the United States who are at least eighteen years old.
It was proposed by Congress on March 23, 1971, and ratified on July 1,
1971, the quickest ratification of an amendment in history.
This amendment was important to the Student Movement because they
declared that if they were old enough to be drafted into a war they
were against, then they should be old enough to vote against and have a
voice in their government.
Various public officials had supported lowering the voting age
during the mid-20th century, but were unable to gain the legislative
momentum necessary for passing a constitutional amendment. The drive to
lower the voting age from 21 to 18 grew across the country during the 1960s, driven in large part by the military draft held during the Vietnam War, as well as the student activism movement. The draft conscripted young men between the ages of 18 and 21 into the armed forces, primarily the U.S. Army, to serve in or support military combat operations in Vietnam. A common slogan of proponents of lowering the voting age was "old enough to fight, old enough to vote."
Congress lowered the national voting age to 18 in a 1970 bill that extended the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court subsequently held in the case of Oregon v. Mitchell
that Congress could not lower the voting age for state and local
elections. Shortly after that ruling, Congress proposed and the states
ratified the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which constitutionally protects
voting rights for individuals between 18 and 21 years old.
Text
Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of
age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any State on account of age.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Background
Prior legislation
Senator Harley Kilgore began advocating for a lowered voting age in 1941 in the 77th Congress. Despite the support of fellow senators, representatives, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
Congress failed to pass any national change. However, public interest
in lowering the vote became a topic of interest at the local level. In
1943 and 1955 respectively, the Georgia and Kentucky legislatures passed
measures to lower the voting age to 18.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1954 State of the Union address, became the first president to publicly support prohibiting age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older. During the 1960s, both Congress and the state legislatures came under increasing pressure to lower the minimum voting age from 21 to 18. This was in large part due to the Vietnam War, in which many young men who were ineligible to vote were conscripted
to fight in the war, thus lacking any means to influence the people
sending them off to risk their lives. "Old enough to fight, old enough
to vote" was a common slogan used by proponents of lowering the voting
age. The slogan traced its roots to World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to eighteen.
In 1963, the President's Commission on Registration and Voting Participation, in its report to President Johnson,
further encouraged considering lowering the voting age. Historian
Thomas H. Neale argues that the move to lower the voting age followed a
historical pattern similar to other extensions of the franchise; with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, constituents were mobilized and eventually a constitutional amendment passed.
In 1970, Senator Ted Kennedy proposed amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to lower the voting age nationally.[9] On June 22, 1970, President Richard Nixon
signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required the
voting age to be 18 in all federal, state, and local elections. In his statement on signing the extension, Nixon said:
Despite my misgivings about the
constitutionality of this one provision, I have signed the bill. I have
directed the Attorney General to cooperate fully in expediting a swift
court test of the constitutionality of the 18-year-old provision.
Subsequently, Oregon and Texas challenged the law in court, and the case came before the Supreme Court in 1970 as Oregon v. Mitchell. By this time, four states had a minimum voting age below 21: Georgia, Kentucky, Alaska and Hawaii.
Oregon v. Mitchell
During debate of the 1970 extension of the Voting Rights Act, Senator Ted Kennedy argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment allowed Congress to pass national legislation lowering the voting age. In the 1966 decision of Katzenbach v. Morgan,
the Supreme Court had ruled that "if Congress acts to enforce the 14th
Amendment by passing a law declaring that a type of state law
discriminates against a certain class of persons, the Supreme Court will
let the law stand if the justices can 'perceive a basis' for Congress's
actions".
President Nixon disagreed with Kennedy. In a letter to the
Speaker of the House and the House minority and majority leaders, he
asserted that the issue is not whether the voting age should be lowered,
but how; in his own interpretation of the Katzenbach case, Nixon
argued that to include age as something discriminatory would be too big
a stretch and voiced concerns that the damage of a Supreme Court
decision to overturn the Voting Rights Act could be disastrous.
In Oregon v. Mitchell
(1970), the Supreme Court considered whether the voting-age provisions
Congress added to the Voting Rights Act in 1970 were constitutional. The
Court struck down the provisions that established 18 as the voting age
in state and local elections. However, the Court upheld the provision
establishing the voting age as 18 in federal elections. The Court was
deeply divided in this case, and a majority of justices did not agree on
a rationale for the holding.
The decision resulted in states being able to maintain 21 as the
voting age in state and local elections, but being required to establish
separate voter rolls so that voters between 18 and 20 years old could
vote in federal elections.
Opposition
Although
the Twenty-sixth Amendment passed faster than any other constitutional
amendment, about 17 states refused to pass measures to lower their
minimum voting ages after Nixon signed the 1970 extension to the Voting
Rights Act.
Opponents to extending the vote to youths questioned the maturity and
responsibility of people at the age of 18. Professor William G. Carleton
wondered why the vote was proposed for youth at a time when the period
of adolescence had grown so substantially rather than in the past when
people had more responsibilities at earlier ages.
Carleton further criticized the move to lower the vote citing American
preoccupations with youth in general, exaggerated reliance on higher
education, and equating technological savvy with responsibility and
intelligence. He denounced the military service argument as well, calling it a "cliche". Considering the ages of soldiers in the Civil War,
he asserted that literacy and education were not the grounds for
limiting voting; rather, common sense and the capacity to understand the
political system grounded voting age restrictions.
James J. Kilpatrick, a political columnist, asserted that the states were "extorted into ratifying the Twenty-sixth Amendment".
In his article, he claims that by passing the 1970 extension to the
Voting Rights Act, Congress effectively forced the States to ratify the
amendment lest they be forced to financially and bureaucratically cope
with maintaining two voting registers. George Gallup
also mentions the cost of registration in his article showing
percentages favoring or opposing the amendment, and he draws particular
attention to the lower rates of support among adults aged 30–49 and over
50 (57% and 52% respectively) as opposed to those aged 18–20 and 21–29
(84% and 73% respectively).
On March 10, 1971, the Senate
voted 94–0 in favor of proposing a Constitutional amendment to
guarantee that the minimum voting age could not be higher than 18. On March 23, 1971, the House of Representatives voted 401–19 in favor of the proposed amendment.
Ratification by the states
Having been passed by the 92nd United States Congress,
the proposed Twenty-sixth Amendment was sent to the state legislatures
for their consideration. Ratification was completed on July 1, 1971,
after the amendment had been ratified by the following thirty-eight
states:
Connecticut: March 23, 1971
Delaware: March 23, 1971
Minnesota: March 23, 1971
Tennessee: March 23, 1971
Washington: March 23, 1971
Hawaii: March 24, 1971
Massachusetts: March 24, 1971
Montana: March 29, 1971
Arkansas: March 30, 1971
Idaho: March 30, 1971
Iowa: March 30, 1971
Nebraska: April 2, 1971
New Jersey: April 3, 1971
Kansas: April 7, 1971
Michigan: April 7, 1971
Alaska: April 8, 1971
Maryland: April 8, 1971
Indiana: April 8, 1971
Maine: April 9, 1971
Vermont: April 16, 1971
Louisiana: April 17, 1971
California: April 19, 1971
Colorado: April 27, 1971
Pennsylvania: April 27, 1971
Texas: April 27, 1971
South Carolina: April 28, 1971
West Virginia: April 28, 1971
New Hampshire: May 13, 1971
Arizona: May 14, 1971
Rhode Island: May 27, 1971
New York: June 2, 1971
Oregon: June 4, 1971
Missouri: June 14, 1971
Wisconsin: June 22, 1971
Illinois: June 29, 1971
Alabama: June 30, 1971
Ohio: June 30, 1971
North Carolina: July 1, 1971
Having been ratified by three-fourths of the States (38), the
Twenty-sixth Amendment became part of the Constitution. On July 5, 1971,
the Administrator of General Services, Robert Kunzig,
certified its adoption. President Nixon and Julianne Jones, Joseph W.
Loyd Jr., and Paul S. Larimer of the "Young Americans in Concert" also
signed the certificate as witnesses. During the signing ceremony, held
in the East Room of the White House, Nixon talked about his confidence in the youth of America.
As I meet with this group today, I
sense that we can have confidence that America's new voters, America's
young generation, will provide what America needs as we approach our
200th birthday, not just strength and not just wealth but the 'Spirit of
'76' a spirit of moral courage, a spirit of high idealism in which we
believe in the American dream, but in which we realize that the American
dream can never be fulfilled until every American has an equal chance
to fulfill it in their own life.
The amendment was subsequently ratified by the following states, bringing the total number of ratifying states to forty-three:
39. Oklahoma: July 1, 1971
40. Virginia: July 8, 1971
41. Wyoming: July 8, 1971
42. Georgia: October 4, 1971
43. South Dakota: March 4, 2014
No action has been taken on the amendment by the states of Florida,
Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, or Utah.
Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began with demonstrations in 1964 against the escalating role of the U.S. military in the Vietnam War and grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years. This movement informed and helped shape the vigorous and polarizing debate, primarily in the United States, during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s on how to end the war.
Many in the peace movement within the U.S. were students, mothers, or anti-establishmenthippies.
