vietnam war protest and the music of the 1960s

Vietnam war protests and the antiwar music of the 1960’s
Rachel Allison
AP us history due 12/12/14

The Vietnam War had a huge impact on the American people that will not soon be forgotten. During this period of time America was facing many serious challenges all at once. Americans were at war fighting for freedom and democracy because of the fear of the domino effect; a theory that a communist victory in one country would lead to a chain reaction of communist takeovers in neighboring countries. It was the young
Americans who stood up to voice their opinions concerning this war and created an antiwar culture whose ideology has continued to have a profound impact on American society up to the present day. Due to the opposition towards Vietnam War, there were a number of demonstrations, particularly among students, calling for the US to end its involvement in Vietnam between 1963­1965. Student for Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first national antiwar demonstration in Washington, which consisted of
20,000 people. The Vietnam war the first war with a strong presence of antiwar culture and certainly was not the last. Vietnam was the beginning of a new era of young people in America
Youth Protest of the Vietnam War In 1961 president Kennedy decided to send
American troops to Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism and to show the United
States' strength of resolve. At the time he did not know the turmoil he would bring to his
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own country. The United States was split between those who believed it was our job to get involved in Vietnam and those who thought it was none of our business. As the war continued people's opinions intensified, especially student's. Youth protests during the
1960's changed the way many Americans viewed the Vietnam War. In the early 1960's protests first became a way of change for the civil rights movement. Then as men started going off to war it became a way of displaying activism. Liberal cities with big universities were the first to experience the antiwar movement. The cities of Ann Arbor,
Bloomington, Chicago, East Lansing, Lawrence, Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis saw the movement in full effect. Some people believed that the protesters were a disgrace for betraying their own country (Dudley 83). "Teach­ins" became a way of educating students about what was really happening in Vietnam. Speeches, songs, discussions, and seminars helped get the students involved at the "teach­ins". After the first "teach in" occurred on March 24, 1965, at the University of Michigan, hundreds more started taking place within a few weeks. All the administration could do was to send for government officials called "truth teams". When that did not work, the government realized they should not reveal their policies to the public (Dougan and
Weiss 87­88)
The students from the University of California at Berkely felt like a minority when no one took them seriously at their campus demonstration in September 1965 because of their long hair and ragged clothes (Kent 74). Many youth joined organizations that were against the war. They would go to protests such as the one that took place on
April 17, 1965. The 20,000 protesters that were present in Washington that day showed

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how the peace movement was growing. A few days later, thirty­three antiwar organizations came together to form the National Coordinating Committee To End the
War in Vietnam. Another group, Vietnam Day Committee, attempted to stop troop trains but were unsuccessful. Both groups joined together to lead demonstrations in ninety­three cities, in what was called the "International Days of Protest." The
"International Days of Protest" that took place on October 15 and 16 in 1965 included
100,000 activists that participated not only in the cities but on college campuses as well.
The way of protest in each of these places varied. In Madison, eleven people were arrested when they tried to make a citizen's arrest on a commander of a local air force base by accusing him of "war crimes." At a University of Colorado football game, students flashed antiwar slogans to the fans at halftime. Students in Michigan held a 48 hour peace vigil and also picketed the local draft board. New York had a parade in which 20,000 people were involved in and a "speak out" that 300 people attended at
New York's arms induction center. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was one of the best known and largest organizations. With Tom Hayden, from the University of Michigan, as their president and spokesman, many people who were activists in or out of the group were inspired.
SDS had a huge role in the 60’s protest movement and changed greatly over time eventually leading to their downfall. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical youth group established in the United States in 1959, developed out of the youth branch of an older socialist educational organization, the League for Industrial

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Democracy. The newly formed SDS held its first organizational meeting in 1960 at Ann
Arbor, Michigan, where Robert Alan Haber was elected president.
The political manifesto for SDS, the Port Huron Statement, was written for the most part by Tom Hayden, a twenty­two­year­old former editor of the student newspaper at the University of Michigan. The document, adopted in 1962 by the sixty or so founding members of SDS, criticized the American political system for failing to achieve international peace or to effectively address a bunch of social ills, including racism, materialism, militarism, poverty, and exploitation. The Port Huron Statement called for a fully "participatory democracy," which would empower citizens to share in the social decisions that directly affected their lives and well­being. It was the founders' intense, if somewhat niave, belief that a nonviolent youth movement could transform
U.S. society into a model political system in which the people, rather than just the social elite, would control social policy. At first SDS focused its efforts on helping to promote the civil rights movement and efforts to improve conditions in urban ghettoes. In April of 1965, SDS organized a national march on Washington, D.C., and from that point on the movement grew increasingly aggresive, especially in its opposition to the Vietnam War, using tactics like rowdy (though not violent) demonstrations and occupation of administration buildings on college campuses.(Rudd 67­78) After 1965, SDS became known primarily for its leading role in the youth movement against the Vietnam War.

