Windsor Ruins, Mississippi. No, its not in Kentucky - but it's very Southern and Lost Cause-y (Photo: Galen Parks Smith/Wikipedia Commons)John Ernst and Yvonne Baldwin write in the February 2007 Journal of Southern History about "The not so silent minority: Louisville's antiwar movement, 1966-1975.". (Consumer advisory: this is one of my long posts for the weekend.)
They discuss the stay-forever position taken by the state's Republican Governor on the Vietnam War and how it connected with the Republican Party's emerging "Southern Strategy". I was particularly intrigued by his speculation on the influence of Lost Cause ideology about the Civil War on Southern men's thinking about war in general:
Louie B. Nunn, who in 1967 became Kentucky's first Republican governor in twenty years and who embodied America's "silent majority," the "decent, law-abiding, constructive citizens who form the heart and conscience of our nation." Nunn claimed to have given Richard M. Nixon the famous phrase that identified Nixon's political base and helped bring him victory in the 1968 presidential election. Nixon won that close contest, in part, because Americans like Nunn wanted an honorable end to the Vietnam War and the social turmoil the conflict caused at home.It can scarcely be stressed enough that when you see a phrase like "social turmoil the conflict caused at home" in that context, that the Republican Southern Strategy viewpoint, and its California version that Ronald Reagan had employed in winning his governor's race the year before Nunn, merged the image of "Vietnam" (i.e., the Vietnam War), dirty [Cheney]ing pot-smoking hippies, and uppity rioting black people into one image of horror for frightened white suburbanites.
Nunn, a World War II infantry veteran, viewed Vietnam through a martial, patriotic, southern lens. "Once we were in it," he asserted, "we had to finish it with honor." Nunn spoke for most Kentuckians and southerners, including Senators Herman E. Talmadge and Richard B. Russell of Georgia. Like Nunn, Russell stated that "national honor" was the issue and that America could "not shrink from defending it." This sense of honor permeated southern culture. Since the late nineteenth century, when the Lost Cause ideology began to glorify the Civil War record of both Union and Confederate soldiers, thus salving the sting of defeat for the South, fighting for America had been a means for southern men to assert their heritage and manhood. Not surprisingly, a Gallup poll in May 1967 revealed that southerners supported the Vietnam War in greater numbers than other Americans. Southerners accounted for almost one-third of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and about 28 percent of the American soldiers who died there. At the height of the Vietnam War, four out of five American army generals hailed from the South, including the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, South Carolinian William C. Westmoreland. Bardstown, Kentucky, produced one of the war's most famous officers, Lieutenant General Harold G. "Hal" Moore, coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Kentucky lost more than one thousand young people in the conflict and, along with five other southern states, voted in 1968 for Nixon, whose political strategy of stressing "law and order" and patriotism ended the longtime "Democratic stronghold" in Dixie. (my emphasis)
We shouldn't let this history of the Vietnam War and of Southern military service lead us to make unfounded assumptions about today. The last poll I saw that broke down opinions on the Iraq War by region showed as much opposition to the war in the South as in the rest of the country.
Looking at antiwar activists in the city of Louisville, Ernst and Baldwin write:
Louisville was home not only to [Boxing champion Muhammad] Ali, the nation's best-known dissident, but also to social justice proponents, civil rights advocates, and a growing peace community. Anne and Carl Braden, Dr. George Edwards, and Suzy Post, in particular, addressed the issues of race and class that Ali represented, and, through coalitions and networks that linked young radicals and middle-aged activists, they fashioned an antiwar movement in Louisville that adds depth to historians' understanding of the southern response to the Vietnam War. Middle aged, middle class, well educated, and white, like other southern activist leaders such as Tennessee minister Will Campbell, the dissenters in Louisville joined other teachers, clerics, homemakers, and lawyers to become a vocal minority in cities all across the South. In Atlanta, Austin, Chapel Hill, Columbia, El Paso, Houston, Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, and Tallahassee, they provided counsel and often afforded a degree of protection from the legal system that the younger generation of soldiers and protesters could have received nowhere else. More than sympathizers and boosters, the older men and women often set the agenda for reform as they mentored and sheltered soldiers, draft evaders, peaceniks, and other young people who opposed the American presence in Vietnam. (my emphasis)Reminding us of the "culture war" link the Republicans made, they write, "Governor Nunn pledged to rid the state of the Bradens, who directed the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an interracial civil rights organization."