Opposition grew with participation by the African-American civil
rights, women's liberation, and Chicano movements, and sectors of
organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups,
including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, physicians
(such as Benjamin Spock), and military veterans. Their actions consisted mainly of peaceful, nonviolent
events; few events were deliberately provocative and violent. In some
cases, police used violent tactics against peaceful demonstrators. By
1967, according to Gallup Polls,
an increasing majority of Americans considered U.S. military
involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake, echoed decades later by the then
head of American war planning, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Reasons
Vietnam War protesters in Wichita, Kansas, 1967
The draft, a system of conscription that mainly drew from minorities and lower and middle class whites, drove much of the protest after 1965. Conscientious objectors played an active role despite their small numbers. The prevailing sentiment that the draft was unfairly administered inflamed blue-collar American, especially African-American, opposition to the military draft itself.
Opposition to the war arose during a time of unprecedented student activism, which followed the free speech movement and the Civil Rights Movement. The military draft mobilized the baby boomers,
who were most at risk, but it grew to include a varied cross-section of
Americans. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War was partly
attributed to greater access to uncensored information through extensive
television coverage on the ground in Vietnam.
Beyond opposition to the draft, anti-war protesters also made
moral arguments against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. That moral
imperative argument against the war was especially popular among
American college students, who were more likely than the general public
to accuse the United States of having imperialistic goals in Vietnam and
to criticize the war as "immoral."
Civilian deaths, which were downplayed or omitted entirely by the
Western media, became a subject of protest when photographic evidence of
casualties emerged. An infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shooting an alleged terrorist in handcuffs during the Tet Offensive also provoked public outcry.
Another element of the American opposition to the war was the
perception that U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which had been argued as
acceptable because of the domino theory and the threat of communism,
was not legally justifiable. Some Americans believed that the communist
threat was used as a scapegoat to hide imperialistic intentions, and
others argued that the American intervention in South Vietnam interfered
with the self-determination
of the country and felt that the war in Vietnam was a civil war that
ought to have determined the fate of the country and that America was
wrong to intervene.
Media coverage of the war
also shook the faith of citizens at home as new television brought
images of wartime conflict to the kitchen table. Newsmen like NBC's
Frank McGee stated that the war was all but lost as a "conclusion to be
drawn inescapably from the facts."
For the first time in American history, the media had the means to
broadcast battlefield images. Graphic footage of casualties on the
nightly news eliminated any myth of the glory of war. With no clear sign
of victory in Vietnam, American military casualties helped stimulate
opposition to the war by Americans. In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
reject the mainstream view of how the media influenced the war and
propose that the media instead censored the more brutal images of the
fighting and the death of millions of innocent people.
Polarization
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam."
The U.S. became polarized over the war. Many supporters of U.S. involvement argued for what was known as the domino theory,
a theory that believed if one country fell to communism, then the
bordering countries would be sure to fall as well, much like falling
dominoes. This theory was largely held due to the fall of eastern Europe
to communism and the Soviet sphere of influence following World War II.
However, military critics of the war pointed out that the Vietnam War
was political and that the military mission lacked any clear idea of how
to achieve its objectives. Civilian critics of the war argued that the
government of South Vietnam lacked political legitimacy, or that support
for the war was completely immoral.
The media also played a substantial role in the polarization of
American opinion regarding the Vietnam War. For example, In 1965 a
majority of the media attention focused on military tactics with very
little discussion about the necessity for a full scale intervention in
Southeast Asia.
After 1965, the media covered the dissent and domestic controversy
that existed within the United States, but mostly excluded the actual
view of dissidents and resisters.
The media established a sphere of public discourse surrounding
the Hawk versus Dove debate. The Dove was a liberal and a critic of the
war. Doves claimed that the war was well–intentioned but a disastrously
wrong mistake in an otherwise benign foreign policy. It is important to
note the Doves did not question the U.S. intentions in intervening in
Vietnam, nor did they question the morality or legality of the U.S.
intervention. Rather, they made pragmatic claims that the war was a
mistake. Contrarily, the Hawks argued that the war was legitimate and
winnable and a part of the benign U.S. foreign policy. The Hawks claimed
that the one-sided criticism of the media contributed to the decline of
public support for the war and ultimately helped the U.S. lose the war.
Author William F. Buckley repeatedly wrote about his approval for the
war and suggested that "The United States has been timid, if not
cowardly, in refusing to seek 'victory' in Vietnam."
The hawks claimed that the liberal media was responsible for the
growing popular disenchantment with the war and blamed the western media
for losing the war in Southeast Asia as communism was no longer a
threat for them.
Antiwar movement
As
the Vietnam War continued to escalate, public disenchantment grew and a
variety of different groups were formed or became involved in the
movement.
Students
U.S. Marshals dragging away a Vietnam War protester in Washington, D.C. 1967
German students protest against the Vietnam War in 1968
There was a great deal of civic unrest on college campuses throughout the 1960s as students became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, and anti-war movement. Doug McAdam explains the success of the mass mobilization of volunteers for Freedom Summer
in terms of "Biographical Availability", where individuals must have a
certain degree of social, economic, and psychological freedom to be able
to participate in large scale social movements.
This explanation can also be applied to the Anti-War Movement because
it occurred around the same time and the same biographical factors
applied to the college-aged anti-war protesters. David Meyers (2007)
also explains how the concept of personal efficacy
affects mass movement mobilization. For example, according to Meyers'
thesis, consider that American wealth increased drastically after World
War II. At this time, America was a superpower and enjoyed great
affluence after thirty years of depression, war, and sacrifice. Benjamin
T. Harrison (2000) argues that the post World War II affluence set the
stage for the protest generation in the 1960s. His central thesis is that the World Wars and Great Depression spawned a 'beat generation' refusing to conform to mainstream American values which lead to the emergence of the [Hippies] and the counterculture.
The Anti-war movement became part of a larger protest movement against
the traditional American Values and attitudes. Meyers (2007) builds off
this claim in his argument that the "relatively privileged enjoy the
education and affirmation that afford them the belief that they might
make a difference."
As a result of the present factors in terms of affluence, biographical
availability (defined in the sociological areas of activism as the lack
of restrictions on social relationships of which most likely increases
the consequences of participating in a social movement), and increasing
political atmosphere across the county, political activity increased
drastically on college campuses.
College enrollment reached 9 million by the end of the 1960s.
Colleges and universities in America had more students than ever before,
and these institutions often tried to restrict student behavior to
maintain order on the campuses. To combat this, many college students
became active in causes that promoted free speech, student input in the
curriculum, and an end to archaic social restrictions. Students joined
the antiwar movement because they did not want to fight in a foreign
civil war that they believed did not concern them or because they were
morally opposed to all war. Others disliked the war because it diverted
funds and attention away from problems in the U.S. Intellectual growth
and gaining a liberal perspective at college caused many students to
become active in the antiwar movement. Another attractive feature of the
opposition movement was the fact that it was a popular social event.
Most student antiwar organizations were locally or campus-based,
including chapters of the very loosely co-ordinated Students for a Democratic Society,
because they were easier to organize and participate in than national
groups. Common antiwar demonstrations for college students featured
attempts to sever ties between the war machine and universities through burning draft cards, protesting universities furnishing grades to draft boards, and protesting military and Dow Chemical job fairs on campus. From 1969 to 1970, student protesters attacked 197 ROTC buildings on college campuses. Protests grew after the Kent State shootings,
radicalizing more and more students. Although the media often portrayed
the student antiwar movement as aggressive and widespread, only 10% of
the 2500 colleges in the United States had violent protests throughout
the Vietnam War years. By the early 1970s, most student protest
movements died down due to President Nixon's de-escalation of the war,
the economic downturn, and disillusionment with the powerlessness of the
antiwar movement.
Arts
Many artists
during the 1960s and 1970s opposed the war and used their creativity and
careers to visibly oppose the war. Writers and poets opposed to
involvement in the war included Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Robert Bly.
Their pieces often incorporated imagery based on the tragic events of
the war as well as the disparity between life in Vietnam and life in the
United States. Visual artists Ronald Haeberle, Peter Saul, and Nancy Spero,
among others, used war equipment, like guns and helicopters, in their
works while incorporating important political and war figures,
portraying to the nation exactly who was responsible for the violence.
Filmmakers such as Lenny Lipton,
Jerry Abrams, Peter Gessner, and David Ringo created documentary-style
movies featuring actual footage from the antiwar marches to raise
awareness about the war and the diverse opposition movement. Playwrights
like Frank O'Hara, Sam Shepard, Robert Lowell, Megan Terry, Grant Duay, and Kenneth Bernard
used theater as a vehicle for portraying their thoughts about the
Vietnam War, often satirizing the role of America in the world and
juxtaposing the horrific effects of war with normal scenes of life.
Regardless of medium, antiwar artists ranged from pacifists to violent
radicals and caused Americans to think more critically about the war.
Art as war opposition was quite popular in the early years of the war,
but soon faded as political activism became the more common and most
visible way of opposing the war.
Women
Women were a
large part of the antiwar movement, even though they were sometimes
relegated to second-class status within the organizations or faced
sexism within opposition groups.
Some leaders of anti-war groups viewed women as sex objects or
secretaries, not actual thinkers who could contribute positively and
tangibly to the group's goals, or believed that women could not truly
understand and join the antiwar movement because they were unaffected by
the draft.
Women involved in opposition groups disliked the romanticism of the
violence of both the war and the antiwar movement that was common
amongst male war protesters.
