Was the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War counterproductive?

Tom Hayden, post-1968

This is a view that even some careful researchers have rather amazingly come to accept. I've explained in a number of posts why I believe this view is seriously flawed.

For one thing, that view often seems to overlook the nature of protest itself. There's not nearly so much incentive to protest if most people already agree with you. The anti-Vietnam War protests were aimed at changing people minds. In other words, by their very nature many people would find the protest a pain in the rear. That not the same thing as saying that the protests were ineffective.

In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), which I quoted in the last post, Jules Witcover interviewed Tom Hayden, who was one of the best-known figures in the 1960s antiwar movement and also a founder of the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There was a German SDS, also called Students for a Democratic Society which in German happened to come out to the initials SDS also, but it and the American SDS were not part of the same group.

Witcover questioned Hayden as to whether "the excesses of the radicals of 1968, of whom he was a leader, fueled the rise of conservatism and the resurrection of the Republican party after the Goldwater debacle of 1964". Hayden rejected that argument "sharply". In his response, Hayden pointed to how strongly the image of what Digby calls DFH's, for "dirty [Cheney]ing hippies", continued to antimate the Republican Party in the late 1990s:

"Law and order meant the status quo at that time [1968] against the perceived threat of the blacks, the students, the women, the antiwar demonstrators," Hayden said. "You still see that today. It very much animates [Newt] Gingrich's consciousness when he talks about rescuing American civilization, or rescuing Western civilization. He's talking about rescuing his version of the status quo from what he perceives to be the Visigoths and barbarians at the gates, who are all these people from the sixties. (my emphasis)

People used to counsel African-Americans not to push too hard in the 1960s for their basic rights as citizens because they might provoke a "white backlash". Martin Luther King remarked at one point that it looked like to him that whites had been backlashing for quite a while already.

What Hayden points out there is accurate and important. The perennial Republican bogeyman of the DFH's is not just about white people with flower-power clothes demonstrating against the war. It's a mishmash of all sorts of "culture war" fears, not least of which is the image of black people being equal citizens. When Ronald Reagan in his 1966 campaign for California governor, before the Summer of Love in 1967 and before the various events of 1968, fired up his white audiences by telling him that hippies were people who "act like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah", neither he nor his audiences were thinking only about pot-smoking white guys with shoulder-length hair.

In this case, other groups could have proposed a similar retort to Reagan and his culture-war fans as King posed. Should Vietnam veterans, religious activists and the others who opposed the Vietnam War have just shut the hell up the way Reagan and his supporters wanted them to? Who was being more sensible in 1966, the war critics who were pointed out problems? Or the cheerleaders who just swallowed those over-optimistic assessments of progress from the Johnson administration and the happy-talk generals?

Hayden points to the Vietnam War itself as a decisive factor in the political rebound of the Republicans. After all, it was the Democratic Johnson administration that had placed half a million US troops in Vietnam:

"But there's quite another way to look at it, a better way," he said. "The United States never should have been involved in the war in Vietnam. That's the root cause, because it created a sea of blood that created lasting emotions, feelings and resentments. It prevented the possible completion of the antipoverty effort and the urban agenda which led directly to the conditions for the black riots, the insurrections, further bloodshed and creation of a climate of law and order.

"If there's blame, and I'm only responding to those who want to blame the New Left, the root responsibility was the decision to continue escalating the war in Vietnam in 1963, 1964, 1965. ... If you want to place a date when it ill went wrong it was the Gulf of Tonkin decision in August 1964. That was it. So all the conservatives, the people who blame the New Left, are doing is focusing on a later set of events that brought about the beginning of a Republican ascendancy. ...

"If you go back four years earlier, if you want to get down to what really divided the country, what caused the reform-minded students to become revolutionaries, what caused a breakdown of trust, what caused the racial violence, it was the escalation of the war in Vietnam. ... If Johnson had acted on the recommendations of his advisers who wanted to emphasize the Great Society and deal with the unrest in the cities, [the riots] might not have happened." (my emphasis)

We should remember that urban riots in predominantly black ghettos in the cities were very much on people's minds in 1968. After Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968, riots broke out in over 100 cities.

Marvin Gettleman and his fellow editors wrote in their notes to Vietnam and America: A Documented History (1985):

The nationwide reaction to the murder of Dr. King in some ways rivaled the Tet Offensive, to which it bore similarities by no means purely coincidental. Between April 4 and April 11, 1968, rebellions broke out in 125 US cities and towns.