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SDS was part of a more general youth movement aimed at correcting social injustice in the United States. The civil rights movement that led to the formation of SDS also triggered another political youth movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement
(FSM), led by a junior philosophy major named Mario Savio. Savio urged his generation to fight against the educational­corporate machine, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick to heart that . . . you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."(savio)
The Free Speech Movement arose as a reaction against heavy­handed attempts by Berkeley officials, under pressure by local conservatives, to prevent students from collecting donations and recruiting other students for work in the civil rights movement in the segregated South. Official overreaction to mild student resistance led to massive sit­ins and occupation of the university administration building.(Dudley 110) The arrest of over five hundred demonstrators led to several weeks of even more massive demonstrations and a strike by nearly 70 percent of the Berkeley student body.
The "countercultural" youth movement that SDS and the Free Speech Movement were such a prominent part of was driven by a radical minority of liberal­arts majors and graduate students attending some of the country's most elite educational institutions.
This campus political awakening, dubbed the "New Left," developed around a core of
"red­diaper babies," the children of parents who were themselves politically active and who had participated in progressive, social movements of the 1930s. It was, after all,

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the youth branch of a socialist organization that had evolved into SDS, and most of
SDS's early recruits were red­diaper babies.
The somewhat undecide idealism and beliefs of the early SDS is captured in the ringing declarations of the Port Huron Statement: "We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege or circumstances, with power rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity." The Port Huron Statement also decried "the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry. . . . [and] the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb," which drove the younger generation "as individuals to take responsibility for encounter and resolution."
The campus activism lead by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and SDS's
Port Huron Statement soon spread to colleges and universities all over the United
States. Even students who never joined SDS heeded the call to action embodied in the
Port Huron Statement and other SDS manifestos. SDS also used a small grant from the
United AutoWorkers union to initiate a campaign for grassroots political awakening in working­class neighborhoods. In Hayden's and Savio's words, thousands of students found the vision of a just society that motivated their resistance to what they saw as the impersonality, insensitivity, and rigidity of America's educational institutions and of the society those institutions served.
Student protesters targeted many perceived injustices, focusing f first on loosening up the university culture itself. They demonstrated against racial

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discrimination in sororities and fraternities, dress codes, course requirements, and the grading system.(kent 255) They especially protested against university research that benefited the military­industrial complex.
When in January of 1966 LBJ's administration announced it would end automatic student deferments from the draft, student anger over the escalation of the war in
Vietnam became more personal and intense. SDS, as a leader of the New Left student movement, seized on antiwar sentiment to kindle a mass student movement. By the end of 1966, over three hundred new SDS chapters had been formed on campuses across the country.
The most popular of SDS's rallying cries, "Make Love­­Not War!" became the motto for the antiwar movement. (rudd 213) SDS organized draft­card burnings and disruptions of ROTC classes. Campus recruiters for the military were harassed by large groups of student protesters. A massive SDS­created demonstration in New York's
Central Park, the Spring Mobilization to end the War in Vietnam (1969), drew half a million antiwar protesters. Chanting, "Burn cards, not people," and "Hell, no we won't go!" hundreds of young men threw their draft cards into a large bonfire.(Rudd 218)
In 1968, about forty thousand students on nearly a hundred campuses across the country demonstrated against the Vietnam War and against racism.(Dudley 150)
Protest against one often morphed into protest against the other, as at Columbia
University, where an antiracist demonstration developed into a huge protest against the war and against military research at the university.(Kent 200) The administration