Despite the inequalities, participation in various antiwar groups
allowed women to gain experience with organizing protests and crafting
effective antiwar rhetoric. These newfound skills combined with their
dislike of sexism within the opposition movement caused many women to
break away from the mainstream antiwar movement and create or join
women's antiwar groups, such as Another Mother for Peace, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Women Strike for Peace (WSP),
also known as Women For Peace. Female soldiers serving in Vietnam
joined the movement to battle the war and sexism, racism, and the
established military bureaucracy by writing articles for antiwar and
antimilitary newspapers.
Mothers and older generations of women joined the opposition
movement, as advocates for peace and people opposed to the effects of
the war and the draft on the generation of young men. These women saw
the draft as one of the most disliked parts of the war machine and
sought to undermine the war itself through undermining the draft.
Another Mother for Peace and WSP often held free draft counseling centers to give young men legal and illegal methods to oppose the draft. Members of Women For Peace showed up at the White House every Sunday for 8 years from 11 to 1 for a peace vigil.
Such female antiwar groups often relied on maternalism, the image of
women as peaceful caretakers of the world, to express and accomplish
their goals. The government often saw middle-aged women involved in such
organizations as the most dangerous members of the opposition movement
because they were ordinary citizens who quickly and efficiently
mobilized.
Many women in America sympathized with the Vietnamese civilians
affected by the war and joined the opposition movement. They protested
the use of napalm, a highly flammable jelly weapon created by the Dow Chemical Company and used as a weapon during the war, by boycotting Saran Wrap, another product made by the company.
Faced with the sexism sometimes found in the antiwar movement,
New Left, and Civil Rights Movement, some women created their own
organizations to establish true equality of the sexes. Some of
frustrations of younger women became apparent during the antiwar
movement: they desired more radical change and decreased acceptance of
societal gender roles than older women activists. Female activists' disillusion with the antiwar movement led to the formation of the Women's Liberation Movement to establish true equality for American women in all facets of life.
African-American leaders of earlier decades like W. E. B. Du Bois were often anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. Paul Robeson weighed in on the Vietnamese struggle in 1954, calling Ho Chi Minh "the modern day Toussaint L'Overture,
leading his people to freedom." These figures were driven from public
life by McCarthyism, however, and black leaders were more cautious about
criticizing US foreign policy as the 1960s began.
By the middle of the decade, open condemnation of the war became more common, with figures like Malcolm X and Bob Moses speaking out. Champion boxer Muhammad Ali risked his career and a prison sentence to resist the draft in 1966. Soon Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became prominent opponents of the Vietnam War, and Bevel became the director of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The Black Panther Party vehemently opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
In the beginning of the war, some African Americans did not want to
join the war opposition movement because of loyalty to President Johnson
for pushing Civil Rights legislation, but soon the escalating violence
of the war and the perceived social injustice of the draft propelled
involvement in antiwar groups.
In March 1965, King first criticized the war during the Selma march
when he told a journalist that "millions of dollars can be spent every
day to hold troops in South Vietnam and our country cannot protect the
rights of Negroes in Selma". In 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) became the first major civil rights group to issue a formal
statement against the war. When SNCC-backed Georgia Representative Julian Bond acknowledged his agreement with the anti-war statement, he was refused his seat by the State of Georgia, an injustice which he successfully appealed up to the Supreme Court.
SNCC had special significance as a nexus between the student movement
and the black movement. At an SDS-organized conference at UC Berkeley in October 1966, SNCC Chair Stokely Carmichael
challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military
draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in ghetto rebellions
of the era had already associated their actions with opposition to the
Vietnam War, and SNCC first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August
1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, SDS's first
Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power
[and] emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appear to have
originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"
On 4 April 1967, King gave a much publicized speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence"
at the Riverside Church in New York, attacking President Johnson for
"deadly Western arrogance", declaring that "we are on the side of the
wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor".
King's speech attracted much controversy at the time with many feeling
that it was ungrateful for him to attack the president who done the most
for civil rights for African Americans since Abraham Lincoln had
abolished slavery a century before. Liberal newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times
condemned King for his "Beyond Vietnam" speech while the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People disallowed him. The "Beyond Vietnam" speech involved King in a debate with the diplomat Ralph Bunche
who argued that it was folly to associate the civil rights movement
with the anti-Vietnam war movement, maintaining that this would set back
civil rights for African Americans.
Black antiwar groups opposed the war for similar reasons as white
groups, but often protested in separate events and sometimes did not
cooperate with the ideas of white antiwar leadership. They harshly criticized the draft because poor and minority men were usually most affected by conscription.
In 1965 and 1966, African Americans comprised 25 percent of combat
deaths, more than twice their proportion of the population. As a result,
black enlisted men themselves protested and began the resistance movement among veterans.
After taking measures to reduce the fatalities, apparently in response
to widespread protest, the military brought the proportion of blacks
down to 12.6 percent of casualties.
African Americans involved in the antiwar movement often formed
their own groups, such as Black Women Enraged, National Black Anti-War
Anti-Draft Union, and National Black Draft Counselors. Within these
groups, however, many African American women were seen as subordinate
members by black male leaders. Many African American women viewed the war in Vietnam as racially motivated and sympathized strongly with Vietnamese women. Such concerns often propelled their participation in the antiwar movement and their creation of new opposition groups.
Asian Americans
Many
Asian Americans were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. They saw the
war as being a bigger action of U.S. imperialism and "connected the
oppression of the Asians in the United States to the prosecution of the
war in Vietnam." Unlike many Americans in the anti-war movement, they viewed the war "not just as imperialist but specifically as anti-Asian." Groups like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the Bay Area Coalition Against the War (BAACAW), and the Asian Americans for Action
made opposition to the war their main focus. Of these organizations,
the Bay Area Coalition Against the War was the biggest and most
significant. One of the major reasons leading to their significance was
that the BAACAW was "highly organized, holding biweekly ninety-minute
meetings of the Coordinating Committee at which each regional would
submit detailed reports and action plans." The driving force behind their formation was their anger at "the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong Harbor." Another aspect of the group's prevalence was the support of the Japanese Community Youth Center, members of the Asian Community Center, student leaders of Asian American student unions, etc. who stood behind it.
The BAACAW members consisted of many Asians Americans and they were
involved in antiwar efforts like marches, study groups, fundraisers, teach-ins
and demonstrations. During marches, Asian American activists carried
banners that read "Stop the Bombing of Asian People and Stop Killing Our
Asian Brothers and Sisters."
Its newsletter stated, "our goal is to build a solid, broad-based
anti-imperialist movement of Asian people against the war in Vietnam."
The anti-war sentiment by Asian Americans was fueled by the
racial inequality that they faced in the United States. As historian Daryl Maeda
notes, "the antiwar movement articulated Asian Americans' racial
commonality with Vietnamese people in two distinctly gendered ways:
identification based on the experiences of male soldiers and
identification by women." Asian American soldiers in the U.S. military were many times classified as being like the enemy. They were referred to as gooks and had a racialized identity in comparison to their non-Asian counterparts. There was also the hypersexualization of Vietnamese women which in turn affected how Asian American women in the military were treated. "In a Gidra article, [a prominent influential newspaper of the Asian American movement], Evelyn Yoshimura noted that the U.S. military systematically portrayed Vietnamese women as prostitutes as a way of dehumanizing them." Asian American groups realized in order to extinguish racism, they also had to address sexism as well. This in turn led to women's leadership in the Asian American antiwar movement. Patsy Chan, a "Third World" activist, said at an antiwar rally in San Francisco, "We, as Third World
women [express] our militant solidarity with our brothers and sisters
from Indochina. We, as Third World people know of the struggle the Indochinese are waging against imperialism, because we share that common enemy in the United States." Some other notable figures were Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama.
Both Boggs and Kochiyama were inspired by the civil rights movement of
the 1960s and "a growing number of Asian Americans began to push forward
a new era in radical Asian American politics."
Much Asian-Americans spoke against the war because of the way
that the Vietnamese were referred within the U.S. military by the
disparaging term "gook", and more generally because they encountered
bigotry because they looked like "the enemy". One Japanese-American veteran, Norman Nakamura, wrote in an article in the June/July issue of Gidra,
that during his tour of duty in Vietnam of 1969-70 that there was an
atmosphere of systematic racism towards all Vietnamese people, who were
seen as less than human, being merely "gooks".
Because most white Americans did not make much effort to distinguish
between Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, and
Filipino-Americans, the anti-Asian racism generated by the war led to
the emergence of a pan-Asian American identity. Another Japanese-American veteran, Mike Nakayama, reported to Gidra
in 1971 that he was wounded in Vietnam, he was initially refused
medical treatment because he was seen as a "gook" with the doctors
thinking that he was a South Vietnamese soldier (who were clothed in
American uniforms), and only when he established that he spoke English
as his first language that he was recognized as an American. In May 1972, Gidra
ran on its cover a cartoon of a female Viet Cong guerrilla being faced
with an Asian-American soldier who is commanded by his white officer to
"Kill that gook, you gook!".
There were also Asian American musicians who traveled around the
United States to oppose the imperialist actions of the American
government, specifically their involvement in Vietnam. "The folk trio 'A
Grain of Sand' ... [ consisting of the members] JoAnne 'Nobuko'
Miyamoto, Chris Iijima, and William 'Charlie' Chin, performed across the
nation as traveling troubadours who set the antiracist politics of the
Asian American movement to music."