"Rid the state of the Bradens". Wow!
The George Edwards mentioned there was a Christian minister who had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War. He actively counseled draft evaders, knowing that he was breaking the law in doing so. They quote Anne Braden describing him as "the most militant pacifist you ever saw".
Their article also reminds us that when Bush and his followers accuse war critics of betraying American by aiding the enemy, they stand in an ugly tradition from the Vietnam War and desegregation days:
Southern hostility toward war resisters frequently provoked confrontations. In Tallahassee, for example, conservative Florida State University fraternity brothers and "jocks" pelted activists with rocks and tossed them in the student union fountain. In Texas the Ku Klux Klan harassed a woman after the local newspaper revealed that her son-in-law was an exile in Canada. Her complaints about a break-in, shattered windows, slashed tires, and crank calls failed to alarm local police, who advised her to move since the local "organization" did not "take kindly to draft dodgers."Brave defenders of the white race often showed their version of "patriotism" in such courageous ways. I wonder how many of those brave souls had volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War themselves? Threatening wimmin while safe at home in Texas is much more their style. Fine Christian white men, those guys.
They don't give a lot of details about the antiwar movement at Florida State University. But it's worth noticing that Florida State was not an "elite", Ivy League school. It was one of those state colleges that attracted a disproportionate number of working-class kids. And they had an active antiwar movement, active enough to catch the attention of the frat boys and and some jocks who were there enjoying their draft deferments, most of them having (like Dick Cheney) "other priorities" than going to war. But these brave patriots were able to muster the courage to gang up on some nonviolent demonstrators - they probably had to git likkered up first - and toss them into the campus fountain. Shoot, they takes nearly as much courage as fightin' them Vietcong in the jungle. That shore makes yuh proud to be an Amurcan, don't it?
Actually, despite "culture war" dogma, working class voters were more opposed to the Vietnam War than wealthy ones. And the campus antiwar movement was more active on more heavily working-class compuses like Kent State University than at the "elite" institutions.
In 1967 Austin antiwar leader George Vizard died of gunshot wounds in what police termed a grocery holdup. Texas peace organizations disagreed and called his death a "political murder." Three years later a coalition of Houston activists, including the John Brown Revolutionary League, the Houston Committee to End the War, Communications for Peace, and the University of Houston Student Mobilization Committee, accused the city's police of "protecting" Klan members who perpetrated bombings, shootings, and arson.In those days, there was military conscription (the draft) in the US. And, unlike today, Canada's laws offered a measure of asylum to draft resisters. Antiwar activists used the opportunity:
Edwards, Post, and the Bradens risked criminal prosecution for operating a kind of Underground Railroad that assisted young Kentuckians as they sought to avoid military service in the jungles of Vietnam. Throughout the South, like-minded "conductors" did the same. Kevin Vrieze, a draft evader from Texas, found help from "Houston to Austin to Tulsa to St. Louis to Detroit, and finally to Windsor in Canada." Clerics, teachers, homemakers, and pacifists formed the core of the network. As Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop noted, "the more middle-class and middle-aged the better," because such individuals did not draw the attention of federal and local authorities with the same regularity as did their younger, more radical counterparts.Ernst and Baldwin also describe other aspects of the antiwar movement that were also prominent in the South, like antiwar coffeehouses (decades before Starbucks!)and soldier's "underground" newspapers (the 1960s and 1970s equivalent of blogs). They write:
Individuals and organizations throughout the South assisted, to varying degrees, dissident soldiers. For example, the Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, hosted weekly meetings for a Fort Bragg organization named GIs United Against the War in Vietnam. The Bradens went a step further. They had a printing press in the basement that soldiers used for an underground GI newspaper called FTA and subtitled Fun, Travel, Adventure, drawing from a military recruitment slogan. One of the first newspapers edited exclusively by GIs, "It was called FTA," noted Anne, and "What it really stood for was 'Fuck the Army." Despite nearly constant federal surveillance, the Bradens' home in the city's West End served as SCEF headquarters and became a "second home" for some of the soldiers from Fort Knox.
