Ibn Warraq thinks it might:
One of the enduring images of the era was the word “fuck” written on the foreheads of the protestors. This wasn’t done to simply offend: it was done to prevent their photos from appearing in newspapers, where they could be identified and expelled from college, and then drafted and sent into combat.
Even so, there were many, many polite, well-groomed people opposed to the war. Contrary to what Spiro Agnew said, the silent majority didnt feel threatened by a small country on the other side of the world; and smashing up such places wasn’t something they needed to do, yet they considered themselves fully patriotic and otherwise normal.
ETA: Nixon was elected because he clearly said in his TV ads that he’d end the war. (Not saying that he’d drag that out for as long as possible).
I agree with both your points. I graduated from High School in 1968 during a high point of US casualties. I did not go to college, got married and worked blue collar and began raising my daughter within about one year.
I argued against the war when I was in high school prior to 1968, having studied all I could on my own about Vietnam. A couple of my teachers opposed my views but we had some great knock down drag out debates during and after class as the war waged on.
So I was one of those normally dressed working class war protestors but I have never been sympathetic to the ‘SILENT MAJORITY’ that let the war happen with their silence.
And just so you know why I started this thread, it was my response to Ibn Warraq on a thread about another topic that has led to a major discussion about what happened during the presidential election of 1968.
My first response to Ibn Warraq’s suggestion was this:
So it was the fashion statement of a young non-conformist generation that dragged out the War in Vietnam?
Wow? Let’s see all that happened in the year from the First major anti-war protest to the election of one Richard M. Nixon.
October 1967 the first major anti-war demonstration with many badly dressed hippies takes place on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
November 1967 Eugene McCarthy, nicely dressed, announces bid for Presidency against LBJ the sitting President. Dr MLK annouces oppositon to the war.
January 1968 - TET Offensive Begins…
February - Nixon declares run for presidency. George Wallace announces Independent Party run for the presidency. Walter Cronkite questions war on 6:00 PM evenving news. Gallop Poll reports 50% now do not support LBJ’s Vietnam war policy. Lots of those are nicely or conventionally dressed folks I am sure. Kerner Commission releases report on Race Riots, “US is moving toward two societies” One Black One White separate and unequal.
March - J Edgar Hoover orders Civil rights and Black Militants to be neutralized. McCarthy nearly beats LBJ in New Hampshire. Senator Bobby Kennedy enters presidential primary; also nicely dressed. LBJ announces he will not run for re-election. This opens way for Hubert Humphrey his VP to enter the Democratic Primary.
April - Dr. Martin Luther King is assassinated. Tens of thousands of troops called up in a hundred US Cities to quell riots/protests. Not sure of what the rioters and protesters were wearing. Strudens take dean of Columbia hostage to protest the Draft. Yes, they were not dressed as Mr and Mrs Cleaver would prefer. Humphrey declares run on Democrat 8 year record including the War in Vietnam.
May - US and Vietnam agree to start peace talks. Kennedy wins Nebraska Primary. His first. McCarthy wins in Oregon. Nixon wins GOP race.
June - Kennedy wins California… Is ASSASSINATED at victory rally the next day.
August - Riots break out in Miami… Nixon calls the urgent need for LAW and ORDER. How the Sixties generation dressed during all this would seem to me to be quite trivial at best. NIXON/AGNEW win GOP nomination. Nixon appeals to the SILENT MAJORITY. Humphey wins nomination in Chicago. wallace campaign gains momentum by appealing to White Voters and returning schools to local control in appeal to those opposed to forced busing. But Wallace also picks General Curtis LeMay (bomb Vietnam back to the stone ages) and his campaign begins to falter.
October - LBJ announces peace talks are moving forward and halt to bombardment of North Vietnam.
WHAT WE KNOW NOW.. for less than a month:
Quote:
Now David Taylor reports on BBC that the latest set of declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls show that by the time of the Presidential election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence that Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks — or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had ‘blood on his hands’. It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war that he knew would derail his campaign. Nixon therefore set up a clandestine back-channel to the South Vietnamese involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris.
November - Nixon and Agnew are elected by 50,000 vote Majority. Wallace takes 5 states in the South.
I think Bobby Kennedy’s death and Martin Luther’s Death both paved the war to Nixon’s election more so than anything else.
It is nonsense to blame bell bottom courduroy, ragged blue jeans and long hair - some with flowers in it, as the reason the war was prolonged.
Don’t forget the erstwhile longhairs who went Clean for Gene.
I think you are missing the point **Ibn Warraq **was making.
It isn’t that the war was prolonged by the behavior and appearance of the Vietnam protesters, it is that a more credible message and appearance would have been more effective in turning the main stream view against the war. The general public was not easily able to relate to the protesters in ways that would sway their opinions.
Information for the general public at the time was limited to what was shown on the evening news hour and the protesters lacked credibility with the public in part due to appearance and actions. What the public saw was a hippy love fest rather than a coherent anti-war message and reasoning.
One need look no farther than last year’s Occupy Wall Street movement for an utter failure to connect the intended message with the mind and mood of the general public. That is if the OWS movement actually had a message other than “we can shit in your city parks until they have to be condemned.”
The majority of Americans never wanted to be at war in Vietnam in the first place. We were enmired before we knew it and the great controversy was not really about whether or not we should be there but how it would end and who would end it. If the anti-war movement hadn’t been all over the map and instead focused on some acceptable strategies for ending the war it’s possible the conclusion would have been sooner. But once Nixon was elected the timetable was under his control, he knew the public wanted it over with and he wouldn’t have done things any differently.
For the love of Christ, do you even know what the word “perhaps” mean?