This band was so against the imperialistic actions of the United
States, that they supported the Vietnamese people vocally through their
song 'War of the Flea'. Asian American poets and playwrights also joined in unity with the movement's antiwar sentiments. Melvyn Escueta
created the play 'Honey Bucket' and was an Asian American veteran of
the war. Through this play, "Escueta establishes equivalencies between
his protagonist, a Filipino American soldier named Andy, and the
Vietnamese people."
"The Asian American antiwar movement emerged from a belief that
the mainstream peace movement was racist in its disregard to Asians ...
Steve Louie remembers that while the white antiwar movement had 'this
moral thing about no killing,' Asian Americans sought to bring attention
to 'a bigger issue ... genocide.' ... the broader movement had a hard
time with the Asian movement ... because it broadened the issues out
beyond where they wanted to go ... the whole question of U.S.
imperialism as a system, at home and abroad."
Clergy
The
clergy, often a forgotten group during the opposition to the Vietnam
War, played a large role as well. The clergy covered any of the
religious leaders and members including individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.
In his speech "Beyond Vietnam" King stated, "the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those
boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of
thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." King was not looking for racial equality through this speech, but tried to voice for an end to the war instead.
The involvement of the clergy did not stop at King though. The
analysis entitled "Social Movement Participation: Clergy and the
Anti-Vietnam War Movement" expands upon the anti-war movement by taking
King, a single religious figurehead, and explaining the movement from
the entire clergy's perspective. The clergy were often forgotten though
throughout this opposition. The analysis refers to that fact by saying,
"The research concerning clergy anti-war participation is even more
barren than the literature on student activism." There is a relationship and correlation between theology and political opinions and during the Vietnam War, the same relationship occurred between feelings about the war and theology.
This article basically was a social experiment finding results on how
the pastors and clergy members reacted to the war. Based on the results
found, they most certainly did not believe in the war and wished to help
end it.
Another source, Lift Up Your Voice Like A Trumpet: White Clergy And The Civil Rights And Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973 explains the story of the entire spectrum of the clergy and their involvement. Michael Freidland
is able to completely tell the story in his chapter entitled, "A Voice
of Moderation: Clergy and the Anti-War Movement: 1966–1967". In basic
summary, each specific clergy from each religion had their own view of
the war and how they dealt with it, but as a whole, the clergy was
completely against the war.
Soldiers
Within the United States military various soldiers would organize to
avoid military duties and individual actors would also carry out their
own acts of resistance.
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy
(SANE) – liberal international organization that was founded in 1957 by
a group of nuclear pacifists. They attempted to increase public opinion
in favor of their cause in an attempt to influence policy makers to
halt atmospheric nuclear testing and reversing the arms race and the Cold War.
Another committee was called SNCC – Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Third World Liberation Front
(TWLF)- Some Asian American student organizations under this were:
Filipino American Collegiate (PACE), Asian American Political Alliance
(AAPA), and Chinese for Social Action (ICSA)
The Student Libertarian Movement – Libertarian organization that was
formed in 1972. The guiding principles of this organization were
opposition to the war in Vietnam and opposition to the draft. The
organization did not take a strong stand on racial issues. For example,
"In virtually hundreds of issues of libertarian newspapers, bulletins,
and journals, the civil rights movement, Black nationalism, or race in
general composed no more than 1 percent of all articles surveyed."
Students for Democratic Society (SDS) – founded in 1960 and was seen as one of the most active college campus groups of the New Left and the antiwar movement.
Furman University
Corps of Kazoos (FUCK) – created to make fun of the military and campus
ROTC program at Furman University in South Carolina. Such anti-campus
ROTC groups were common throughout the U.S.
Various committees and campaigns for peace in Vietnam came about,
including Campaign for Disarmament, Campaign to End the Air War,
Campaign to Stop Funding the War, Campaign to Stop the Air War, Catholic
Peace Fellowship, and Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.
Protest to American participation in the Vietnam War was a movement
that many popular musicians appropriated, which was a stark contrast to
the pro-war compositions of artists during World War II. These musicians included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Lou Harrison, Gail Kubik, William Mayer, Elie Siegmeister, Robert Fink, David Noon, Richard Wernick, and John W. Downey.
The two most notable genres involved in this protest were Rock and Roll
and Folk music. While composers created pieces affronting the war, they
were not limited to their music. Often protesters were being arrested
and participating in peace marches and popular musicians were among
their ranks.
This concept of intimate involvement reached new heights in May 1968
when the "Composers and Musicians for Peace" concert was staged in New
York. As the war continued, and with the new media coverage, the
movement snowballed and popular music reflected this. As early as the
summer of 1965, music-based protest against the American involvement in
Southeast Asia began with works like P. F. Sloan's folk rock song Eve of Destruction, recorded by Barry McGuire as one of the earliest musical protests against the Vietnam War.
A key figure on the rock end of the antiwar spectrum was Jimi Hendrix
(1942–1970). Hendrix had a huge following among the youth culture
exploring itself through drugs and experiencing itself through rock
music. He was not an official protester of the war; one of Hendrix's
biographers contends that Hendrix, being a former soldier, sympathized
with the anticommunist view. He did, however, protest the violence that took place in the Vietnam War. With the song "Machine Gun", dedicated to those fighting in Vietnam, this protest of violence is manifest. David Henderson, author of 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,
describes the song as "scary funk ... his sound over the drone shifts
from a woman's scream, to a siren, to a fighter plane diving, all amid Buddy Miles' Gatling-gun snare shots. ... he says 'evil man make me kill you ... make you kill me although we're only families apart.'" This song was often accompanied with pleas from Hendrix to bring the soldiers back home and cease the bloodshed.
While Hendrix's views may not have been analogous to the protesters,
his songs became anthems to the antiwar movement. Songs such as "Star
Spangled Banner" showed individuals that "you can love your country, but
hate the government."
Hendrix's anti-violence efforts are summed up in his words: "when the
power of love overcomes the love of power ... the world will know
peace." Thus, Hendrix's personal views did not coincide perfectly with
those of the antiwar protesters; however, his anti-violence outlook was a
driving force during the years of the Vietnam War even after his death
(1970).
The song known to many as the anthem of the protest movement was The "Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag—first released on an EP in the October 1965 issue of Rag Baby—by Country Joe and the Fish,
one of the most successful protest bands. Although this song was not on
music charts probably because it was too radical, it was performed at
many public events including the famous Woodstock
music festival (1969). "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" was a song
that used sarcasm to communicate the problems with not only the war but
also the public's naïve attitudes towards it. It was said that "the
happy beat and insouciance of the vocalist are in odd juxtaposition to
the lyrics that reinforce the sad fact that the American public was
being forced into realizing that Vietnam was no longer a remote place on
the other side of the world, and the damage it was doing to the country
could no longer be considered collateral, involving someone else."
Along with singer-songwriter Phil Ochs,
who attended and organized anti-war events and wrote such songs as "I
Ain't Marching Anymore" and "The War Is Over", another key historical
figure of the antiwar movement was Bob Dylan. Folk and Rock were critical aspects of counterculture during the Vietnam War
both were genres that Dylan would dabble in. His success in writing
protest songs came from his pre-existing popularity, as he did not
initially intend on doing so. Tor Egil Førland,
in his article "Bringing It All Back Home or Another Side of Bob Dylan:
Midwestern Isolationist", quotes Todd Gitlin, a leader of a student
movement at the time, in saying "Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang
for us. ... We followed his career as if he were singing our songs." The anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" embodied Dylan's anti-war, pro-civil rights sentiment. To complement "Blowin' in the Wind" Dylan's song "The Times they are A-Changin'"
alludes to a new method of governing that is necessary and warns those
who currently participate in government that the change is imminent.
Dylan tells the "senators and congressmen [to] please heed the call."
Dylan's songs were designed to awaken the public and to cause a
reaction. The protesters of the Vietnam War identified their cause so
closely with the artistic compositions of Dylan that Joan Baez and Judy
Collins performed "The Times they are A-Changin'" at a march protesting
the Vietnam War (1965) and also for President Johnson.
While Dylan renounced the idea of subscribing to the ideals of one
individual, his feelings of protest towards Vietnam were appropriated by
the general movement and they "awaited his gnomic yet oracular
pronouncements", which provided a guiding aspect to the movement as a
whole.
John Lennon, former member of the Beatles, did most of his activism in his solo career with wife Yoko Ono.
Given his immense fame due to the success of the Beatles, he was a very
prominent movement figure with the constant media and press attention.
Still being proactive on their honeymoon, the newlyweds controversially
held a sit-in, where they sat in bed for a week answering press
questions. They held numerous sit-ins, one where they first introduced
their song "Give Peace a Chance". Lennon and Ono's song overshadowed
many previous held anthems, as it became known as the ultimate anthem of
peace in the 1970s, with their words "all we are saying ... is give
peace a chance" being sung globally. "[McCormick, Anita Louise. The
Vietnam Antiwar Movement in American History. Berkeley Heights, New
Jersey: Enslow, 2000. Print.]"
The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the U.S. government. On August 16, 1966 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigations of Americans who were suspected of aiding the NLF,
with the intent to introduce legislation making these activities
illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting and 50 were
arrested.