[A]n estimated three hundred GI underground newspapers appeared during the Vietnam era, but most lasted a year or less. Dissidents at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, published at least half a dozen, including Flag-In-Action, Napalm, EM 16, In Formation, Spread Eagle, and People's Press. Perhaps the two most famous GI newspapers, both FTA and Fort Jackson's Short Times ran fairly regularly from 1968 through 1972...Active-service GIs and veterans, including Vietnam veterans, were very much a part of the antiwar movement and became even more so as time went on.
The following is also an important point for those who argue - to my mind, in an astonishingly misguided way - that the antiwar movement of those days strengthened support for the war:
Like many of the GI coffeehouses, the one in Muldraugh proved extremely controversial, enjoyed a relatively brief life span, and thus on the surface could be judged a failure. Coffeehouses, however, served a significant purpose. They became way stations for young draftees and deserters on the Underground Railroad to Canada and fueled the growing GI movement by bringing civilian and military activists together.It shouldn't be so hard to understand that the purpose of a protest movement is to protest. Ultimately, the goal is to produce constructive results. But as long as the protesters represent a minority, which the Vietnam War opponents did for much longer than the Iraq War critics had to face, a key part of their job is be a pain in the rear. And on the other end of the metaphor, to get in people's faces and make them think about what they are supporting.
Although what we remember as the activist women's movement of those days was a more widespread phenomenon of the 1970s than the 1960s, the antiwar movement was an important contributor to changing consciousness on sex-role issues and offered an opportunity and challenge to those who were interested in raising those issues. In the following passage, they remind us of the heavy hand of "respectability" and how that tyranny-of-the-majority social conformity affected the activists in various ways:
Like [famous pediatrician and antiwar activist Benjamin] Spock, Post believed in solidarity among the various groups that opposed the war even as they took on other social justice causes, and she faced the same challenges that he did in getting the antiwar organizations to work side by side with civil rights activists already radicalized by the struggle. Ironically, black war protesters encountered the same dilemma as they weighed coming out against Vietnam and thus possibly alienating their grassroots supporters. Both sets of dissidents risked antagonizing the government and being tarred with the brush of communism. Respectability was important, especially to middle-aged activists who recalled the spectacle of McCarthyism. They too risked losing everything if they went too far. Suzy Post enjoyed a certain level of respectability because of her socioeconomic status. "I came out of the great white Jewish middle class," Post noted. "My husband was a very successful trial lawyer so I could operate within that community with a kind of authority and legitimacy." Post described her work and the antiwar stance of her colleagues, including the Bradens and Edwards, in ethical terms. "It was a moral issue and it grew in the churches. Most of the people with whom I worked really didn't have a political perspective," she recalled, "they had a moral perspective." This absence of political perspective divided "traditional" antiwar women like Post from the younger generation of "radicals" who criticized the older women for their "false consciousness" and urged them to abandon the roles of mother and wife and demand instead to be treated equally by the government as citizens. (my emphasis)This is part of why the whole discussion today about how Democrats need to show they respect religion seems so bizarre to me. Respect religion? "Putting God back in the public square"? Religious convictions and the moral considerations growing from them were a major part in the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement that contributed so much to shaping the Democratic Party of today. 95% of that talk about Democrats needing to emphasize religion is just rightwing white fundamentalists trying to claim God's sanction for militarism, neosegregationism and hostility to science. It's really amazing that such a brainless theme ever caught on as part of our political dialogue.
