# Would better dressed/behaved '60s War Protestors have shortened the War? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 7, 2013, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052 "2013-04-07T03:26:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2013, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/41 "2013-04-07T22:12:41Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > As someone who held a 2S (student) deferment during the Vietnam War (1969-1973) and had a low lottery number, this wasn’t a major factor. Not very many college kids got drafted. The brunt was on those who couldn’t afford to go (or didn’t have scholarships). **PastTense** has it right. > > My lottery number was so low that if I hadn’t had a student deferment in 1969 I would have been drafted. By the time I graduated in 1973 and became 1A the call-ups had decreased so much that I was at no risk. I think what Mace meant was that when they started drafting college kids that inspired far more opposition to the war because that dramatically raised the stakes for most college students. I certainly think there is a large amount of truth in that. Certainly there probably would have been far more opposition to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan if the UK and the US started drafting soldiers instead of using strictly volunteers. Remember, 40% of all draft age people in the Vietnam era(1965-1973) served in the US military(admittedly most not in Vietnam). ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2013, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/42 "2013-04-07T22:15:47Z")
Of course, Walter Cronkite’s famous article in 1968 didn’t help. I don’t think we can quite related to a Newscaster today who had as much influence as Cronkite had in his day. Anyway, I think we’re all reaching if we think there was one thing that turned the American public against the war. It was long, drawn out and the country was being torn apart (by the war and many other issues). ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2013, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/43 "2013-04-07T22:21:23Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > I think what Mace meant was that when they started drafting college kids that inspired far more opposition to the war because that dramatically raised the stakes for most college students. > > I certainly think there is a large amount of truth in that. Did you read my post? They weren’t drafting many college students during most of the war, because we had 2S deferments. In fact student protesters were sometimes dismissed as elitists because they weren’t at any real risk from the draft. The brunt of the draft fell on working-class kids who didn’t or couldn’t go to college. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2013, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/44 "2013-04-07T22:48:54Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Did you read my post? They weren’t drafting many college students during most of the war, because we had 2S deferments. In fact student protesters were sometimes dismissed as elitists because they weren’t at any real risk from the draft. The brunt of the draft fell on working-class kids who didn’t or couldn’t go to college. I’m aware that most of the people drafted were working-class and most of the people “perceived” as “draft-dodgers” were well-off college students(working class people tended to resist by not registering for selective service rather than heading to Canada). I was under the impression that the draft lotteries starting in 1969 did apply to college students as well. Was I wrong? ---
**Author:** ![NotfooledbyW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f475e1/32.png) [@NotfooledbyW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NotfooledbyW)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2013, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/45 "2013-04-08T02:48:05Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Had the protestors been better at winning over the American public, they’d have been more successful like the Civil Rights movement which faced vastly more hardships. The SDS was tightly invovled in the Civil Rights movement in the early Sixties. Todd Gitlin was President and founding member of SDS when Civil Rights was one of the main issues that coincided roughly to Vietnam moving from the “advisers” stage under Kennedy to a violent and deadly ground war and bombing campaign killing and maiming Vietnamese and Americans alike. For what? After Gitlin’s term in 1963 and 1964, Paul Potter became President. See the following two cites. In 1965, the ourward radicallism had not taken hold during an early Vietnam War Protest. So my question to you is what escalated the anti-war radicalism to the confrontation in 1968 in Chicago? The non-radical protests of 1965 saw the war they were protesting be escalated every year from that point on. Was Paul Potter’s argument that the brutality manifested in Vietnam was connected to the brutality of American society and that in order to stop the war we had to change the system, so off base in the passion of the moment to stop this hideous war? Could you envision in the (1965) moment that actually turning back the Industrial Military Complex, tying Vietnam to Cold War threats and seeing the war waste so much resources needed for continuing work against poverty and for civil rights etc, could be accomplished by status quo polictics… ? I just can’t see the logic that brings you to your conclusion that the war protest shoulda coulda, put on their Sunday Best and tried to appeal to Archie Bunker that the war needed to be stopped. Archie Bunker is the problem here isn’t he? He is not some ‘silent saint’ in my view. > [@](#): > > MR. WATTENBERG: When and why did the conservatives come to take on the mantle of the defenders of the common culture? > > MR. GITLIN: It’s a tragedy of the late '60s, and I say it’s a tragedy rather than a crime, because it’s a