Protest against the Vietnam War in Amsterdam, April 196
In February 1967, The New York Review of Books published "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", an essay by Noam Chomsky,
one of the leading intellectual opponents of the war. In the essay
Chomsky argued that much responsibility for the war lay with liberal
intellectuals and technical experts who were providing what he saw as pseudoscientific justification for the policies of the U.S. government. The Time Inc magazines Time and Life maintained a very pro-war editorial stance until October 1967, when in a volte-face, the editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, came out against the war. Donovan wrote in an editorial in Life
that the United States had gone into Vietnam for "honorable and
sensible purposes", but the war had turned out to be "harder, longer,
more complicated" than expected.
Donovan ended his editorial by writing the war was "not worth winning",
as South Vietnam was "not absolutely imperative" to maintain American
interests in Asia, which made it impossible "to ask young Americans to
die for".
On February 1, 1968, Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Vietcong officer suspected of participating in murder of South Vietnamese government officials during the Tet Offensive, was summarily executed by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the South Vietnamese National Police Chief. Loan shot Lém in the head on a public street in Saigon
front of journalists. South Vietnamese reports provided as
justification after the fact claimed that Lém was captured near the site
of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of
police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General
Loan's deputy and close friend. The execution provided an iconic image
that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war.
The events of Tet in early 1968 as a whole were also remarkable
in shifting public opinion regarding the war. U.S. military officials
had previously reported that counter-insurgency in South Vietnam was
being prosecuted successfully. While the Tet Offensive provided the U.S.
and allied militaries with a great victory in that the Vietcong was
finally brought into open battle and destroyed as a fighting force, the
American media, including respected figures such as Walter Cronkite, interpreted such events as the attack on the American embassy in Saigon as an indicator of U.S. military weakness.
The military victories on the battlefields of Tet were obscured by
shocking images of violence on television screens, long casualty lists,
and a new perception among the American people that the military had
been untruthful to them about the success of earlier military
operations, and ultimately, the ability to achieve a meaningful military
solution in Vietnam.
In May 1969, Life magazine published in a single issue
photographs of the faces of the roughly 250 or so American servicemen
who had been killed in Vietnam during a "routine week" of war in the
spring of 1969. Contrary to expectations, the issue sold out with many being haunted by the photographs of the ordinary young Americans killed. On October 15, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people took part in National Moratorium
anti-war demonstrations across the United States; the demonstrations
prompted many workers to call in sick from their jobs and adolescents
nationwide engaged in truancy
from school. About 15 million Americans took part in the demonstration
of 15 October, making it the largest protests in a single day up to that
point. A second round of "Moratorium" demonstrations was held on November 15 and attracted more people than the first.
The My Lai massacre was used as an example of bad military conduct during the Vietnam War.
The U.S. realized that the South Vietnamese government needed a solid
base of popular support if it were to survive the insurgency. To pursue
this goal of winning the "Hearts and Minds" of the Vietnamese people, units of the United States Army, referred to as "Civil Affairs" units, were used extensively for the first time since World War II.
Civil Affairs units, while remaining armed and under direct military control, engaged in what came to be known as "nation-building": constructing (or reconstructing) schools, public buildings, roads and other infrastructure;
conducting medical programs for civilians who had no access to medical
facilities; facilitating cooperation among local civilian leaders;
conducting hygiene and other training for civilians; and similar
activities.
This policy of attempting to win the hearts and minds
of the Vietnamese people, however, often was at odds with other aspects
of the war which sometimes served to antagonize many Vietnamese
civilians and provided ammunition to the anti-war movement. These
included the emphasis on "body count"
as a way of measuring military success on the battlefield, civilian
casualties during the bombing of villages (symbolized by journalist Peter Arnett's famous quote, "it was necessary to destroy the village to save it"), and the killing of civilians in such incidents as the My Lai massacre. In 1974 the documentary Hearts and Minds sought to portray the devastation the war was causing to the South Vietnamese people, and won an Academy Award
for best documentary amid considerable controversy. The South
Vietnamese government also antagonized many of its citizens with its
suppression of political opposition, through such measures as holding
large numbers of political prisoners, torturing political opponents, and
holding a one-man election for President in 1971. Covert counter-terror programs and semi-covert ones such as the Phoenix Program
attempted, with the help of anthropologists, to isolate rural South
Vietnamese villages and affect the loyalty of the residents.
This man wears a Purple Heart medal as he watches a San Francisco peace march, April 1967.
Despite the increasingly depressing news of the war, many Americans
continued to support President Johnson's endeavors. Aside from the
domino theory mentioned above, there was a feeling that the goal of
preventing a communist takeover of a pro-Western government in South
Vietnam was a noble objective. Many Americans were also concerned about
saving face in the event of disengaging from the war or, as President Richard M. Nixon
later put it, "achieving Peace with Honor." In addition, instances of
Viet Cong atrocities were widely reported, most notably in an article
that appeared in Reader's Digest in 1968 entitled The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi Minh.
However, anti-war feelings also began to rise. Many Americans
opposed the war on moral grounds, appalled by the devastation and
violence of the war. Others claimed the conflict was a war against
Vietnamese independence, or an intervention in a foreign civil war;
others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and
appeared to be unwinnable. Many anti-war activists were themselves Vietnam veterans, as evidenced by the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In April 1971, thousands of these veterans converged on the White House in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of them threw their medals and decorations on the steps of the United States Capitol.
By this time, it had also become commonplace for the most radical
anti-war demonstrators to prominently display the flag of the Viet Cong
"enemy", an act which alienated many who were otherwise morally opposed
to the war.
Political factors
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson began his re-election campaign. Eugene McCarthy ran against him for the nomination on an anti-war platform. McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New Hampshire,
but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent. The resulting blow
to the Johnson campaign, taken together with other factors, led the
President to make a surprise announcement in a March 31 televised speech
that he was pulling out of the race. He also announced the initiation
of the Paris Peace Negotiations with Vietnam in that speech. Then, on August 4, 1969, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy began secret peace negotiations at the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris.
After breaking with Johnson's pro-war stance, Robert F. Kennedy entered the race on March 16 and ran for the nomination on an anti-war platform. Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, also ran for the nomination, promising to continue to support the South Vietnamese government.
Draft
Students demonstrate in Saigon, July 1964, observing the tenth anniversary of the July 1954 Geneva Agreements.
Anti-Vietnam War protest. Vancouver, B.C., Canada. 1968
Protests bringing attention to "the draft" began on May 5, 1965. Student activists at the University of California, Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft board and forty students staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States. Another nineteen cards were burnt on May 22 at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach-in. Draft card protests were not aimed so much at the draft as at the immoral conduct of the war.
At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually conscripted, but the Selective Service System
office ("Draft Board") in each locality had broad discretion on whom to
draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for
exemption. In late July 1965, Johnson doubled the number of young men to
be drafted per month from 17,000 to 35,000, and on August 31, signed a
law making it a crime to burn a draft card.
In 1967, the continued operation of a seemingly unfair draft
system then calling as many as 40,000 men for induction each month
fueled a burgeoning draft resistance movement. The draft favored white,
middle-class men, which allowed an economically and racially
discriminating draft to force young African American men to serve in
rates that were disproportionately higher than the general population.
Although in 1967 there was a smaller field of draft eligible black
men–29 percent versus 63 percent of draft eligible white men–64 percent
of black men were chosen to serve in the war through conscription,
compared to only 31 percent of eligible white men.
On October 16, 1967, draft card turn-ins were held across the
country, yielding more than 1,000 draft cards, later returned to the Justice Department as an act of civil disobedience. Resisters expected to be prosecuted immediately, but Attorney GeneralRamsey Clark instead prosecuted a group of ringleaders including Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
in Boston in 1968. By the late 1960s, one quarter of all court cases
dealt with the draft, including men accused of draft-dodging and men
petitioning for the status of conscientious objector. Over 210,000 men were accused of draft-related offenses, 25,000 of whom were indicted.
The charges of unfairness led to the institution of a draft
lottery for the year 1970 in which a young man's birthday determined his
relative risk of being drafted (September 14 was the birthday at the
top of the draft list for 1970; the following year July 9 held this
distinction).
The first draft lottery
since World War II in the United States was held on 1 December 1969 and
was met with large protests and a great deal of controversy;
statistical analysis indicated that the methodology of the lotteries
unintentionally disadvantaged men with late year birthdays. This issue was treated at length in a January 4, 1970 New York Times article titled "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random".
Various antiwar groups, such as Another Mother for Peace, WILPF, and WSP, had free draft counseling centers, where they gave young American men advice for legally and illegally evading the draft.
Over 30,000 people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft.[85] The Japanese anti-war group Beheiren helped some American soldiers to desert and hide from the military in Japan.[87]
To gain an exemption or deferment, many men attended college,
though they had to remain in college until their 26th birthday to be
certain of avoiding the draft. Some men were rejected by the military
as 4-F unfit for service failing to meet physical, mental, or moral standards. Still others joined the National Guard or entered the Peace Corps
as a way of avoiding Vietnam. All of these issues raised concerns about
the fairness of who got selected for involuntary service, since it was
often the poor or those without connections who were drafted.
Ironically, in light of modern political issues, a certain exemption was
a convincing claim of homosexuality, but very few men attempted this because of the stigma involved. Also, conviction for certain crimes earned an exclusion, the topic of the anti-war song "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie.
