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It was the y nouns Americans who stood up to voice their opinions concerning this war and create deed 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, the ere were a number of demonstrations, particularly among students, calling for the US to end its involvement in Vietnam between 19631965. Student for Democratic Society (S organized the first national antiwar demonstration in Washington, which cons sites of 20,000 people.
The Vietnam war the first war with a strong presence of antiwar r culture and certainly was not the last. Vietnam was the beginning of a new era of you Eng people in America Youth Protest of the Vietnam War In 1 961 president Kennedy decided to send American troops to Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism and to show t he United States’ strength of resolve. At the time he did not know the turmoil he would bring to his Allison 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.
A s the war continued people’s opinions intensified, especially student’s. Youth protests d urine the sass’s changed the way many Americans viewed the Vietnam War. In the earl Y sass’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 w tit big universities were the first to experience the antiwar movement. The cities of A an Arbor, Bloomington, Chicago, East Lansing, Lawrence, Madison, Milwaukee, and Min Annapolis saw the movement in full effect.
Some people believed that the protesters we disgrace for betraying their own country (Dudley 83). “Teaching” became a WA Y of educating students about what was really happen inning in Vietnam. Speeches, s ones, concussions, and seminars helped get the students involved at the “teaching”. After the first “teach in” occurred on March 24, 1965, at the University of Michigan, hung dress 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 (Dough n and Weiss 8788) The students from the University of California at Berkeley felt like a minority w hen no one took them seriously at their campus demonstration in September 1 96 because of their long hair and ragged clothes (Kent 74). Many youth joined organization NSA that were against the war. They would go to protests such as the one that took pal CE on April 17, 1965.
The 20,000 protesters that were present in Washington that dad y showed Allison how the peace movement was growing. A few days later, thirteen antiwar organizations came together to form the National Coordinating Committee To End the War in Vietnam. Another group, Vietnam Day Committee, attempted to stop t roof trains but were unsuccessful. Both groups joined together to lead demonstrations I interfere cities, in what was called the “International Days of Protest. The “International Days of Protest” that took place on October 15 and 16 in 1 965 included 100,000 activists that participated not only in the cities but on college campus sees 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 GA students flashed antiwar slogans to the fans at halftime. Students in Michigan led a 48 hour peace vigil and also picketed the local draft board.
New York had a Para De in which 20,000 people were involved in and a “speak out” that 300 people eaten deed at New Work’s arms induction center. The Students for a Democratic Society (SD ) 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 active SST in or out of the group were inspired. SD had a huge role in the ass’s protest movement and changed greatly over time eventually leading to their downfall.
Students for a Democratic Society (S 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 Allison Democracy. The newly formed SD held its first organizational meeting in 19 60 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Robert Alan Huber was elected president. The political manifesto for SD, the Port Huron Statement, was written for the most part by Tom Hayden, a downheartedly former editor of the student newspaper at the University of Michigan.
The document, adopted in 1 962 byte he sixty or o founding members of SD, criticized the American political system for failing g to achieve international peace or to effectively address a bunch of social ills, inch duding racism, materialism, militarism, poverty, and exploitation. The Port Huron Stats moment 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 f menders’ intense, if somewhat naive, belief that a nonviolent youth movement could try insofar U.
S. Society into a model political System in which the people, rather than just he social elite, would control social policy. At first SD focused its efforts on helping to promote the civil rights move NT and efforts to improve conditions in urban ghettos. In April of 1965, SD org aniseed a national march on Washington, D. C. , and from that point on the movement gar increasingly aggressive, especially in its opposition to the Vietnam War, using t acetic like rowdy (though not violent) demonstrations and occupation of administration buildings on college campuses. Rude 6778) After 1 965, SD became known primarily for its leading role in the youth movement against the Vietnam War. Allison SD 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 on of SD also triggered another political youth movement, the Berkeley Free Speech M event (FSML), led by a junior philosophy major named Mario Savior.
Savior urged his g enervation to fight against the disproportionately machine, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick to heart that you ‘eve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon a II the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it The Free Speech Movement arose as a reaction against heavyhearted attempt by Berkeley officials, under pressure by local conservatives, to prevent student TTS 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 satins and occupation of the university administration building. (Dudley 110) T he arrest of over five hundred demonstrators led to several weeks of even more massive ministrations and a strike by nearly 70 percent of the Berkeley student body The “countercultures” youth movement that SD and the Free Speech Move were such a prominent part of was driven by a radical minority of liberators majors and graduate students attending some of the country’s most elite educational insist tuitions.
This campus political awakening, dubbed the “New Left,” developed around a core of “readier babies,” the children of parents who were themselves politically AC dive and who had participated in progressive, social movements Of the 1 sass. It was, oaf ere all, Allison the youth branch of a socialist organization that had evolved into SD, and m cost of Sad’s early recruits were readier babies.