Ibn is saying that, given the way they dress ed and acted, they weren’t going to accomplish anything because people confused the messenger with the message. Had the Civil Rights movement been led by the Black Panthers, they probably wouldn’t have accomplished what MLK did. It is generally necessary, but not sufficient, for the general public to be able to relate to protesters in order to “get” their message.
What a ridiculous pit thread, but not surprising, given the OP. Bring on the Wall of Text.
(A) If you have a record of me writing that Nixon made his famous “Silent Majority” speech prior to 1969 or that I have claimed that the phrase became popularly known prior to 1969, let the readers here see it. If you do not have my words, could you please cease to make this part of trying to defend your claim that the peace movement’s bad behaviour and dress was responsible for Nixon beating Humphrey and extending the war by several years.
(B) Are you saying that the “SILENT MAJORITY” did not exist until Nixon put those two exact words together on the night he addressed the nation to introduce them to his “Vietnamization” plan? If so, who was he talking to at the Miami GOP Convention in August the previous year?
So is it your position that when Nixon addressed the GOP convention in Miami in August 1968 giving his acceptance speech, and appealing to the ‘silent center’ that no one knew who in the hell he was appealling to or talking about.
Here’s what I wrote:
As I pointed out, Nixon had already mentioned 'the ‘silent’ Americans in the spring of 1968 in a radio address:
Had you heard that radio address and you were not a loud protestor, anti-war demonstrator, picketer; are you telling me that you would not have known that Nixon was speaking to you?
And here is the specific group or identifiable Americans that Nixon was appealing to and talking about in his August 1968 acceptance speech:
Again. Are you saying, that none of those identifiable Americans knew that Nixon was appealing to and talking about them?
(C) Move on. If you can, try to defend your position on some merits and facts and reason rather than picking out a typo where I was addressing another issue..
(D) See my response to (B). I can assure you that in 1968, my mother who voted for Nixon and was horrified that her 18 year old son would protest against the war being fought to stop the encroachment of Communism and Russian Aggression in the ‘real’ world, knew who Nixon was speaking to both in the Radio AAddress in the spring and in the acceptance speech in August.
She did not need to be labled ‘Silent Majority’ to know that she was part of what Nixon was speaking to.
(E) Here we are.
Maybe these two deserve each other.
I addressed what you are ranting about. I’ll bring it here when I have time. Don’t go away. In the meantime Do you agree with Ibn’s subsequent** fixation **on the fact that the phrase “Silent Majority” was not coined until 1969 and do you understand that I did not ever say that the phrase was coined prior to when it actually was? Ibn, requested we bring the discussion here, and I agree. Now you rant about that.
Why not enter the fray, and go by what people like me acutally write.
The better ‘perhaps’ is perhaps that without the anti-war protests being a combination of “Clean for Gene” student activists, civil rights acitivists, young blue-collar workers, and yes radicals, hippies, and celebrities, journalists like Walter Cronkite, and JUST PLAIN “NOT-SILENT-concerned-Americans” of every stripe, there would not have been much opposition to the war prior to the TET offensive and LBJ announcing that he would not seek re-election.
I see Ibn’s blanket criticism of the dress and and behavior of the Sixties Young idealistic activists for change generation as the acceptence of the establishment ‘silent majority’ generation that led America into LBJ’s Vietnam mess in the first place.
Ibn’s probably is a weak probably and I would like to see you or anyone else defend it, rather than talking about the exact date that the phrase “SILENT MAJORITY” was coined.
The Freakin’ “SILENT MAJORITY” existed in 1964, for god’s sake. It did not mysteriously come into existence on the night of Nixon’s Vietnamization speech.
Motherfuckers should be discussing this shit in Great Debates instead of taking up Pit space for Christ sake.
One thing I learned from watching* Les Miserables *is that French student radicals from the 1830’s were *much *snazzier dressers than American student radicals from the 1960s. They weren’t very effective, but at least they looked better failing.
Fuck that shit. GD is the province of The Man. All the moderators are over 30!!
Occupy this chat!
Steal this thread!
It is always amusing when conformists urge that those opposed to such conformity should conform to the norm, become exactly like them, and if they must seek change, obediently ‘work within the system’ that is determined to deny that change.
Bullshit. If you want to be different, then go - be different. Do whatever you want. But if you want to convince people of something, try not to alienate them too much. It’s not good strategy.
The premise is already dubious because not everyone who protested the war was a hippie, which is why the protests were in some theoretical vague sense threatening the social order. But what’s the hypothetical alternative reality? Everyone dons a suit and tie and votes for Humphrey? And he’d pull out sooner than Nixon?
Generally those who dissent against war are marginalized and painted by the powers that be as cowardly, treasonous, ignorant, naive, etc. I’m not sure how much being able to take off “and dress funny” off the list would really help. Just look at protests since then and their blunted effect.
The cry of the conformist throughout the ages.
It was Gandhi, not the Indian parliamentarians, who drove the British from India before they wished — and that fat fraud Churchill who sneered at Gandhi’s unconventional dress; it was Karl who led a singularly alienated life and who despised most of his followers, who created the groundwork for the political change that engulfed the next century — how many of the dutiful little centrists of the 19th century are today remembered ?; it was Luther who kicked in the rotten wood of the triumphal catholic edifice instead of toadying to the Church’s insistence on obedience to the power.
What success they had does not justify them: they would have been right to hold their beliefs whether those beliefs were right or wrong; but integrity trumps strategy every time — even for winning, insofar as that matters.
I would not have been a hippy; but I respect them for not knuckling to mindless, obsequious, agreeable convention. Certainly not simply to persuade the simple safe majority.