They go on to point out that Westmoreland had requested an additional 206,000 troops for Vietnam. Part of the military's thinking in that request, as Jeffrey Record has described, was to force Johnson to mobilize the reserves, which they believed would not only provide better troops than they were getting through the draft but would also bolster public support for the Vietnam War. Gettleman, et al, write:

The uprisings [urban riots] of early April realized [the] worst fears [of "worried decision-makers in the Pentagon and the White House"]. In that cataclysmic week, 55,000 troops had to be mobilized alongside tens of thousands of police. Television viewers around the world saw Washington itself defended by federal combat troops, while columns of smoke from burning buildings towered above the Capitol. On April 11 came the biggest call-up of the reserves during the Vietnam War.

Protests followed at many colleges and universities around the country, with events tending to link the issues of the King assassination, civil rights and the Vietnam War in the minds of both protesters and the public.

And there were violent protests occurring in other contexts, as well. In 1969, for instance, there were around 5,000 protest bombings in the United States, something rarely heard of these days. We should note that over 60% of those bombings were related in some way to labor conflicts.

My point in describing this context is not to justify riots or to romanticize the use of Molotov cocktails. It's to say that there were a lot more social conflicts going on than hippies smoking dope and the occasional antiwar demonstrators getting rowdy.

And to meaningfully understand the political dynamics of that period, it's necessary to ask, for instance, since the Vietnam War was being waged by a Democratic administration and the Presidential candidate (Nixon) elected in 1968 was a Republican who assured voters he had a secret plan to end the war, how does that translate into antiwar protests being counterproductive?

And if the public saw a Democratic administration calling out troops to quell rioting black people in 1968, why is it that "backlashing" Southern whites who supported the Vietnam War being waged by that same Democratic administration were repelled by that same administration?

The answers to those questions aren't simple, either. But they do suggest how lacking the simple-minded assumptions of the conventional wisdom about that period really are. Not to speak of the assumptions of Christian Right culture warriors.

Hayden's comments to Witcover about the violent radical group the Weather Underground, which was similar in ideology to the German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), but unlike the RAF did not use kidnappings or murder as part of their repertoire, are also notable.

Even before the disillusionment of 1968, Hayden said, the Students for a Democratic Society of which he had been a founder and intellectual voice "was cracking up. The first wave of radical reformers like myself had gone. ... A new, more disillusioned radicalism was sprouting, from 1965 to 1968, and in the wake of 1968 you had a further splintering into what became the Weather Underground, which had concluded that only by violent disruption [could change be achieved].

"This was not a completely mindless approach," he said. "The new leaders of SDS who became the Weather Underground were the younger brothers and sisters of the people who had started SDS in a rosier time. You know how you get into fights in a family. Well, they felt that our generation had failed. By that they meant reform had not occurred. In fact, more people were getting killed in Vietnam, and people trying to reform the system in Mississippi had been denied, and in Chicago had been beaten up with clubs. So they took the leap from that to the conclusion that the establishment didn't listen to reason, or morality or to marching feet or even to votes. The change would only come about if the establishment faced a continual low-grade, violent headache at home.

"And so you started to get these bombings of power lines, ROTC buildings. But never before, in many years, [except] maybe in labor strikes, had there been this much violent disruption in America. If you look at it amorally as a historian would, you'd have to say they had some effect. They may not have brought about reform and they certainly didn't bring about the good society or the blessed community. But they did add, just as they thought they would, to the burden of the establishment going on with the Vietnam War. It became clearer and clearer that if you went on with the Vietnam War, you were creating more and more of this chaos at home." (my emphasis)

Again, no simple answers. I would add that the electoral presence in American politics of any group that shared the ideology of the Weather Underground was pretty much precisely zero. What the effects of their violent activities - like successful symbolic bombings (i.e., symbolic in being non-lethal by design) - may have been, it's hard to say. I don't recall ever seeing any polls that attempted to measure that, but there probably were. As Hayden indicates, they did add some element of disruption to the political scene.

I suppose I should also add that I don't see Hayden's comments as in any way approving of the Weather Underground's particular approach, although that should be clear from the passage I quoted itself.

Now, in the fevered minds of Republican culture warriors, there is little or no distinction between Congressional war critics, underground Marxist-Leninist sects, scary rioting Negroes, and Sunni Salafist suicide bombers. And that strange identification of wildly disparate groups in their ideology and political imagery is a fact in itself that has to be taken into account.

It just shouldn't be confused with reality-based history.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, tom hayden, vietnam war, weather underground