But the South was still emerging from the era of de facto segregation. And the social repression of dissident ideas still was taking its toll in notable ways. As Ernst and Baldwin write, "Martial patriotism, fear, and racism thinned the antiwar ranks in Dixie and prevented some who privately opposed the war from demonstrating publicly."
But there were demonstrations in the South, including in the "border state" of Kentucky. They describe the events of 1969 commemorating the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination:
The King anniversary also sparked a demonstration in Louisville. To honor him and support the so-called Black Six (six African Americans who at the time faced trial over their alleged involvement in riots in Louisville in May 1968), about two hundred civil rights advocates, most of them blacks, started marching from Louisville's West End toward the county courthouse, the site of a scheduled memorial service. Coming from the other direction, down Broadway, 130 LPC demonstrators, primarily whites, marched to acknowledge King's antiwar contributions. The streets were full of people. According to Anne Braden, neither group had secured a permit to march, and neither was aware of the other's plans. "It was pure coincidence," Braden recalled, and no one had "enough sense on either side to call up and make some contacts." By chance, both groups hit Fourth and Broadway at the same moment and "overflowed" into the street. The police, probably fearing a recurrence of the May 1968 disorders, "quickly blocked the street to vehicles while the marchers clapped, sang and chanted their way" to the courthouse. At first, the blacks shouted, "Freedom, Freedom!" and the whites shouted, "Peace, Peace!" as they walked. Soon, however, they shouted both slogans in unison and raised a black flag. In a 1999 interview, Braden mused over what the movements could accomplish when they came together. "You took over Fourth Street," she asserted, "nobody could have stopped them, and nobody tried." Before the demonstration ended, Braden ran into George Edwards on the street. The two had at times disagreed over the Black Power movement because its supporters' advocacy of racial separation disturbed him. As their paths converged, Braden asked, "What do you think about that Black Power now? He just laughed," she recalled.My own undergraduate alma mater, Millsaps College in Mississippi, even comes into their account:
Anne Braden's brainchild, the SSOC, a predominantly white group meant to complement SNCC, enjoyed some early success fighting for civil rights and other social justice causes, but it derailed on the Vietnam War. Organized in 1964 by delegates from fifteen southern colleges, the SSOC spread throughout the region and even reached into the Deep South. For example, in a Jackson, Mississippi, apartment, five SSOC activists calling themselves "The Army" produced an underground newspaper titled KUDZU and, with the help of Millsaps College students, distributed the publication at local high schools and at Mississippi State University. Headquartered in Nashville, just several hours from Louisville, the SSOC collaborated with the SCEF to set the agenda for the southern antiwar movement. The SCEF occasionally met in Nashville and lent cars to SSOC members, who in turn promoted the Louisville-based organization. The two groups worked together to create a new organization, the Southern Committee Against Repression (SCAR), and they initiated the Southern Movement News Service, a clearinghouse for coordinating the region's underground papers and movement newsletters. (my emphasis)Ah, I can feel the old school spirit!
Now, this is a really strange twist. As weird as it seems now - and as weird as it should have seemed then - antiwar activists actually tried to use neo-Confederate symbolism to make their point. What influence people like those around today's neo-Confederate and isolationist LewRockwell.com group and Web site may have had in that, I don't know. I do recall Molly Ivins saying that she recalled that white supporters of the civil rights movement that she was around in Texas also looked by to Confederate heroes as some kind of model of honor. But that is weird. The best thing you can say about it is that it shows the absurd degree to which phony Lost Cause versions of history permeated the South. Ernst and Baldwin write:
The SSOC, backed by the SCEF and other groups, reached its peak in early 1969. Although an internal crisis soon splintered the group, it organized a four-day southern protest of the Nixon inauguration in Washington, D.C. The protesters chose a site near the White House at the statue of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, whose scorched-earth tactics during the Civil War sought to break the South's spirit. The site symbolized "Yankee Imperialism and the colonial status of the South," claimed the young activists, who co-opted historical memory to allege that northern capitalists victimized southerners and Vietnamese alike.Good grief! "Bravery, loyalty and devotion"?!? Couldn't these presumably mostly well-intentioned white activists have figured out that those alleged qualities were being exercised in support of slavery, white supremacy and treason? Well-intentioned or not - during that period it became routine to blame stuff in the movement you didn't like on police provocateurs, and that wasn't entirely paranoid - that business of opposing the war to defend the tradition of Suthun honuh handed down from the good ole white boys of the Confederacy, well, that was just whacked.