Even many of those who never received a deferment or exemption
never served, simply because the pool of eligible men was so huge
compared to the number required for service, that the draft boards never
got around to drafting them when a new crop of men became available
(until 1969) or because they had high lottery numbers (1970 and later).
Of those soldiers who served during the war, there was increasing opposition to the conflict amongst GIs, which resulted in fragging and many other activities which hampered the US's ability to wage war effectively.
Most of those subjected to the draft were too young to vote or
drink in most states, and the image of young people being forced to risk
their lives in the military without the privileges of enfranchisement
or the ability to drink alcohol legally also successfully pressured
legislators to lower the voting age nationally and the drinking age in many states.
Student opposition groups on many college and university campuses
seized campus administration offices, and in several instances forced
the expulsion of ROTC programs from the campus.
Some Americans who were not subject to the draft protested the conscription of their tax dollars for the war effort. War tax resistance, once mostly isolated to solitary anarchists like Henry David Thoreau and religious pacifists like the Quakers,
became a more mainstream protest tactic. As of 1972, an estimated
200,000–500,000 people were refusing to pay the excise taxes on their
telephone bills, and another 20,000 were resisting part or all of their income tax bills. Among the tax resisters were Joan Baez and Noam Chomsky.
Environment
Momentum
from the protest organizations and the war's impact on the environment
became focal point of issues to an overwhelmingly main force for the
growth of an environmental movement in the United States. Many of the environment-oriented demonstrations were inspired by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, which warned of the harmful effects of pesticide use on the earth. For demonstrators, Carson's warnings paralleled with the United States' use of chemicals in Vietnam such as Agent Orange, a chemical compound which was used to clear forestry being used as cover, initially conducted by the United States Air Force in Operation Ranch Hand in 1962.
Congressional hearings
United Nations intervention
In
October 1967 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on
resolutions urging President Johnson to request an emergency session of
the United Nations security council to consider proposals for ending the
war.
Dellums (war crimes)
In January 1971, just weeks into his first term, Congressman Ron Dellums
set up a Vietnam war crimes exhibit in an annex to his Congressional
office. The exhibit featured four large posters depicting atrocities
committed by American soldiers embellished with red paint. This was
followed shortly thereafter by four days of hearings on "war crimes" in Vietnam, which began April 25. Dellums, assisted by the Citizens Commission of Inquiry,
had called for formal investigations into the allegations, but Congress
chose not to endorse these proceedings. As such, the hearings were ad hoc
and only informational in nature. As a condition of room use, press and
camera presence were not permitted, but the proceedings were
transcribed.
The transcripts describe alleged details of U.S. military's
conduct in Vietnam. Some tactics were described as "gruesome", such as
the severing of ears from corpses to verify body count. Others involved
the killing of civilians. Soldiers claimed to have ordered artillery
strikes on villages which did not appear to have any military presence.
Soldiers were claimed to use racist terms such as "gooks", "dinks" and
"slant eyes" when referring to the Vietnamese.
Witnesses described that legal, by-the-book instruction was
augmented by more questionable training by non-commissioned officers as
to how soldiers should conduct themselves. One witness testified about "free-fire zones", areas as large as 80 square miles (210 km2)
in which soldiers were free to shoot any Vietnamese they encountered
after curfew without first making sure they were hostile. Allegations of
exaggeration of body count, torture, murder and general abuse of
civilians and the psychology and motivations of soldiers and officers
were discussed at length.
The
opposition to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War had many
effects, which arguably led to the eventual end of the involvement of
the United States. Howard Zinn, a controversial historian, states in his book A People's History of the United States
that, "in the course of the war, there developed in the United States
the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a
movement that played a critical role in bringing the war to an end."
Fewer soldiers
The
first effect the opposition had that led to the end of the war was that
fewer soldiers were available for the army. The draft was protested and
even ROTC programs too. Howard Zinn first provides a note written by a
student of Boston University on May 1, 1968, which stated to his draft
board, "I have absolutely no intention to report for that exam, or for
induction, or to aid in any way the American war effort against the
people of Vietnam ..."
The opposition to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War had
many effects, which led to the eventual end of the involvement of the
United States.
This refusal letter soon led to an overflow of refusals ultimately
leading to the event provided by Zinn stating, "In May 1969 the Oakland
induction center, where draftees reported from all of Northern
California, reported that of 4,400 men ordered to report for induction,
2,400 did not show up. In the first quarter of 1970 the Selective
Service System, for the first time, could not meet its quota."
The fewer numbers of soldiers as an effect of the opposition to
the war also can be traced to the protests against the ROTC programs in
colleges. Zinn argues this by stating, "Student protests against the
ROTC resulted in the canceling of those programs in over forty colleges
and universities. In 1966, 191,749 college students enrolled in ROTC. By
1973, the number was 72,459."
The number of ROTC students in college drastically dropped and the
program lost any momentum it once had before the anti-war movement.
College campuses
A
further effect of the opposition was that many college campuses were
completely shut down due to protests. These protests led to wear on the
government who tried to mitigate the tumultuous behavior and return the
colleges back to normal. The colleges involved in the anti-war movement
included ones such as, Brown University, Kent State University, and the
University of Massachusetts.
Even at The College of William and Mary unrest occurred with protests
by the students and even some faculty members that resulted in "multiple
informants" hired to report to the CIA on the activities of students
and faculty members.
At the University of Massachusetts, "The 100th Commencement of the
University of Massachusetts yesterday was a protest, a call for peace",
"Red fists of protest, white peace symbols, and blue doves were
stenciled on black academic gowns, and nearly every other senior wore an
armband representing a plea for peace."
Additionally, "At Boston College, a Catholic institution, six thousand
people gathered that evening in the gymnasium to denounce the war."
At Kent State University, "on May 4, when students gathered to
demonstrate against the war, National Guardsmen fired into the crowd.
Four students were killed."
Finally, "At the Brown University commencement in 1969, two-thirds of
the graduating class turned their backs when Henry Kissinger stood up to
address them."
Basically, from all of the evidence here provided by the historians,
Zinn and McCarthy, the second effect was very prevalent and it was the
uproar at many colleges and universities as an effect of the opposition
to the United States' involvement in Vietnam.
American soldiers
Another
effect the opposition to the war had was that the American soldiers in
Vietnam began to side with the opposition and feel remorse for what they
were doing. Zinn argues this with an example in which the soldiers in a
POW camp formed a peace committee as they wondered who the enemy of the
war was, because it certainly was not known among them. The statement of one of the soldiers reads,
Until we got to the first camp, we didn't see a village
intact; they were all destroyed. I sat down and put myself in the middle
and asked myself: Is this right or wrong? Is it right to destroy
villages? Is it right to kill people en masse? After a while it just got
to me.
Howard Zinn provides that piece of evidence to reiterate how all of
this destruction and fighting against an enemy that seems to be unknown
has been taking a toll on the soldiers and that they began to sense a
feeling of opposition as one effect of the opposition occurring in the
United States.
In December 1964, Joan Baez leads six hundred people in an antiwar demonstration in San Francisco.
1965
On March 24, organized by professors against the war at the University of Michigan, a teach-in protest was attended by 2,500 participants. This model was to be repeated at 35 campuses across the country.
On March 16, Alice Herz, an 82-year-old pacifist, set herself on fire in the first known act of self-immolation to protest the Vietnam War.
A Gallup poll
in May showed 48% of U.S. respondents felt the government was handling
the war effectively, 28% felt the situation was being handled badly, and
the rest had no opinion.
May – First anti-Vietnam War demonstration in London was staged outside the U.S. embassy.
Protests were held in June on the steps of the Pentagon, and in August, attempts were made by activists at Berkeley to stop the movement of trains carrying troops.
A Gallup poll in late August showed that 24% of Americans view sending troops to Vietnam as a mistake versus 60% who do not.
By mid-October, the anti-war movement had significantly expanded to
become a national and even global phenomenon, as anti-war protests
drawing 100,000 were held simultaneously in as many as 80 major cities
around the US, London, Paris, and Rome.
On October 15, 1965, the first large scale act of civil disobedience
in opposition to the Vietnam War occurred when approximately 40 people
staged a sit-in at the Ann Arbor, Michigandraft board. They were sentenced to 10 to 15 days in jail.
On November 27, Coretta Scott King, SDS President Carl Oglesby,
and Dr. Benjamin Spock, among others, spoke at an anti-war rally of
about 30,000 in Washington, D.C., in the largest demonstration to date.
Parallel protests occurred elsewhere around the nation. On that same day, President Johnson announced a significant escalation of U.S. involvement in Indochina, from 120,000 to 400,000 troops.
1966
Protest in Netherlands in July 1966
In February, a group of about 100 veterans attempted to return their military decorations to the White House in protest of the war, but were turned back.
On March 26, anti-war demonstrations were held around the country and the world, with 20,000 taking part in New York City.
A Gallup poll shows that 59% believe that sending troops to Vietnam
was not a mistake. Among the age group of 21–29, 71% believe it was not a
mistake compared to 48% of those over 50.
On May 15, another large demonstration, with 10,000 picketers
calling for an end to the war, took place outside the White House and
the Washington Monument.
June – The Gallup poll respondents supporting the U.S. handling of
the war slipped to 41%, 37% expressed disapproval, and the rest had no
opinion.
A crowd of 4,000 demonstrated against the U.S. war in London on July
3 and scuffled with police outside the U.S. embassy. 33 protesters were
arrested.