The somewhat undecided idealism and beliefs of the early SD is captured in t he ringing declarations of the Port Huron Statement: “We would replace power r doted in possession, privilege or circumstances, with power rooted in love, reflective reason and creativity. ” The port Huron Statement also decried “the permeating g and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle a GA insist 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 re’s pointillist for encounter and resolution. The campus activism lead by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Sad’s Port Huron Statement soon spread to colleges and universities all over the Un tied States. Even students who never joined SD heeded the call to action embodied deed in the Port Huron Statement and other SD manifestos. SD also used a small grant from the United AutoWorkers union to initiate a campaign for grassroots political awake null In workingman’s neighborhoods.
In Hoyden’s and Savior’s words, thousands of SST dents 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 a ND 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 Allison discrimination in sororities and fraternities, dress codes, course requirement s, and the grading system. .NET 255) They especially protested against university research h that benefited the maladministration complex. When in January of 1966 Lab’s administration announced it would end automat attic student deferments from the draft, student anger over the escalation of the w Vietnam became more personal and intense. SD, as a leader of the New Left student movement, seized on antiwar sentiment to kindle a mass student movement. By the end of 1 966, over three hundred new SD chapters had been formed on campuses s across the country. The most popular of Sad’s rallying cries, “Make Lovelorn War! Became the motto for the antiwar movement. Rude 21 3) SD organized drafted burning s and disruptions of ROTC classes. Campus recruiters for the military were harassed by large groups of student protesters. A massive Scattered demonstration in New You ark’s Central Park, the Spring Inflammation to end the War in Vietnam (1969), drew half a million antiwar protesters. Chanting, “Burn cards, not people,” and “Hell, no w e won’t go! ” hundreds of young men threw their draft cards into a large bonfire. (Rude 218) In 1 968, about forty thousand students on nearly a hundred campuses across he country demonstrated against the Vietnam War and against racism. Dudley 1 50) Protest against one often morphed into protest against the other, as at Column University, where an antifascist demonstration developed into a huge protest against the war and against military research at the university. (Kent 200) The administration Allison building and other campus buildings were occupied by nearly a thousand an gray students, who set up barricades and established “revolutionary communes” b Enid the barricades. (Rude 260) When the police stormed the buildings and brutalized t 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 Dale’s police attacked five thousand antiwar demonstrators in what investigators wow old 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 SST dents at Kent State University on 4 May 1970. Also in May, Mississippi state highway pa trolled investigating a student protest fired into a women’s dormitory at Jackson Stats College, killing two students and wounding eleven. Dugan 1 20) These two incidents I deed to even more protests on college campuses, though by the time school resumed in the e fall, the wave of protests had pretty much burned itself out. As student activism subsided on the nation’s college campuses, SD itself beg to fall victim to its own internal divisions. Within the SD organization, highly disciplined factions of hardliner followers of the revolutionary philosophies of Mao Oozed g and Chew Guava began to take over the movement(Rude 31 5) By 1 969 these factions already in evidence.
The most notorious of them was the Weather underground ND, or Weathermen, which went underground to employ terrorist violence, thus pro viding the Allison justification the FBI and other government agencies wanted to crack down o n the New Left. Other SD factions withdrew from the national organization to focus their beef rots on the Third World or on the now radicalized Black Power movement. As the Vietnam War began to enter its closing stages, SD lost much of its rationale for nation al activism, and by the mid sass the organization was essentially dead.
Rude 33 0) 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 sass’s was particularly defining g to the youth of this time. Music has always kept company with American wars. During g the Revolutionary War, “Yankee Doodle” and many other songs were sung to eke p spirits alive during dark times. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Lincoln favorite s Eng during the Civil War, was countered by “Dixie” in the Confederate States. Raw ford 47) In 1 918, in the middle of World War l, Irving Berlin gave us “God Bless America considered by many to be the unofficial anthem of the Ignited States. Compose errs such as Marc Blintzes and Samuel Barber were enlisted to write upbeat songs for the Office of War Information during World War al. (Crawford 471 00) 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 pa articulacy true of the war in Vietnam.
Given this era’s unique historical circumstances, the e musical oral of the Vietnam War was greatly different from the music that accompany need World Allison War II. While there were patriotic songs that did very well. The vast majority 0 f Vietnam War songs fell into the category of anti rather than prewar songs. Rock and roll, fully born in the sass, and called “noise” by parents, turned millions of these young people toward this exotic and transformation new art. Along with sexual experimentation and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the So the, it created a youth culture that shared the black writer James Baldwin insight: ‘
The American equation of success with the big times reveals an awful disrespect f or human life and human Youth “counterculture” carved out nee w spaces for experimentation and alternative views about what made a good society, hill a New Left made up of civil rights and antiwar activists developed as the war in Viet am 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 g, 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 e early sixties, but grew to a critical mass by the war’s termination. (Crawford 1 50) Bob Dylan called for an oppositional voice to the Vietnam War during the first half of the 1 9605. Initially connected to a folk music revival that was simultaneous political and cultural phenomena.
Dylan wrote “Blowing’ in the Wind” and “Mass terse of Allison O War” in 1962, the latter as harsh, and gloriousness an indictment of militarism m as popular music had seen. (Boyd 5670) milieu that never done nothing’ But build to destroy You play with my world eke 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 1 963 with ‘With God on Our Side,” in which the notion the at God plays favorites with countries at war is considered both crude and foolish .