Don't oversimplify the protest movements of the Vietnam War era

I've posted several times lately about what I think is a tendency among liberal writers who I respect to carelessly accept conservative polemical claims about the anti-Vietnam War movement in particular.

It would be silly to pretend that there weren't some people who were put off by the protests of various kinds,  and not just large demonstrations or violent incidents.  These were live issues in political campaigns, such as Ronald Reagan's successful 1966 campaign for California governor and Nixon's 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns.

But it's all too easy looking back at events 30-40 years ago to isolate particular elements and overemphasize them.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, the point of the antiwar movement of those days was not identical to promoting liberal or Democratic politics generally.  I recall seeing a film clip of Sen. Gaylord Nelson telling about how he had advised antiwar activists in 1968 not to concentrate on picketing appearances by Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey.  He told them it might wind up elected Nixon, and, he said, "I don't think you're going to like him very much."

So it may well be that the antiwar movement contributed in some way to Republican ascendency.  Because, in a situation similar to the Labour Party in Britain today, an unpopular war was being led by the party to which most critics of the war also gravitated.  And in a two-party system, putting pressure on elected officials of one party, e.g., Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, ultimately means theatening them with a loss of votes in relation to the other party.

So the effectiveness of the antiwar movement can't be equated with its popularity, nor with the success of the Democratic Party.  Even so, polls on something like "demonstrations" or "the antiwar movement" have to be read closely to understand what is being communicated, if anything is.  A poll on something like that is different from asking about particular candidates, parties or issues.  So arguments that polls showing an increasing unpopularity of both the war and the antiwar movement have to be regarded critically.

Also, the antiwar movement was hardly the only expression of civil unrest in those years.  The civil rights movement in theSouth was regarded favorably in the North, but even there there was a "white backlash".  And there were race-related protests of various kinds in non-Southern states, as well.

It's worth remembering that African-American civil rights activists were always advised, no matter how tame or "respectable" their protests, that they risked turning off people to their cause by having the bad manners to publicly demand that their rights as American citizens be observed and respected.  Someone once asked Martin Luther King if he wasn't worried about the "white backlash."  He responded drily that it seemed to him that a lot of whites had been backlashing for quite a while already.

To get an idea of how some protests not soley related to the Vietnam War could disturb "respectable" citizens, this story about the militant group the Black Panthers can serve as an illustration, from Walton Bean's California: An Interpretive History (3rd edition; 1978):

In the spring of 1967 the California Legislature was preparing to pass a gun control law directed against the Black Panthers; and on May 2, when the bill was debated, a caravan of armed Panthers drove from Oakland to Sacramento, read a manifesto on the steps of the capitol denouncing the "racist legislature," and then walked onto the floor of the assembly carrying guns. They were quickly expelled from the chamber, and [Black Panther Chairman Bobby] Seale and others were later arrested. The sensational publicity given to the affair aroused much public alarm, and great condemnation of the Panthers, but it also gave the party wide advertising among militant young blacks and led to the organization of branches in several other parts of the country.

As I recall from another account of this incident, the guns they carried were unloaded shotguns.  Bean does not report whether the National Rifle Association (NRA) applauded this protest as a welcome defense of the Second Amendment.

But one can imagine it shook a few white folks up.

This was also a period in which urban riots threatened to become a regular summer event.  Riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and in Detroit in 1967 were notable examples.  And riots broke out in 125 cities across the country in the wake of King'sassassination in 1968.

Along with this, there was a student protest movement, whose goals included opposition to the war but also focused on issues of racism and campus governance, that involved actions that at times were disruptive, and violent police responses in many cases that polarized the situation.

And speaking of polarization, not only George Wallace (whose economic positions were arguably liberal even in the 1960s) but Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Tricky Dick Nixon demagogued about the evils of protests as hard as they could.  Nixon's first Vice President Spiro Agnew, before he resigned in disgrace after copping a plea on a bribery charge, was a hero to "cultural conservatives."  As a sample of his rhetoric to fire up the Republican base - which by this time included the "white backlash" vote in the formerly Democratic South, we could take this one from a speech of 02/10/70 (quoted in Robert Jay Lifton's 1973 Home From the War):

... as for these deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and the uncivil disobedients among our youth, SDS, PLP, Weathermen I and Weathermen II, the revolutionary action movement, the Black United Front, Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, Lions and Tigers alike—I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.

Lifton also notes that Agnew-like caricatures of "dirty hippies" and "crazy protesters" were "emphasized in the military" at the time.

Today, this rhetoric has become standard for OxyContin radio and Right Blogostan.  With Karl Rove (of the Valerie Plame outing) accusing war critics of treason, we could say that Agnew was ahead of his time.  But it's important to recognize the large element of desperation in Agnew's attempt to define antiwar protesters as enemies of the soldiers, or their cultural opposite.  Part of the Nixon team's worry was the increasing prominence of Vietnam veterans in the antiwar movement.  They were desperate to neutralize it.

The normal language of the Republican faithful has become so venomous today that it would be easy to overlook that Agnew was engaging in genuine hate-mongering.  It was unusual for the Vice President to carry on that way.  And having such a high official use this kind of demagogic language was strong stuff.  Stronger than it may seem today when so much of what was Radical Right in 1970 is mainstream Republicanism in 2005.  A lot can change in 35 years.

Add the hippie movement, pot and LSD, and there were lots of things for people to be disturbed about.  And, to a certain extent, these fears and resentments almost certainly attached themselves to many people's perception of the antiwar movement.

And they also contributed to people's attitude toward the war, as well.  Historian George Herring wrote in  - note that he is talking about 1967 here, during the Johnson administration:

By late 1967, for many observers the war had become the most visible symbol of a malaise that had afflicted all of American society. Not all would have agreed with [Arkansas Sen. William] Fulbright's assertion that the Great Society was a "sick society," but many did feel that the United States was going through a kind of national nervous breakdown. The "credibility gap" - the difference between what the administration said and what it did - had produced a pervasive distrust of government. Rioting in the cities, a spiraling crime rate, and noisy demonstrations in the streets suggested that violence abroad had produced violence at home. Increasingly divided against itself, the nation appeared on the verge of an internal crisis as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Anxiety about the war had not translated into a firm consensus for either escalation or withdrawal, but the public mood - tired, angry, and frustrated - perhaps posed a more serious threat to the administration than the antiwar movement.

We can't look at the antiwar movement of the anti-Vietnam War in isolation from factors like the ones mentioned here.  And it's important in looking at it now that we don't confuse effectiveness with popularity.  And also not to confuse a "movement" with "demonstrations." Or to confuse the antiwar movement with the Democratic Party.  To the extent that such factors were affecting people's voting behavior, the Democrats in Congress and the White House were vulnerable to the "throw the bums out" attitude.  The Dems lost control of the White House in the election 1968, but it wasn't until the election of 1980 that the Republicans gained control of either House of Congress, the Senate in that case.

Finally, we have to remember that the perceptive pimped by Spiro Agnew in the quote above has been promoted by the Republican noise machine in the decades since.  While it's critical to remember that such tactics can be used (and are!) as a political club against today's antiwar movement, it's also important not to assume that everyone is so brainless as to be suckered by the ravings of a Spiro Agnew - notwithstanding Rush Limbaugh's popularity among Republican white guys.