Sure there was.
This entire conversation started because in the “In God We Trust” thread, Der Trihs made a point of claiming that if MLK had been “polite” he wouldn’t have been so successful.
I pointed out that part of his whole strategy was to make the Civil Rights movement appealing to most Americans and to have it set up so that they would generate sympathy. That’s one of the reason why you’ll notice the Civil Rights marchers under King were always dressed in their Sunday best and while they engaged in civil disobedience but always made sure that radicals weren’t able to hijack their movement or misrepresent it. They made a point of not allowing certain signs or banners at their events etc.
I then made an offhand remarks suggesting if the anti-War movement had behaved in such a way and not allowed themselves to be portrayed the way they came to be viewed than they would have been more successful whereas what they really did was allow Nixon to get elected and delayed the end of the war.
I pointed to a book by professor Kim McQuaid called The Anxious Years. chronicling the 60s and early 70s in America where he spends a good time goring various sacred cows. http://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Years-America-Vietnam-Watergate-Era/dp/0465003893/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365360491&sr=1-5&keywords=The+Anxious+Years
One of the major points of his book was detailing how the anti-War movement learned the wrong lessons from the Civil Rights movement and as a result turned off most Americans in ways that the Civil Rights movement didn’t.
There were a variety of reasons for this, but the main one from which the others flowed is that the Civil Rights movement was led by and represented people fighting to get accepted by and become a part of the mainstream while the anti-War movement with few exceptions was led by and represented by people who were from the mainstream and who wanted to break away.
To be blunt I wasn’t so much talking about the way the people were dressed(which certainly hurt) but behavior like having at every major rally people waving the flag of the NLF(Viet Cong) and having as one of their more popular chants “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!”, openly cheering for the victory of the people America was fighting against.
In fact at the boarding school school I went to, 20 years before, in 1969, when an Army Chaplain came to speak at the chapel, several(though not a majority) of students hung NLF(Viet Cong) flags out their windows.
Now, can anyone imagine the reaction in present day America to Iraq War protesters if they’d carried aloft pictures of Saddam Hussein or if one of their popular chants was “Osama, Osama, victory for Al-Quaeda!”.
You’re correct that they weren’t representative of all the anti-war protesters and not all of them were dress like hippies or long-hairs(though be careful about pictures from back then because what’s considered long-hair back then was dramatically different from now).
Anyway McQuaid makes several points.
A)For better or worse, the clash between protester and the Chicago Police during the 1968 Democratic convention was blamed on the protesters and had they been smarter and led by someone as image-conscious as MLK it would have been avoided.
B)It’s hard to dispute Mike Royko’s argument that the chaos surrounding the Democratic convention was part of the reason Nixon managed to narrowly defeat Humphrey.
C)Starting in the late 1950s through the 1960s every year approval ratings for the Civil Rights movement and MLK went up as support for Jim Crow plummeted. Martin Luther King went from being seen as a dangerous radical who scared Bobby Kennedy so bad he had him bugged to a national hero who’s birthday is now a major holiday.
D)Polls repeatedly showed that the anti-War movement was wildly unpopular due to their behavior, how they presented themselves, how they allowed some radicals to portray them, and how they allowed the media to portray them in stark contrast to how the Civil Rights movement very much understood the concept of “message discipline” and how they were to be portrayed.
E)Polls also showed that even people who should have been their strongest supporters hated them. McQuaid points to a key poll which showed that in 1968 even most Americans who agreed with the statement that the United States should “immediately and completely withdraw from Vietnam” “strongly disapproved” of the anti-War protesters. When even the people who agree with you don’t like you, you’ve very badly fucked up.
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.