Joan Baez and A. J. Muste
organized over 3,000 people across the nation in an antiwar tax
protest. Participants refused to pay their taxes or did not pay the
amount designated for funding the war.
Protests, strikes and sit-ins continued at Berkeley and across other
campuses throughout the year. Three army privates, known as the "Fort Hood Three", refused to deploy in Vietnam, calling the war "illegal and immoral", and were sentenced to prison terms.
Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali – formerly known as Cassius Clay – declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to go to war. According to a writer for Sports Illustrated, the governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, Jr., called Ali "disgusting" and the governor of Maine, John H. Reed, said that Ali "should be held in utter contempt by every patriotic American."
In 1967 Ali was sentenced to 5 years in prison for draft evasion, but
his conviction was later overturned on appeal. In addition, he was
stripped of his title and banned from professional boxing for more than
three years.
In June 1966 American students and others in England meeting at the London School of Economics
formed the Stop It Committee. The group was prominent in every major
London anti-war demonstration. It remained active until the end of the
war in April 1975.
1967
The protest
on June 23 in Los Angeles is singularly significant. It was one of the
first massive war protests in the United States and the first in Los
Angeles. Ending in a clash with riot police, it set a pattern for the
massive protests which followed and due to the size and violence of this event, Johnson attempted no further public speeches in venues outside military bases.
In February, about 2,500 members of Women Strike for Peace
(WSP) marched to the Pentagon. This was a peaceful protest that became
rowdier when the demonstrators were denied a meeting with Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara.
February 8 – Christian groups opposed to the war staged a nationwide "Fast for Peace."
March 12 – A three-page anti-war ad appeared in The New York Times
bearing the signatures of 6,766 teachers and professors. The
advertisement spanned two and a quarter pages in Section 4, The Week in
Review. The advertisement itself cost around $16,500 and was sponsored
by the Inter-University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy.
March 17 – a group of antiwar citizens marched to the Pentagon to protest American involvement in Vietnam.
April 4 – Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in New York City. "America rejected Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary government seeking self-determination. ... "
On April 24, Abbie Hoffman led a small group of protesters against both the war and capitalism who interrupted the New York Stock Exchange, causing chaos by throwing fistfuls of both real and fake dollars down from the gallery.
On May 30 Jan Crumb and ten like-minded men attended a peace demonstration in Washington, D.C., and on June 1 Vietnam Veterans Against the War was born.
In the summer of 1967, Neil Armstrong and various other NASA officials began a tour of South America to raise awareness for space travel. According to First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong,
a 2005 biography, during the tour, several college students protested
the astronaut, and shouted such phrases as "Murderers get out of
Vietnam!" and other anti-Vietnam War messages.
June 23, 1967 President Johnson was met in Los Angeles by a massive
anti-war protest on the street outside the hotel where he was speaking
at a Democratic fundraiser.Progressive Labor Party and SDS protesters. The Riot Act was read and 51 protesters arrested.
This was one of the first massive war protests in the United States and
the first in Los Angeles, Ending in a clash with riot police, it set a
pattern for the massive protests which followed. The vigor of the response from the LAPD,
initially intended to prevent the demonstrators from storming the hotel
where Johnson was speaking, was to a certain extent based on
exaggerated reports from undercover agents which had infiltrated the
organizations sponsoring the protest. "Unresisting demonstrators were
beaten – some in front of literally thousands of witnesses – without
even the pretext of and attempt to make an arrest."
A crowd the Los Angeles Times reports at 10,000 clashed with 500 riot
police outside President Johnson's fundraiser at the Century City Plaza
Hotel. Expecting only 1,000 or 2,000 protesters, the LAPD field
commander later told reporters he had been 'astounded' by the size of
the demonstration. "Where did all those people come from? I asked
myself." Scores were injured, including many peaceful middle-class
protesters. Some sources put the crowd as high as 15,000 and noted that the police attacked the marchers with nightsticks to disperse the crowd. Due to the size and violence of this event, Johnson attempted no further public speeches in venues outside military bases.
July 30 – Gallup poll reported 52% of Americans disapproved of
Johnson's handling of the war, 41% thought the U.S. made a mistake in
sending troops, and over 56% thought the U.S. was losing the war or at
an impasse.
On August 28, 1967, U.S. representative Tim Lee Carter
(R-KY) stated before congress: "Let us now, while we are yet strong,
bring our men home, every man jack of them. The Vietcong fight fiercely
and tenaciously because it is their land and we are foreigners
intervening in their civil war. If we must fight, let us fight in
defense of our homeland and our own hemisphere."
On September 20, over one thousand members of WSP rallied at the
White House. The police used brutal tactics to try to limit it to 100
people (as per the law) or stop the demonstration, and the event
tarnished the wholesome and nonviolent reputation of the WSP.
Demonstrations in The Hague in the Netherlands by the PSP, 1967. The placards read "USA out of Vietnam" and "USA murder".
In October 1967, Stop the Draft Week resulted in major clashes at the Oakland, California
military induction center, and saw more than a thousand registrants
return their draft cards in events across the country. The cards were
delivered to the Justice Department on October 20. Singer/musician-activist Joan Baez, a longtime critic of the war in Vietnam, was among those arrested in the Oakland demonstrations.
On October 18, 300 students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison attempted to prevent Dow Chemical Company, the maker of napalm,
from holding a job fair on campus. The police eventually forced the
demonstration to end, but Dow was banned from the campus. Three police
officers and 65 students were injured in the event, dubbed "Dow Day".
In November 1967 a non-binding referendum was voted on in San
Francisco, California which posed the question of whether there should
be an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. The vote was
67% against the referendum, which was taken by a Johnson administration official as support for the war.
1968
Olof Palme marching against the Vietnam War in Stockholm, 1968
On January 15, 1968, over five thousand women rallied in D.C. in
the Jeannette Rankin Brigade protest. This was the first all female
antiwar protest intended to get Congress to withdrawal troops from
Vietnam.
On January 18, 1968, while in the White House for a conference about juvenile delinquency, black singer-entertainer Eartha Kitt yelled at Lady Bird Johnson about the generation of young men dying in the war.
January 30, 1968 – Tet Offensive
was launched and resulted in much higher casualties and changed
perceptions. The optimistic assessments made prior to the offensive by
the administration and the Pentagon came under heavy criticism and ridicule as the "credibility gap" that had opened in 1967 widened into a chasm.
February – Gallup poll showed 35% approved of Johnson's handling of
the war; 50% disapproved; the rest, no opinion. [NYT, 2/14/68] In
another poll that month, 23% of Americans defined themselves as "doves"
and 61% "hawks."
March 12 – anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy received more votes than expected in the New Hampshire primary, leading to more expressions of opposition against the war. McCarthy urged his supporters to exchange the 'unkempt look'
rapidly becoming fashionable among war opponents for a more clean-cut
style to in order not to scare voters. These were known as "Clean
Genes."
March 16 – Robert Kennedy
joined the race for the US Presidency as an anti-war candidate. He was
shot and killed on June 5, the morning after he won a decisive victory
over McCarthy in the Democratic primary in California.
March 17 – Major rally outside the U.S. Embassy in London's
Grosvenor Square turned to a riot with 86 people injured and over 200
arrested. Over 10,000 had rallied peacefully in Trafalgar Square but met
a police barricade outside the embassy. A UK Foreign Office report
claimed that the rioting had been organized by 100 members of the German
SDS who were "acknowledged experts in methods of riot against the
police."
In March, Gallup poll reported that 49% of respondents felt involvement in the war was an error.
April 17 – National media films the anti-war riot that breaks out in Berkeley, California. The over-reaction by the police in Berkeley is shown in Berlin and Paris, sparking reactions in those cities.
On April 26, 1968, a million college and high school students boycotted class to show opposition to the war.
April 27 – an anti-war march in Chicago organized by Rennie Davis
and others ended with police beating many of the marchers, a precursor
to the police riots later that year at the Democratic Convention.
During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held August 26 – August 29 in Chicago, anti-war protesters marched and demonstrated throughout the city. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley brought to bear 23,000 police and National Guardsman upon 10,000 protesters. Tensions between police and protesters quickly escalated, resulting in a "police riot." Eight leading anti-war activists were indicted by the U.S. Attorney and prosecuted for conspiracy to riot; the convictions of the Chicago Seven were subsequently overturned on appeal.
August – Gallup poll shows 53% said it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam.
Among the academic or scholarly groups was the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, founded in 1968 by graduate students and junior faculty in Asian studies.
1969
March polls
indicated that 19% of Americans wanted the war to end as soon as
possible, 26% wanted South Vietnam to take over responsibility for the
war from the U.S., 19% favored the current policy, and 33% wanted total
military victory.
In March, students at SUNY Buffalo destroyed a Themis construction site.
Late 1960s–early 1970s anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Lund, Sweden.
On April 6, a spontaneous anti-war rally in Central Park was recorded and later released as Environments 3.
On May 22, the Canadian government announced that immigration
officials would not and could not ask about immigration applicants'
military status if they showed up at the border seeking permanent
residence in Canada.
On July 16, activist David Harris
was arrested for refusing the draft, and would ultimately serve a
fifteen-month prison sentence; Harris' wife, prominent musician,
pacifist and activist Joan Baez,
toured and performed on behalf of her husband, throughout the remainder
of 1969, attempting to raise consciousness around the issue of ending
the draft.
