Essay Sample: Vietnam War and the Anti-War Movement
Publication Date:
The flowing essay will describe the anti-war protests during the Vietnam War. It will discuss whether the protests worked to prolong the war, rather than resulted in shortening it as many have concluded. The anti-war protestors may have failed to influence public opinion of many Americans who were convinced that the war would stop Communism from spreading in South East Asia. Not all of those factors were under the control of the anti-war protestors. Other factors employed by the anti-war movement directly affected how the protests were perceived. The anti-war protests may have prolonged the war effort.
The Vietnam War
If every generation gets handed the problems of the previous one, then the children of the 1950s were handed the conflict in Vietnam. The United States had ended the war in Korea, only to become involved in the conflict in Vietnam. The fight was to stop the spread of Communism. The post-World War II boom produced more college students than blue collar workers. “They could afford the leisure of protests, and the generational difference intensified: What the generation of the fifties saw as leisure in work, the generation of the sixties saw as liberation from work” (Harrison, 1993, p. 106). The children of upper-middle class parents had the influence of left of center politics, and poverty is a choice attitude. The youth of the 1960s wanted to create a new world.
The post-war boom was not just secluded in the West, and the post-war period affected more than just prosperity. There were new social problems such as racism, poverty, the bomb, feminism, colonialism, totalitarianism, war, overpopulation, super technology, global warming, and a list that continues to grow exponentially. Some of the anti-war movement was connected to other social concerns.
The beat generation of the 1950s turned into the hippie generation of the 1960s. “The beat generation was led by Allen Ginsberg, who became one of the main gurus of the 1960s protest activists with his emphasis on spontaneous, intuitive, unstructured, individualistic, experimental, nonconformist, and antiWASPish values” (Harrison, 1993, p. 107). The ideology was putting down straight America and alienating the status quo of middle-class values. They fought the repressed culture of the Freudian society in favor of comedians like Lenny Bruce. The free love culture espoused Zen Buddhism, poverty by choice, and drugs (Harrison, 1993).
The Anti-War Movement
There are many who would believe that the war ended in Vietnam because the anti-war movement was successful. According to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), “The peace movement was often militant, and many on the campuses came to reject non-violence and fought heroically against the police. But in the end, the bosses destroyed that movement because it was not politically and militarily strong enough” (para. 9). The anti-war movement did not help to bring an end to the war but indeed may have worked to prolong it.
One of the main reasons the anti-war movement did not succeed was there was no clear leader of the protest. In the 1950s, “the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was formed, the forerunner of the anti-Vietnam movement” and the protest movement borrowed heavily from lessons learned (Harrison, 1993, p. 103). Civil disobedience was copied from the labor movement, and mass protests were acquired from the civil rights movement. According to Gustainis and Hahn (1988), six particular protest tactics identified with the anti-war movement set it apart from other movements were: counter-culture, immoderate protest tactics, the use of violence, attacks on capitalism, the use of obscenity, and desecration of the American flag (p. 205). These were also the reasons why the protests were not successful and probably prolonged the war rather than ended it sooner. According to Gustainis and Hahn (1988), the only thing the anti-war movement accomplished was getting Nixon elected twice.
It was the very tactics of the anti-war protests that alienated the movement from the general American public. It should be noted that not all anti-war protestors utilized all six tactics. “It should be noted that not all protesters made all of these choices or even any of them. But some protesters did—and, in the public mind, all were tarred with the same brush” (Gustainis & Hahn, 1988, p. 205).
Immoderate Protest Tactics can be described as simple activities such as writing a letter to a Congressperson or a newspaper. It could also be giving a speech at an anti-war rally or circulating a petition to stop the war. At the far end of the Immoderate Protest Tactics, it would be more extreme behavior like bombing a laboratory. Most anti-war activists were not radical. (Gustainis and Hahn, 1988, p. 206).
Violence as a Protest Tactic was what made the nightly news broadcasts. Splinter groups of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the main campus-based anti-war organization, like the Weather Underground, saw violence as the only alternative to protest the war movement. They were responsible for bombings, arson, and other crimes of violence. Their types of violence were shunned by the most militant anti-war protestors, but the extreme radicals did commit violent acts in the name of the anti-war movement. It was these types of actions that frightened the average American and turned off the more moderate citizen to anti-war efforts. The violent acts did more damage and convinced more people that all anti-war protestors were revolutionaries.
Attacks on Capitalism were joined with the American involvement with the war effort in Vietnam and used to criticize their entire economic system. Protestors believed the war was a natural extension of the socio-economic oppression that was poisoning the whole culture. It was thought that only a few monopolies controlled the system and the SDS championed few capitalistic systems could survive under those monopolies. This did little to endear Americans who had survived two world wars to the anti-war movement. The democracy of the United States was built on capitalism and to challenge that belief was bordering on treason.
Use of Obscenity was stock in trade for many in the anti-war movement. Words and gestures which are regarded as obscene, were used in anti-war protests. They were aimed at authority figures, especially police officers and politicians. The use of obscenity separated the protestors from the establishment and created us v. them adversarial confrontation. It also functioned as liberation from the constraints of social behavior and shock value. Unfortunately, the use of obscenity detracted away from the main point and became the focus of attention. It did not help the cause of the anti-war movement. The Use of Obscenity served to help defeat the cause rather than help the anti-war movement (Gustainis and Hahn, 1988). The use of obscenities may have seemed mindless to many, but it was a purposeful action on behalf of protesters. Just as obscene to many is Desecration of the Flag. A few protesters chose to burn the American flag in protest, which also did little to endear the average American to the anti-war movement.
Failure of the anti-war movement can be blamed on a lack of leadership among the opponents of the war. The tactics used by the anti-war protesters did little to endear themselves to the average American who supported stopping Communism in South East Asia. There was no organization in which the anti-war movement was held accountable. The tactics employed by many of the anti-war protesters did little to help their campaign.
Conclusion
The anti-war movement of the Vietnam War was interesting to me because of the current conflicts in the Middle East. The war in Vietnam is talked about sometimes, but there is not much referenced, except it was a failure. The Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. has so many names listed on it, and when I visited the nation’s capital, I saw it. It piqued my curiosity.
It was my understanding that the anti-war effort is what caused the war to end. I did not know the war effort was prolonged because of the anti-war movement. It was especially interesting to learn how not to organize a protest using the tactics used in the anti-war movement. The use of obscenity was of interest because of the reaction it caused and how counterproductive it was in the final outcome. What was the ultimate benefit was the failure was caused by a lack of organization and leadership. This is why most businesses fail, as well.
While doing research, I did come across a few articles that stated the anti-war movement needed to be studied more, and one that said no research had been done at all. This underscores why in college papers, it is important to have three legitimate sources of information as resources. To study the topic more, I would read everything I could that was written in journal articles at the time the conflict was happening. Then I would try to gather firsthand accounts from people who were involved in the anti-war protests. Finally, I would research studies that have been conducted since the 1960s to see what those studies have determined.
References
Gustainis, J. J., & Hahn, D. F. (1988). While the whole world watched: Rhetorical failures of anti‐war protest. Communication Quarterly, 36(3), 203-216.
Harrison, B. T. (1993). Roots of the anti-Vietnam war movement. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 16(2), 99. https://doi.org/10.1080/10576109308435923
Students for a Democratic Society. (1991). The Rise and fall of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the U.S. Retrieved from https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/riseandfall.html