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).
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).
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.