On July 31, The New York Times published the results of a
Gallup poll showing that 53% of the respondents approved of Nixon's
handling of the war, 30% disapproved, and the balance had no opinion.
On October 15 the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam
demonstrations took place. Millions of Americans took the day off from
work and school to participate in local demonstrations against the war.
These were the first major demonstrations against the Nixon
administration's handling of the war.
In October, 58% of Gallup respondents said U.S. entry into the war was a mistake.
In November, Sam Melville, Jane Alpert,
and several others bombed several corporate offices and military
installations (including the Whitehall Army Induction Center) in and
around New York City.
On November 15, crowds of up to half a million people participated
in an anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. and a similar
demonstration was held in San Francisco. These protests were organized
by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (New Mobe)
and the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC).
On December 7, The 5th Dimension performed their song "Declaration" on the Ed Sullivan Show. Consisting of the opening of the Declaration of Independence (through "for their future security"), it suggests that the right and duty of revolting against a tyrannical government is still relevant.
In late December, the And babies
poster is published – "easily the most successful poster to vent the
outrage that so many felt about the war in Southeast Asia."
By end of the year, 69% of students identified themselves as doves.
On March 4, Antonia Martínez, a 21-year-old student at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras
was shot and killed by a policeman while watching and commenting on the
anti-Vietnam War and education reform student protests at the
University of Puerto Rico.
On March 14, two merchant seamen, claiming allegiance to the SDS, hijacked the SS Columbia Eagle,
a U.S.-flagged merchant vessel under contract with the U.S. government,
carrying 10,000 tons of napalm bombs for use by the U.S. Air Force in
the Vietnam War. The hijackers forced its master to divert to
then-neutral Cambodia (which promptly was taken over by anti-Communists, who eventually returned to the ship to the U.S.).
Kent State/Cambodia Invasion Protest, Washington, D.C.: After the Kent State shootings, on May 4, 100,000 anti-war
demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C. to protest the shooting of
the students in Ohio and the Nixon administration's incursion into Cambodia.
Even though the demonstration was quickly put together, protesters were
still able to bring out thousands to march in the Capital. It was an
almost spontaneous response to the events of the previous week. Police
ringed the White House with buses to block the demonstrators from
getting too close to the executive mansion. Early in the morning before
the march, Nixon met with protesters at the Lincoln Memorial but nothing was resolved and the protest went on as planned.
National Student Strike:
more than 450 university, college and high school campuses across the
country were shut by student strikes and both violent and non-violent
protests that involved more than 4 million students, in the only
nationwide student strike in U.S. history.
A Gallup poll in May shows that 56% of the public believed that
sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake, 61% of those over 50 expressed
that belief compared to 49% of those between the ages of 21–29.
On June 13, President Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest. The commission was directed to study the dissent, disorder, and violence breaking out on college and university campuses.
In July 1970. the award-winning documentary The World of Charlie Company
was broadcast. "It showed GI's close to mutiny, balking at orders that
seemed to them unreasonable. This was something never seen on television
before." The documentary was produced by CBS News.
On August 24, 1970, near 3:40 a.m., a van filled with ammonium
nitrate and fuel oil mixture was detonated on the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in the Sterling Hall bombing. One researcher was killed and three others were injured.
Vortex I: A Biodegradable Festival of Life: To avert potential violence arising from planned anti-war protests, a government-sponsored rock festival was held near Portland, Oregon from August 28 to September 3, attracting 100,000 participants. The festival, arranged by the People's Army Jamboree (an ad hoc group) and Oregon governor Tom McCall, was set up when the FBI told the governor that President Nixon's planned appearance at an American Legion convention in Portland could lead to violence worse than that seen at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The Chicano Moratorium: on August 29, some 25,000 Mexican-Americans participated in the largest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles. Police attacked the crowd with billyclubs and tear gas;
two people were killed. Immediately after the marchers were dispersed,
sheriff's deputies raided a nearby bar, where they shot and killed Rubén Salazar, KMEX news director and Los Angeles Times columnist, with a tear-gas projectile.
1971 and after
Protests against the Vietnam War in Washington D.C. on April 24, 1971
On April 23, 1971, Vietnam veterans threw away over 700 medals on the West Steps of the Capitol building.
The next day, antiwar organizers claimed that 500,000 marched, making
this the largest demonstration since the November, 1969 march.
Two weeks later, on May 5, 1971, 1146 people were arrested on the
Capitol grounds trying to shut down Congress. This brought the total
arrested during the 1971 May Day Protests to over 12,000. Abbie Hoffman was arrested on charges of interstate travel to incite a riot and assaulting a police officer.
In August, 1971, the Camden 28
conducted a raid on the Camden, New Jersey draft board offices. The 28
included five or more members of the clergy, as well as a number of
local blue-collar workers.
Beginning December 26, 1971, 15 anti-war veterans occupied the
Statue of Liberty, flying a US flag upside down from her crown. They
left on December 28, following issuance of a Federal Court order.
Also on December 28, 80 young veterans clashed with police and were
arrested while trying to occupy the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
On March 29, 1972, 166 people, many of them seminarians, were arrested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for encircling the Federal Courthouse with a chain, to protest the trial of the Harrisburg Seven.
On April 19, 1972, in response to renewed escalation of bombing,
students at many colleges and universities around the country broke into
campus buildings and threatened strikes. The following weekend, protests were held in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
On May 13, 1972, protests again spread across the country in
response to President Nixon's decision to mine harbors in North Vietnam and renewed bombing of North Vietnam (Operation Linebacker).
On July 6, 1972, four Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur on a White
House Tour stopped and began praying to protest the war. In the next six
weeks, such kneel-ins became a popular form of protest and led to over
158 protesters' arrests.
Public opinion on the Vietnam War
The
American public's support of the Vietnam War decreased as the war
continued on. As public support decreased, opposition grew.
The Gallup
News Service began asking the American public whether it was a "mistake
to send troops to Vietnam" in August 1965. At the time less than a
quarter of Americans polled, 24%, believed it was a mistake to send
troops to Vietnam while 60% of Americans polled believed the opposite.
Three years later, in September 1968, 54% of Americans polled believed
it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam while 37% believed it was not
a mistake.
A 1965 Gallup Poll asked the question, "Have you ever felt the urge to organize or join a public demonstration about something?"
Positive responses were quite low; not many people wanted to protest
anything, and those who did want to show a public demonstration often
wanted to demonstrate in support of the Vietnam War. However, when the
American Public was asked in 1990, "Looking back, do you wish that you
had made a stronger effort to protest or demonstrate against the Vietnam
War, or not", 25 percent said they wished they had.
Urge to Organize or Demonstrate
Yes%
No%
U.S. adults
10
90
21 to 29 years old
15
85
30 to 49 years
12
88
50 and older
6
94
College graduates
21
79
High school graduates
9
91
High school nongraduates
5
95
GALLUP, OCT. 29-NOV. 2, 1965
A major factor in the American public's disapproval of the Vietnam
War came from the casualties being inflicted on US forces. In a Harris
poll from 1967 asking what aspect most troubled people most about the
Vietnam war the plurality answer of 31% was "the loss of our young men."
A separate 1967 Harris poll asked the American public,"How has the war
affected your own family, job or financial life?" The majority of
respondents, 55%, said that it had had no effect on their lives. Of the
45% who indicated the war had affected their lives, 32% listed inflation
as the most important factor, while 25% listed casualties inflicted.
As the war continued, the public became much more opposed to the
war, seeing that it was not ending. In a poll from December 1967, 71% of
the public believed the war would not be settled in 1968. A year later the same question was asked and 55% of people did not think the war would be settled in 1969.
When the American public was asked about the Vietnam-era Anti-War
movement in the 1990s, 39% of the public said they approved, while 39%
said they disapproved. The last 22% were unsure.
Slogans and chants
"Hell, no, we won't go!" was heard in antidraft and antiwar protests throughout the country.
"Bring the troops home now!" was heard in mass marches in Washington D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Berkeley, New York, and San Diego.
"Dow shall not kill." and "Making money burning babies!" were two slogans used by students at UCLA and other colleges to protest the Dow Chemical Company, the maker of napalm and Agent Orange.
"Stop the war, feed the poor." was a popular slogan used by
socially conscious and minority antiwar groups, protesting that the war
diverted funds that struggling Americans desperately needed.
"Girls say yes to men who say no." was an antidraft slogan used by the SDS and other organizations.
"War is not healthy for children and other living things" was a slogan of Another Mother for Peace, and was popular on posters.
"End the nuclear race, not the human race." was first used by the WSP in antinuclear demonstrations and became incorporated into the antiwar events.
"Not my son, not your son, not their sons." was an antiwar and antidraft slogan used by the WSP during protests.
"Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong are gonna win." was a common anti-war chant during anti-war marches and rallies in the later sixties.
"Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" was especially chanted by students and other marchers and demonstrators in opposition to Lyndon B. Johnson.
"One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war." was chanted in marches from Brisbane to Boston.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck it all. We don't want this anymore." was also chanted in marches from Brisbane to Boston.
"আমার নাম তোমার নাম ভিয়েতনাম" (Your name, My Name Vietnam): Slogans chanted by leftists of Kolkata (the then-Calcutta) against the American oppression on Vietnam
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