Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ man makes the rules and he don’t make them for us—he don’t make them for poor folk, he don’t make them for dissenters, he don’t make them for blacks—he makes them for the man.”⁴³ Carl Davidson, a Freedom Summer volunteer and student leader, put it more succinctly—“I learned it from the Ku Klux Klan and the Mississippi Highway Patrol, that you needed revolution, and that there wasn’t any other way.”⁴⁴

      The radicalizing experience of civil rights work at the grass-roots level would help shape responses to the Vietnam War within organizations such as SNCC, CORE and the MFDP. Writing in the Student Voice in August 1965, Howard Zinn—one of SNCC’s “adult advisors”—encouraged the organization to oppose the war in Vietnam. Movement people, he said, were in the best position to understand America’s immoral actions in Southeast Asia, not from any expert knowledge of foreign policy, but because they knew so much about America. Zinn explained that “they understand just how much hypocrisy is wrapped up in our claim to stand for ‘the free world.’ … Events in Vietnam become easier to understand in the light of recent experience in the South.”⁴⁵ In late 1965, Zinn eloquently argued that opposition to the Vietnam War among black civil rights activists in the American South did not result from a simple application of leftist ideology. Rather, it came “from the cotton fields, the country roads, the jails of the Deep South, where these young people have spent much of their time.” In other words, antiwar sentiment flowed, at least in part, from the organizing experience itself. As Bob Moses put it, “our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America.”⁴⁶ When SNCC publicly opposed the war in January 1966, it placed its policy within the context of its own experience of America during the previous five years—“our work, particularly in the South, taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens.”⁴⁷

      Although the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam began in May 1959, the war did not emerge as an important national issue until 1965. At the end of Johnson’s first year in office, America’s military commitment to Vietnam accounted for just 23,000 troops, but within twelve months it had risen to 181,000. Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was launched in February 1965; this made the war a major political issue, and it also energized a domestic peace movement that had been declining in strength since the 1963 signing of the nuclear test ban treaty. In the same month that the bombing began, the first teach-in on the war was held at the University of Michigan. Within two months hundreds more had occurred, including one at Berkeley that involved 30,000 people and lasted for 36 hours. The teach-ins consisted of lectures, debates, and discussion groups on the war, and served to legitimize dissent. As Charles DeBenedetti has stated, “the vacuum of understanding which they exposed created a market for information,” and this need was met by a cadre of academic experts who challenged national policy and established an alternative source of information.⁴⁸

      Any story of the antiwar movement of the 1960s must give some consideration to the emergence and development of the New Left. Not only was it a key participant in the emergent antiwar sentiment of the 1960s, but it also played an important role in forging links between the various social movements of the decade. Always an assorted coalition of different groups, and thus difficult to define, the New Left’s major characteristics were its campus base, its rejection of anticommunism, its high degree of decentralization, its advocacy of participatory democracy, and its emphasis on a politics of authenticity. As the decade progressed, the New Left changed—morphing from a reformist movement inspired by John Kennedy’s call to service into an association of various radical groups that embraced elements of an anti-American worldview and often espoused competing versions of Marxist-Leninism. By the mid-1960s the New Left had been involved in a number of progressive causes—including civil rights, anti-poverty, and campus reform (for example, the Free Speech movement had erupted on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1964). Increasingly, though, student activism would center on efforts to end American involvement in the Vietnam War.⁴⁹

      The most important New Left organization was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Formed in 1960 as the renamed Student League for Industrial Democracy, in 1962 it published the Port Huron Statement, a widely influential and much read manifesto for the generation of 1960s student activists. It emphasized participatory democracy and “values,” especially the need for spiritual meaning in modern society, as well as more traditional demands for civil rights, social justice, and an end to militarism. During its early years, SDS focused on the struggle for black rights and also attempted to organize an “interracial movement of the poor” through a program of community organization modeled on SNCC-style activism, known as the Economic and Research Action Project (ERAP). As Vietnam began to emerge as a national issue, however, SDS turned its attention to events in Southeast Asia.⁵⁰

      In December 1964, SDS decided to hold an antiwar march in Washington, D.C., the following April.⁵¹ The escalation of the war during early 1965 fueled interest in the prospective action, and SDS responded by hiring more staff to deal with the administrative burdens of staging what would be the first significant national antiwar demonstration. Endorsements were received from James Farmer, Staughton Lynd, Harvard historian and SANE leader H. Stuart Hughes, Berkeley Free Speech icon Mario Savio, veteran pacifist A. J. Muste, and Howard Zinn, among others.⁵² The SDS decision to adopt a nonexclusionary approach to antiwar activity, however, produced controversy and dissent. The official call stated that “we urge the participation of all those who agree with us that the war in Vietnam injures both Vietnamese and Americans and should be stopped.”

      Antiwar liberals did not take kindly to the idea that they might be marching alongside communists.⁵³ In New York, a few days before the march, Stuart Hughes, A. J. Muste, socialist Norman Thomas, and Bayard Rustin warned people away from the event because of its alleged communist taint. The group declared that they were concerned about Vietnam, but believed in “the need for an independent peace movement, not committed to any form of totalitarianism or drawing inspiration from the foreign policy of any government.”⁵⁴ A New York Post editorial added fuel to the fire when it claimed that “on the eve of this weekend’s ‘peace march’ … several leaders of the peace movement have taken clear note of attempts to convert the event into a pro-Communist production.”⁵⁵ Hughes and Thomas subsequently apologized to SDS for their involvement in this unsavory episode, although the issue of nonexclusion (or anti-anticommunism) would continue to be debated furiously within the peace movement.⁵⁶

      April 17, 1965 was “one of those flawless Washington spring days,” and it augured a successful march. Perhaps as many as 25,000 people attended, and they came from all over the country. African Americans were particularly well represented—partly the result of “conscious effort” by the SDS to get a black turnout.⁵⁷ SNCC’s Bob Moses was a featured speaker, and he compared the killing in Vietnam to the killing in Mississippi. He told the crowd to ask themselves and their government whether they had the “right to plot and kill and murder in defense of the society you value?”⁵⁸ Moses was perhaps the SNCC member most active in the early antiwar movement, and he frequently linked his opposition to the war with his own experiences in the Deep South. For example, he had told the audience at a Berkeley teach-in that “the South has got to be a looking glass, not a lightning rod. You’ve got to learn from the South if you’re going to do anything about this country in relation to Vietnam.”⁵⁹ The influence of the civil rights movement on the anti-Vietnam War movement, and its desire to generate black support for peace actions, were evident from the start.

      SDS president Paul Potter closed the rally with a fiery speech that placed the Vietnam War firmly within a wider context, and called for the building of a multi-issue movement for progressive change in the United States. Potter asked, “what kind of system is it that justifies the United States … seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose?” He continued, “what kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves millions upon millions of people … excluded from the … promise СКАЧАТЬ