Don’t overlook that the push to end the draft, was much focussed on the fact that white kids were getting excused by going to college, while black kids were getting sent to die.
George Bush’s kid dodging the draft would have looked very bad, so he went, but somehow found himself serving in Texas, go figure!
Once these inequities were illuminated, those defending the draft had very little to say. The writing was on the wall.
I was active in the anti war movement. I think the disorderly behavior of many protesters angered the voters and provoked many of them to vote for hawks who prolonged the war.
I think demonstrations rarely have a positive effect. What matters is who wins on election day.
He joined the National Guard.
This is exactly my thought as well. To a lot of folks, it looked like rich spoiled white hippie kids were daring to protest against the country that everybody should support. Those people definitely voted for hawks, both R and D.
Very true. I would say, however, that a lot of vets, myself included, did feel that the demonstrations were directed at us rather than at the war and the government. It was a bad feeling, I can tell you, to feel that you were hated by your fellow countrymen simply because you did what was asked of you. I blame the messaging for that, and the fact that what news we got over there was filtered through government agencies.
It was rare certainly and almost a UL, but-
A couple of vets confirmed it happened. So, not quite a UL, but much more rare than the meme would have you believe.
Part of that perception, of course, was due to racist assumptions on the part of media outlets and consumers that rich white kids were by default the face of the antiwar movement and its principal constituents. Black American public figures and protestors played a much larger role than is generally remembered today.
How many people remember the Jackson State killings of Black student protestors, as opposed to the far better-known Kent State killings of non-Black ones?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that it focused the attention of some politicians on the issue to the point where somebody turned it into a campaign for the presidency and then voters weighed it.
Correct, and for a war the officials knew from the start was not really our business, and also an exercise in futility.
According to this, the number of draftees dropped by over a third every year past 1969. The draft may have ended in 1973, but even in 1971 it was down below pre-Vietnam War levels. That, IMHO, did more than anything else to end the antiwar movement.
Boris Johnson? LBJ didn’t resign.
I have no idea why I wrote ‘resignation’.
It demonstrated that the US public, while it would support a draft for a genuinely existential threat like World War Two and would grudgingly tolerate a peacetime draft to man the USA’s commitments to N.A.T.O., would NOT support a draft for a quasi-imperial war to bolster the USA’s geopolitical strategic position. The hopelessness of ever having a draft for such adventures as the USA’s occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq led to the modern reliance on a army of professional volunteers. Which is the modern analogy to how ancient Rome moved away from having a citizen army man the borders of a city-state to having professional legionnaires man the frontiers of an empire; an analogy which is rather disturbing if you’ve ever read “Are We Rome?” by Cullen Murphy.
I blame nuclear weapons and “duck and cover” for producing the first generation of American youth who grew up with the fear of annihilation; and who were as a result natural pacifists who saw war and militarism as insane, to a degree their WW2 elders could scarcely imagine.
I’m glad Kimstu brought up what happened at Jackson State.
I can’t really reach a conclusion about what was “achieved” by the protests but am glad they occurred nonetheless. Rightly or wrongly, a group felt strongly enough to speak out about perceived injustice and that’s a fine old American, or even global, tradition that I appreciate.
People comfortable in their authority will never get that.
Guess I should head over to the Gaza thread now.
Interesting parallels to the recent “defund the police” sloganeering.
I was listening to a political science type who had done a study of protests around the world. His basic conclusion is that they take a long time to move the needle. Civil rights boycotts and marches went on for years, Vietnam protests went on for years, anti-Apartheid protests went on for years, etc. That doesn’t mean they aren’t effective, just that trying to change national policy in a few weeks is like trying to turn around a supertanker in a few feet.
I had heard that the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing at UW-Madison ended student protests. Killing someone to protest war didn’t go over too well.
Though I was only 9 at the time; my memory may be a little off.