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The Vietnam War produced the largest and most sustained protest movement in American history. At its peak in 1969 and 1970, opposition to the war reached from university campuses to Congress, from the Black churches of the South to the draft offices of the Midwest, and from the editorial pages of major newspapers to the living rooms of ordinary families. The movement was not a single organisation but a coalition of overlapping groups: student activists, draft resisters, civil rights leaders, returning veterans, religious pacifists and, increasingly by the late 1960s, substantial sections of the broad American public. It transformed how Americans thought about military service, the presidency and the limits of state power.
This lesson covers the growth of the anti-war movement between 1965 and the early 1970s. It examines the early campus protests, the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the politics of the draft, the role of civil rights leaders, the turning-point coverage by Walter Cronkite after Tet, the photographs that entered public consciousness — Eddie Adams's image of a Saigon execution, Ronald Haeberle's My Lai photographs — the My Lai Massacre of March 1968, the Kent State shootings of May 1970, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Paper 3 question on the importance of the anti-war movement in American defeat is one examiners return to repeatedly; this lesson provides the evidence to answer it.
The earliest sustained opposition to the war came from American universities. On the night of 24–25 March 1965, three weeks after Rolling Thunder began and the Marines landed at Da Nang, faculty and students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor held the first teach-in: a twelve-hour seminar on the history and politics of Vietnam that drew roughly 3,000 participants. Within weeks similar events had been held at the University of California, Berkeley (21–22 May 1965, 30,000 participants over 36 hours), Columbia, Wisconsin, and more than a hundred other campuses.
The teach-ins reflected a wider shift on American campuses. The generation of students entering universities in the early 1960s had grown up in suburban comfort, watched the civil rights movement on television, and been politicised by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964. The organisation that most directly translated that political energy into opposition to the war was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had been founded in 1960 and adopted its defining statement — the Port Huron Statement, drafted by Tom Hayden — in 1962. SDS's critique of "the establishment" quickly became a critique of the war.
On 17 April 1965, SDS organised a march on Washington against the bombing of Vietnam. Around 25,000 people attended — a modest number by later standards but, at the time, the largest anti-war demonstration in American history. SDS membership grew from roughly 2,500 members in early 1965 to more than 100,000 by 1968.
The draft shaped the anti-war movement more than any other factor. Under the Selective Service system, men aged 18 to 26 were liable for conscription; between 1964 and 1973 approximately 2.2 million Americans were drafted into the armed forces, of whom more than half served in Vietnam. The system was administered by local draft boards, each of which had substantial discretion over who was called up.
| Feature | How it worked |
|---|---|
| Registration | All men aged 18 were required to register |
| Classifications | 1-A (available for service); 2-S (student deferment); 4-F (unfit); 1-O / 1-A-O (conscientious objector) |
| Student deferment | Full-time undergraduates could defer service until graduation — a provision that benefited middle-class white men disproportionately |
| Medical and psychiatric exemptions | Widely exploited by those with access to sympathetic doctors |
| Conscription lottery (from December 1969) | Birth dates drawn at random determined the order of call-up |
The social incidence of the draft was uneven. Because student deferments protected most middle-class white men at least through their early twenties, Black Americans and working-class white men were overrepresented in the ranks, particularly in the early years of the war. Around 23 per cent of combat deaths in 1965 were African American, at a time when African Americans made up around 11 per cent of the US population; the proportion declined somewhat in later years as the draft reached deeper into suburban America. Muhammad Ali made the point in characteristically direct terms: "No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger."
Draft resistance took several forms. Some men refused to register, risking criminal prosecution. Others registered and then publicly burned their draft cards — a federal offence after August 1965, when Congress made the destruction of a draft card a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Between 1964 and 1973 the federal government opened roughly 210,000 cases for draft-law violations and convicted around 9,000 men. A further approximately 30,000 to 50,000 young Americans crossed the border into Canada to avoid the draft; several thousand more went to Sweden or Mexico. At the other end of the political spectrum, more than 170,000 men applied successfully for conscientious objector status, serving in non-combat roles or in civilian alternative service.
On 28 April 1967 the world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused induction into the armed forces at a ceremony in Houston, Texas, citing his Muslim faith and his opposition to the war. He was immediately stripped of his title by boxing's governing bodies, had his passport confiscated, and was convicted on 20 June 1967 of refusing induction; he was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000. Ali remained free on appeal for the three and a half years that followed — years in which he was unable to fight and which covered what would have been the prime of his career. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction in Clay v. United States (June 1971) on a procedural point. His stance lost him his livelihood in the short term and made him, for a large section of the American public, one of the most recognisable voices against the war.
Among civil rights leaders, the war posed a difficult political choice. Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; open criticism of his Vietnam policy risked dividing the civil rights coalition and losing access to the White House. Some leaders — notably Roy Wilkins of the NAACP — therefore kept their public criticism muted. Others did not.
On 4 April 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an address at Riverside Church in New York City titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". The speech drew together three arguments against the war. First, the war consumed resources that should have funded the War on Poverty. Second, the war disproportionately drafted and killed poor young Black men. Third, and most sharply, a nation that sent "its sons and brothers and husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population" could not credibly claim to be defending freedom; King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".
The Riverside Church speech cost King substantial support. The Washington Post wrote that he had "diminished his usefulness"; The New York Times called the speech "facile" and "slander". The NAACP board voted 60–0 to disavow the speech. Johnson, who had been a political patron, is reported to have been enraged. The speech is now commonly read, in contrast, as one of the most prescient moral statements of the period.
SNCC, under Stokely Carmichael and, from May 1967, H. Rap Brown, moved into open opposition to the war. The Black Panther Party, founded in October 1966 (see the Black Power lesson), was anti-war from the start.
By the autumn of 1967 the anti-war movement had become a mass phenomenon. On 21 October 1967, approximately 100,000 people marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon in what became known as the March on the Pentagon. The image of a young woman placing a carnation in the barrel of a National Guardsman's rifle, photographed by Bernie Boston, became one of the iconic images of the movement.
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