The group's antiwar philosophy centered on "southern distinctiveness," which inspired some members and offended others. Some SSOC leaders admired the work of historian C. Vann Woodward and invited him to address the group. They also lionized southern progressives like Braden and began to emphasize white Confederates' "positive" traits of "bravery, loyalty, and devotion." "Not for slavery," they claimed, but for dedication to their families and homes. As one activist observed, "no revolution is gonna happen" without whites, and to recruit them the SSOC must examine "those very things that make Southerners what they are and build on them--using the symbols and peculiarities by which they have been taught to identify themselves." The Confederate flag reemerged as an important symbol, and rebel yells broke out at antiwar demonstrations where the SSOC "call[ed] for southerners to 'secede' from the war."
In June 1969 the southern identity issue imploded at a meeting near Edwards, Mississippi. SCEF representative Carl Braden attended, along with a number of SDS activists. Weakened by internal power struggles and eager to garner support in the South, SDS targeted SSOC members who rejected the Confederate symbolism, a move that, to the dismay of the Bradens, hastened the SSOC's self-destruction. (my emphasis)
That's the Ron Paul school of war criticism.
When prowar fantasists today or airhead journalists start wondering why there's no huge demonstrations against the war, I always want to ask them why aren't we seeing mass demonstrations by those who support the war? Today's situation isn't entirely comparable in that regard to the Vietnam War days, because the Iraq War became unpopular among the majority years ago. If they're serious about reviving support for the Iraq War, the shrinking prowar minority should be demonstrating and getting in people's faces in the streets. But that would be more sacrifice than most war fans are willing to make in support of the Front Line Struggle Against The Terrorists on which they tell us the future of American civilization hangs.
But the prowar zealots had a bit of a time rounding up activists in Louisville in those days, too:
Some pro-war demonstrations occurred in Louisville. A rally in October 1967 produced a seemingly improbable combination: the Concerned Citizens Committee, the Total Effort for America Committee, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Committee for the Continuation of War for the Sake of Love and the Preservation of Peace. A year later the school board denied Edwards's request to speak at a meeting on behalf of the Louisville Peace Council. Edwards wanted to propose that peace advocates receive "equal time with military recruiters" in the high schools. Following the meeting, a parents' group, numbering about thirty, heckled Edwards while the press interviewed him. Some yelled "traitor," and many wore campaign paraphernalia promoting the 1968 presidential bid of George Wallace. In December 1969 a handful of individuals picketed outside the Atherton High School auditorium as Dr. Spock spoke. Their signs read "Free speech or treason?" "Dr. Spock--leader of loud-mouthed minority," and "Enter Hanoi Annex." Many of the city's residents, intensely anticommunist, held traditional southern values and strong religious convictions that supported the notion of duty and service to one's country, and as late as 1970, even if they were not willing to take to the streets to support the war, approximately two hundred parishioners walked out on an antiwar sermon at Fifth Street's Cathedral of the Assumption. (my emphasis)I wonder how many of those 200 walkouts were white. About 200, I would guess. One might also wonder if any of them were bothered at all in that situation by the fact that Jesus was, uh, a pacifist. I'm guessing around zero on that one.