case of something that was magnificent, namely, the civil rights movement, reaching a point at which a significant number of its partisans felt that they had to accentuate what differentiated blacks from the rest of America. > > Now,that need not have led to disaster had it not been, in my view, for the Vietnam war, which distracted Johnson from the great work of the Great Society, and the collapse of what you could call a sort of ecumenical liberalism, which was sometimes represented by Johnson, or could have been represented by Bobby Kennedy. That collapsed, and the wars between liberals and radicals helped destroy both of them as political forces. > [PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "A Conversation with Todd Gitlin"](http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript235.html) > [@](#): > > A Student Organizer Recalls an Antiwar Protest > > Todd Gitlin was a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which by the late 1960s was the largest radical student organization in the country. Originally concerned with the problem of poverty and racism in the United States, SDS was one of the first student groups to take an anti-war stance. Here Gitlin recalls his impressions of an anti-Vietnam War protest held in Washington on April 17, 1965, the largest demonstration against the war to that point. > We scheduled the (antiwar) demonstration for April 17, 1965 in Washington D.C., but nobody thought it would be very large. SDS was still a tiny organization with maybe two thousand members and Vietnam was not very much on anybody’s horizon… > > So when I got on a bus in Ann Arbor on April 16, I felt I would be happy to see five thousand people. When we rolled in Washington I remember seeing great flocks of buses parked along the mall, scores of them. It was a sunrise experience and it was staggering. I thought, we’re in business, we’re rolling. The antiwar movement is going to be really substantial. It will be a real contest. We had maybe twenty-five thousand people and everything about it felt good. > > It was a beautiful day and if you look at pictures of the crowds you’d probably be surprised by how straight everyone looks. People are sitting on the grass around the Washington Monument wearing sports jackets and dresses. It looked like a prom. We had music by Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, and Phil Ochs. Most people thought the best speech was given by Paul Potter, then the president of SDS. \*\*His argument was that the brutality manifested in Vietnam was connected to the brutality of American society and that in order to stop the war we had to change the system. \*\* That was the key phrase. Some people thought it was huge mistake, a radical deepening of what was at stake, but it was a momentous speech and what most resonated with people was the very clear call to fortitude and commitment…. > > [A Student Organizer Recalls an Antiwar Protest · SHEC: Resources for Teachers](http://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/978) ---
**Author:** ![BigAppleBucky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigapplebucky/32/178_2.png) [@BigAppleBucky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigAppleBucky)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2013, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/46 "2013-04-08T16:24:44Z")
“Clean for Gene” (McCarthy) was a motto for anti-war campaigners in 1968. Once the events of Chicago happened and it became abundantly clear the democratic process did not work, no one gave a damn about appearances any more. ---
**Author:** ![NotfooledbyW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f475e1/32.png) [@NotfooledbyW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NotfooledbyW)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2013, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/47 "2013-04-09T03:29:30Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Sure there was. > F)He points to Todd Gitlin, the former President of SDS and organizer of the first protests agains the Vietnam War, who later became a professor at UCLA, who made some rather ruthless but necessary critiques of the movement. **Gitlin pointed out how while the Civil Rights movements approval ratings went up during the 1950s and the 1960s, from 1968 onwards every year polls showed approval for the war going down while disapproval for the anti-war protestors went up**. > > And yes, I think, as does both McQuaid and Gitlin, had the anti-War protestors followed the example of Martin Luther King, at a time when 350 Americans were being sent home in boxes every week they could have gotten the American public to force the war to come to a close much quicker rather than allowing Nixon to use them in his famous “Silent Majority” speech to rally the American public for the war. Gitlin was ‘the older generation’ by 1967, when the counter-culture radicals took over the SDS and the organized anti-war movement. The radicals that took over SDS were opposed to all authority including the way Gitlen may have preferred to procede. Events. music and forces, drugs, and the war and the riots and all that happened from 1965 to 1968 took over the anti-war protests that no one could control. In all this discussion, I still wonder why the 'silent majority’of the early Sixties escapes criticism for their slow momentum to coming out to bother to tell a pollster that they were against the war. In 1965 Gitllin’s SDS was linked to the Civil Rights sit-ins and protests… yes, dressed in Sunday best or normal street clothes. Where were the silent Americans in 1965 as the war was being escalated? Could you find where Gitlen say he thinks the war would have been shortened if the radicals had not taken over the SDS. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/48 "2013-04-10T15:09:33Z")
Having nicer-dressed protestors would have made no difference. What really began the end of the war was the realization that it was bankrupting the USA. Early in the war, Lyndon Johnson’s Sec. of the Treasury (Henry Fowler) warned Johnson that the reckless spending would cause the value of the US$ to drop-and he as right. By 1968, the sheer volume of “eurodollars” was causing havoc in the US credit markets-even a nut like Johnson began to understand the disaster taking place. I think Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek re-election hammered home the public perception of the war (as a a complete disaster). ---