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building and other campus buildings were occupied by nearly a thousand angry students, who set up barricades and established "revolutionary communes" behind the barricades.(Rudd 260) When the police stormed the buildings and brutalized the occupying students, the moderate majority of students at Columbia joined in a boycott of classes that shut down the university.
During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Mayor Daley's police attacked five thousand antiwar demonstrators in what investigators would later term a "police riot." Unfortunately, worse violence was in the future. The most shocking incident was the unprovoked shooting by Ohio National Guardsmen of four students at
Kent State University on 4 May 1970. Also in May, Mississippi state highway patrolmen investigating a student protest fired into a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, killing two students and wounding eleven.(Dougan 120) These two incidents led to even more protests on college campuses, though by the time school resumed in the fall, the wave of protests had pretty much burned itself out.
As student activism subsided on the nation's college campuses, SDS itself began to fall victim to its own internal divisions. Within the SDS organization, highly disciplined factions of hard­line followers of the revolutionary philosophies of Mao Zedong and Che
Guevara began to take over the movement.(Rudd 315) By 1969 these factions were already in evidence. The most notorious of them was the Weather Underground, or
Weathermen, which went underground to employ terrorist violence, thus providing the

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justification the FBI and other government agencies wanted to crack down on the New
Left.
Other SDS factions withdrew from the national organization to focus their efforts on the Third World or on the now radicalized Black Power movement. As the Vietnam
War began to enter its closing stages, SDS lost much of its rationale for national activism, and by the mid­1970s the organization was essentially dead.(Rudd 330)
Another large part of the counterculture and antiwar protests was the music coming out during the time we all know music can definitely set the mood for a time in history and effect that history. The music of the 1960’s was particularly defining to the youth of this time. Music has always kept company with American wars. During the
Revolutionary War, “Yankee Doodle” and many other songs were sung to keep spirits alive during dark times. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Lincoln’s favorite song during the Civil War, was countered by “Dixie” in the Confederate States.(crawford 47)
In 1918, in the middle of World War I, Irving Berlin gave us “God Bless America,” considered by many to be the unofficial anthem of the United States. Composers such as Marc Blitzstein and Samuel Barber were enlisted to write upbeat songs for the Office of War Information during World War II.(crawford 47­100)

Wars also create their unique icons who transform their empathy, concern,

anger, and other emotions into poetry,or in our time popular music. This was particularly true of the war in Vietnam. Given this era’s unique historical circumstances, the musical world of the Vietnam War was greatly different from the music that accompanied World

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War II. While there were patriotic songs that did very well. The vast majority of Vietnam
War songs fell into the category of anti­ rather than pro­war songs.
Rock and roll, fully born in the 1950s, and called “noise” by parents, turned millions of these young people toward this exotic and transformative new art. Along with sexual experimentation and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the South, it created a youth culture that shared the black writer James Baldwin’s insight: “The
American equation of success with the big times reveals an awful disrespect for human life and human achievement.”(Baldwin) Youth “counterculture” carved out new spaces for experimentation and alternative views about what made a good society, while a New
Left made up of civil rights and anti­war activists developed as the war in Vietnam dragged out and became increasingly bloody, confusing, and unpopular.
This was how popular music in general, and certainly anti­war music specifically, became known for cultural and political conflict, and at times a resource for a broader movement against the war. The Vietnam War was accompanied every step of the way by an anti­war soundtrack that touched on every tone melancholy and touching, enraged and sarcastic, fearful and that captured the long time impact of this war. And like the anti­war movement itself, it began without a significant audience in the early sixties, but grew to a critical mass by the war’s termination.(Crawford 150)
Bob Dylan called for an oppositional voice to the Vietnam War during the first half of the 1960s. Initially connected to a folk music revival that was simultaneously a political and cultural phenomena. Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of

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War” in 1962, the latter as harsh, and self­righteous an indictment of militarism as popular music had seen.(Boyd 56­70)
“You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.” (Dylan)
Dylan followed up in 1963 with “With God on Our Side,” in which the notion that
God plays favorites with countries at war is considered both crude and foolish. Dylan’s lyrics combined a new history of what true patriotism meant, opposition to what
Eisenhower called for. As the Cold War and the hard reality of death, both in the United
States and four thousand miles away in Vietnam(google maps), escalated anti­war songs kept the pulse of individual and collective dissent.
Perhaps the biggest moment of this protest genre came on August 18, 1969, when guitarist Jimi Hendrix stood on stage at Woodstock and played his version of “The
Star­Spangled Banner.” (Scott 23) His blistering and ironic version of our country’s most loved musical symbol also showcased a lot of changes and contradictions that summarized the anti­war music and movements of the 1960s and beyond. For, unlike