Perhaps the most incredible thing from today's perspective is that back then, there were Republicans - yes, actual members and officeholders of the Republican Party! - who were seriously critical of the Vietnam War. And not in the John Warner - oh, I'm going to wring my hands and mutter about my deep concern and always vote for the Cheney-Bush positions on any and all matters relating to the war - kind of way. No, I mean actual war critics:
The divergence of opinion over the war extended to politics and created some heated discussion among the state's leading Republicans. U.S. senator Thruston B. Morton, a native of the city, joined his influential counterpart, Senator John Sherman Cooper, early on in advocating American withdrawal from Vietnam, a position the former mayor of Louisville, U.S. representative William O. Cowger, severely criticized. Cowger accused Morton, a moderate Republican, of flip-flopping due to a growing "shift of public sentiment against the war." Analysts agreed, and Morton's 1967 turnaround became national news. Congressional colleagues considered the old national Republican Party chair (1959-1961) a "weathervane," a political professional, and a potential vice presidential candidate for the 1968 election. Gene Snyder, Louisville's other member of the House of Representatives, also became dovish, asserting in 1969 that America "ought to pack up and come home." (my emphasis)Can you imagine, even imagine any Republican member of Congress other than the nativist, ultra-right, John Birch Society whacko-type Ron Paul saying something like that today? "We ought to just pack up and come home from Iraq?" Man, the times they have a-changed.
Now, I'm not making this up. Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper really was a leading critic of the Vietnam War. Even more exotic from today's viewpoint, he was part of a long-extinct species called "liberal Republicans". Yes, I know it sounds as mythical as a gryphon or a cyclops or something. But there is substantial evidence that sober-minded scholars credit than such creatures really did once exist. And, no, I'm not drunk or indulging in recreational drugs. Although I may have just had one too many cups of coffee.
At the end of their article, Ernst and Baldwin revisit the Lost Cause theme. I've been convinced for a while that this "never retreat, never surrender" notion about the Iraq War is related in some way to the Lost Cause dogma. I'm not sure if such a thing could ever be conclusively demonstrated. But here's their take on it:
With Vietnam, however, "history," in C. Vann Woodward's words, had "begun to catch up with Americans," and the war would not go away. As Woodward noted, the South's defeat in the Civil War created a unique southern experience, making the region emblematic of the entire nation as Vietnam stripped away the country's sense of innocence and "invincibility." Perhaps the entire nation came to grips with the idea of the Lost Cause and, as the U.S. sought national meaning and redemption, came to better understand why southerners, in an effort to exorcise their old demons, proudly sent more than their share to Southeast Asia. While Vietnam may have helped the nation understand the South's commitment to militarism, the conflict also stimulated the work of modern social justice activists like the Bradens, George Edwards, and Suzy Post. Though advocates of peace and progressive causes had always been a small minority in the South, this generation of activists was a vocal one, and a modern giant, Muhammad Ali, served as a symbol of its significance. (my emphasis)I have to ask, though, how many times do Americans have to collectively lose our viriginity? Or, "lose our innocence", as the pundits like to put it. Weren't the Mexican War and the Civil War and Indian Wars enough times to lose our innocence? If not, there was the Spanish-American War which gave way to the godawful "small war" in the Phillipines. Then "we" lost our innocence again in the massive, mostly completely senseless slaughter that we know as the First World War. Then we lost our innocence again with the Vietnam War. Or was the Korean War the next loss of innocence? I lose track. Then there were the John and Bobby Kennedy assassinations and the King assassination that took away our national innocence yet again. By the time 9/11 came along, our innocence was ready to be lost again. Soon I'm sure we'll found out that our remarkably resilent innocence was sacrificed again in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.
I hate all these "national character" metaphors anyway. Individuals have characters. Nations make collective decision and do things.
Maybe "we" could collectively make a deal with the cosmos, or the karmic force, or whatever entity will deal with us over it. "We" agree to give up "our" innocence forever, never ever to have it back again. And in return, The Force will allow us to not ever have to spread our innocence to other lucky nations in the world by invading their countries and bombing, shooting and torturing them into being innocent like us.
Deal?
Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, john ernst, lost cause, millsaps college, vietnam war, yvonne baldwin war, yvonne baldwin
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