**Author:** ![NotfooledbyW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f475e1/32.png) [@NotfooledbyW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NotfooledbyW)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2013, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/49 "2013-04-10T17:07:50Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Having nicer-dressed protestors would have made no difference. What really began the end of the war was the realization that it was bankrupting the USA. Early in the war, Lyndon Johnson’s Sec. of the Treasury (Henry Fowler) warned Johnson that the reckless spending would cause the value of the US$ to drop-and he as right. By 1968, the sheer volume of “eurodollars” was causing havoc in the US credit markets-even a nut like Johnson began to understand the disaster taking place. > > I think Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek re-election hammered home the public perception of the war (as a a complete disaster). You are correct that the cost of fighting the war in Vietnam, with more urgency after the TET offensive, was the major reason both LBJ and Nixon had increasing motivation to reduce the costs of propping up the South by removing troops as fast as possible. Yet had Humphrey won in 1968, the same pace of ending the would have remains what it turned out to be under Nixon. Humphrey was the Democratic Party establishment candidate that was in no position or mood to adminster a faster paced withdrawal of US troops which would have amounted to a quicker fall of Saigon to the forces from Hanoi. Anti-war protests up to that time in November 1968 were angrily opposed to the pro-war/ anti-Globalistic-Communism liberals in the Democratic Party as well as on the right. Very few older and ‘knowing-better’ Democrats in Congress were going to be the ones that surrendered to the Communists by quitting the war to satisfy college kid demonstrators whether they behaved as they did through 1965 when student activism joined forces with the civil rights movement or whether those students continued to protest the war dressed in their Sunday Best. The issue that competed against pulling troops out based upon cost, in the late Sixties and early seventies, was still the need to confront the spread of Chinese and Soviet Communism. ---
**Author:** ![NotfooledbyW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f475e1/32.png) [@NotfooledbyW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NotfooledbyW)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2013, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/50 "2013-04-13T00:11:57Z")
See Post #47. I was hoping to see Ibn Warraq’s source that Todd Gitlin said anything supportive of this: “had the anti-war protestors followed the example of Martin Luther King, at a time when 350 Americans were being sent home in boxes every week they could have gotten the American public to force the war to come to a close much quicker rather than allowing Nixon to use them in his famous “Silent Majority” speech to rally the American public for the war.” ---
**Author:** ![NotfooledbyW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f475e1/32.png) [@NotfooledbyW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NotfooledbyW)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2013, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052/51 "2013-04-20T10:26:39Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Having nicer-dressed protestors would have made no difference. What really began the end of the war was the realization that it was bankrupting the USA. Early in the war, Lyndon Johnson’s Sec. of the Treasury (Henry Fowler) warned Johnson that the reckless spending would cause the value of the US$ to drop-and he as right. By 1968, the sheer volume of “eurodollars” was causing havoc in the US credit markets-even a nut like Johnson began to understand the disaster taking place. > I think Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek re-election hammered home the public perception of the war (as a a complete disaster). Of course I agree with you that the protest movement’s better dress and better civil behavior could have shortened the war. And I believe the cost in dollars was the driver in getting Law and Order & Southern Stategy Nixon to get out at the pace that he actually did. The Peace Movement I recall chanted Make Love not War… and a small percentage of the entire vast array of anti-war protesters were not radicals and subversives in favor of using violence to end the violence and atrocity against the people of Vietnam. Nixon linked the entire anti-war movement to extremists in the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-war movement and it was successful for him because the ‘silent white majority’ had no intellectual curiosityor moral imperative to understand the war or the civil rights movement at the time. Silent Majorities are generally fear and ignorance driven. The only white churches opposed to the war were the Unitarian/Universalists and the Quakers and of course Amish etc. Black Churches drove the Civil Rights Movement and eventually joined the anti-war movement under Dr MLK’s leadership. The moral backing of Dr King and the black churches against the war made no difference. All the Silent Majority saw was the Black Panthers and Weathermen as representing the un-American protest against the war in Vietnam. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-better-dressed-behaved-60s-war-protestors-have-shortened-the-war/655052.md?page=2)