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the folk tradition that played a part in the movement for civil rights, late­sixties anti­war music There was no direct path which anti­war music moved down but as a generalization, the more death the Vietnam War brought, the hotter the temper became in the songs expressing opposition. On the same stage at Woodstock where Jimi
Hendrix performed, Joe McDonald delivered perhaps the best­remembered anti­war song of the time. A satirical critique of the war, “I­Feel­Like­I’m­Fixin’­to­Die Rag” added weight because Country Joe had earned military stripes in the Navy.
In April of 1970, president Nixon decided to send troops into Cambodia, campuses across the country erupted in protests and a strike of hundreds of thousands students on more than 700 campuses. On“Come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,
Send your sons off before it’s too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.”(McDonald) May 4, four Kent State students were killed and nine were wounded by Ohio
National Guardsmen. After seeing photos from the Kent State massacre, singer­songwriter Neil Young wrote “Ohio”. “Ohio” was a message to America to do something about the deaths, the war, and the divide of the country(boyd 100­109)
“Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
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And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?” (young)
It was a call to action that many AM radio stations, their formats focused on harmless pop hits, refused to play. As an moment of truth, “Ohio” was a call to action, but like the vast majority of successful rockers he wasn’t truly part of a social movement. They stayed clear of day­to­day organizing and ongoing moral support of activists. the music of this time is important for thinking about youth culture as a whole, but anti­war songs were certainly not the best sellers of the time. In fact the only song to reach anthem­like influence in anti­war circle but in no way as influential as “We Shall
Overcome” for the Civil Rights Movement was John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” which was sung by half a million demonstrators at the Vietnam Moratorium Day protest in Washington, DC, in October 1969.(Boyd 120)
As part of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “bed­in­for­peace,” the song is essentially a one­liner, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance,” chanted over and over. At the time Lennon claimed that he was bored with hearing “We Shall Overcome” all the time, and offered his simple ditty as an alternative. “Our job is to write for the people now,” he said. “So the songs that they go and sing on their buses are not just love songs.” But the fact remains, the musicians who wrote the anti­war music that became an organic part of political protest were not themselves riding on those buses with “the people.”(lennon) Allison13

For a brief moment during the years of the war, millions of young people, and a few older people, believed that political music could help make a social revolution, remake a country, and stop a war. As it turned out music did not accomplish these things. What anti­war music did do, as all protest music has done throughout American history, was to raise spirits while doing battle, and help define the identities of activists.
As a whole I think the protests and antiwar music of the 1960’s really was the beginning of a new age of youth in America. I mean before this it was unheard of for the most part to outwardly protest and dismiss the work of the government especially during wartime. Even now we can see how society has been effected because of this movement in history now it is common for the people to show their unhappiness through protests and riots and the music of today is even more provocative if not as political as the music of the 1960’s.
In conclusion I feel that The Vietnam War had a huge impact on the American people that will not soon be forgotten with it’s challenging of social norms and the huge growth of anti­war and pro­peace propaganda. It was a turning point that set a precedent for the next era of youth in America and also changed the way Americans saw their own political involvement and showed exactly how far free speech can reach.

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Text sources:
● Boyd, Joe. White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. London: Serpent's Tail, 2006.
Print.
● Crawford, Richard. America's Musical Life: A History. New York: Norton, 2001.
Print.
● Dougan, Clark, and Stephen Weiss. The American Experience in Vietnam. New
York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Print.
● Dudley, William, and David L. Bender. The Vietnam War: Opposing Viewpoints. San
Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1990. Print
● Glasser, Ronald J. 365 Days. New York: G. Braziller, 1971. Print.
● Kent, Deborah. The Vietnam War: "what Are We Fighting For?" Hillside, NJ, U.S.A.:
Enslow, 1994. Print.
● Maraniss, David. They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and
America, October 1967. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.
● McNamara, Robert S., and Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and
Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times -random House, 1995. Print.
● Moore, Harold G., and Joseph L. Galloway. We Were Soldiers Once -and Young: Ia
Drang, the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam. 2nd ed. New York: Random
House, 1992. Print.
● Rudd, Mark. Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. New York:
William Morrow, 2009. Print.
● Scott, Walter. Woodstock. London: Dent, 1969. Print.
● Smith, Tom. Easy Target: The Long, Strange Trip of a Scout Pilot in Vietnam.
Navato, CA: Presidio, 1996. Print.

Musical references:
● James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” in Nobody Knows My
Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 61.
● Bob Dylan, “Masters of War,” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1963).
● Joe McDonald, “I­Feel­Like­I’m­Fixin’­to­Die Rag,” Country Joe McDonald and the
Fish, Rag Baby: Songs of Opposition, EP (1965) and I­Feel­Like­I’m­Fixin’­to­Die Rag,
Studio album (Vanguard, 1967).

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● Neil Young, “Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, single (Atlantic, 1970).

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