History HW - For 15 points, create a set of Priestley style notes based upon 30-3 attached

The Vietnam War Years 951

Training Corps (ROTC) programs. At Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, students marched merely as “an expression of general student discontent.”

With the onset of the Vietnam War, students across the country found a gal- vanizing issue and joined together in protest. By the mid-sixties, many youths believed the nation to be in need of fundamental change.

The Protest Movement Emerges Throughout the spring of 1965, groups at a number of colleges began to host “teach-ins” to protest the war. At the University of Michigan, where only a year before President Johnson had announced his sweeping Great Society Program, teachers and students now assailed his war policy. “This is no longer a casual form of campus spring fever,” journalist James Reston noted about the growing demon- strations. As the war continued, the protests grew and divided the country.

THE MOVEMENT GROWS In April of 1965, SDS helped organize a march on Washington, D.C., by some 20,000 protesters. By November of that year, a protest rally in Washington drew more than 30,000. Then, in February of 1966, the Johnson administration changed deferments for college students, requiring stu- dents to be in good academic standing in order to be granted a deferment. Campuses around the country erupted in protest. SDS called for civil disobedience at Selective Service Centers and openly counseled students to flee to Canada or Sweden. By the end of 1969, SDS had chapters on nearly 400 campuses.

Youths opposing the war did so for several reasons. The most common was the belief that the conflict in Vietnam was basically a civil war and that the U.S. military had no business there. Some said that the oppressive South Vietnamese regime was no better than the Communist regime it was fighting. Others argued that the United States could not police the entire globe and that war was drain- ing American strength in other important parts of the world. Still others saw war simply as morally unjust.

The antiwar movement grew beyond college campuses. Small numbers of returning veterans began to protest the war, and folk singers such as the trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Joan Baez used music as a popular protest vehicle. The num- ber one song in September 1965 was “Eve of Destruction,” in which singer Barry McGuire stressed the ironic fact that in the 1960s an American male could be drafted at age 18 but had to be 21 to vote:

The Eastern world, it is explodin’, Violence flaring, bullets loadin’, You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’, You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?

FROM PROTEST TO RESISTANCE By 1967, the antiwar movement had intensified, with no sign of slowing down. “We were having no effect on U.S. policy,” recalled one protest leader, “so we thought we had to up the ante.” In the spring of 1967, nearly half a million protesters of all ages gathered in New York’s Central Park. Shouting “Burn cards, not people!” and “Hell, no, we won’t go!” hundreds tossed their draft cards into a bonfire. A woman from New Jersey told a reporter, “So many of us are frustrated. We want to criticize this war because we think it’s wrong, but we want to do it in the framework of loyalty.”

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MAIN IDEAMAIN IDEA

C Summarizing

For what reasons did the protesters oppose the Vietnam War?

SPOTLIGHTSPOTLIGHT HISTORICALHISTORICAL

“THE BALLAD OF THE GREEN BERETS”

Not every Vietnam-era pop song about war was an antiwar song. At the top of the charts for five weeks in 1966 was “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler of the U.S. Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets:

Fighting soldiers from the sky, Fearless men who jump and die, Men who mean just what they

say, The brave men of the Green

Beret.

The recording sold over a mil- lion copies in its first two weeks of release and was Billboard magazine’s song of the year.