Overview

The campus antiwar movement that began in the sixties evolved out of social, political, and economic restraints. Inspired by the civil rights movement and disgusted by the Vietnam War, students across the nation revolted in protest. Though the movement was (and remains) associated with elite institutions like the University of California at Berkeley, student activism flourished at second-tier state schools as well, especially Kent State and Michigan State. These state universities provide a better paradigm for understanding the movement because they were tied to defense agencies as a result of massive government grants aimed at military research. Furthermore, they claimed a much greater proportion of working-and middle-class students than prestigious institutions like Berkeley and Columbia, making them far more culturally and ideologically representative of both the movement and the national climate as well.

The Faces of Student Protest

The 1960s student activist melting pot, far from fitting any single paradigm, was comprised of activists from a variety of class and cultural backgrounds

• Jewish student activists absorbed from their backgrounds a propensity toward awareness and liberalism. As 1950s “red diaper babies,” these immigrant activists had grown up with their share of discrimination, both secular and government-sanctioned. As a result, they (and their parents) tended to support left-wing politics. According to a 1970s study, 23 percent of Jewish students termed themselves leftist, compared to 4 percent of Protestant students (Heineman 80).

• Catholic student activists absorbed from their religious backgrounds “the need for community, mutual assistance, and social justice” (Heineman 80). Culturally, the parents of Catholic activists had experienced some level of discrimination akin to that of their Jewish counterparts—it was not until 1960 that even a wealthy educated Catholic could get elected president of the United States.

• Student protestors from elite backgrounds were often “privileged, secularized Protestant and Jewish children of the establishment” (Heineman 79). Culturally more secure than their lower-class equivalent, these students operated from a position of privilege, both academically and economically.

• Lower-middle-class student activists may be broadly characterized as frequently Catholic or brought up in “low-status” Protestant, Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran denominations (Rothman and Lichter 83). In 1967, for example, 34 percent of entering Penn State Students identified their parents as unskilled or skilled laborers (Heineman 81). In New Left circles, these activists often found themselves condescended to and ridiculed because they were unfamiliar with the jargon and authorities cited by middle-and upper-class student activists. Raised in a cultural milieu which placed a premium upon clear and direct discourse, less privileged activists became frustrated with the obscure language employed by their more culturally and academically privileged counterparts (81). These frustrations, compounded by enormous psychic tensions—not infrequently, these activists’ parents did not support their decision to go to college nor their new political outlook—and they fact they were mostly working students, “imposed limits on their degree of activism” (81).

The Port Huron Statement and Students for a Democratic Society

Student activism, far from fitting within the Berkeley paradigm, reflected varied class and cultural backgrounds. However, the adherents were linked by their opposition to the Vietnam War or by their affiliation with the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a national organization only in name. Originally founded in 1959 as a subsidiary of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, SDS evolved as the major organization associated with the antiwar movement as a whole (Hellman 74).  In 1962, Tom Hayden composed the “Port Huron Statement,” SDS’s manifesto, a document sharply critical of both Vietnam policy and the domestic social reality. The document provides an excellent historical base for examining both the conditions and values of 1960s Vietnam War protest.

The statement draws its rhetoric out of American history; it pulls from historical texts to expose the vast discrepancies between the origins of democracy and its false reality. For example, the statement pulls lines from Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” as a reminder of the bloodiest war fought on American soil, an ideological war that like Vietnam, pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor. By calling upon their audience to remember the horror of the Civil War, the SDS evoked “powerful sentiments of condolence for survivors of war, respect for the dead, and by implication, the nation’s policies and regimes that occasioned their loss (Horowitz).”  In the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln’s words are especially useful for SDS’s political purposes: they act as an invocation to pursue the end of the Vietnam War as well as restore balance between American ideology and policy.

In addition to Lincoln, the statement borrowed from equally powerful historical documents like “The Declaration of Independence.” Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal” provided powerful ammunition for the SDS’s blatant indictment of U.S government policy. Viewed by many as nothing more than timely crafted propaganda, the false rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence rang especially true during the Vietnam era (Horwitz 63). Martin Luther King, Jr for example, noted that while government’s resolve to defend freedom abroad “took it the brink of nuclear conflict,” it “disappeared or became tragically weak when the threat …was concerned with the Negro’s liberty” (Sherry 255). Such appeals to the nation’s domestic interests and by proxy, its global image pushed politicians to act on civil rights issues: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. For the SDS and civil rights leaders alike, the Vietnam War provided them with leverage to expose the lack of cohesion between ideal and reality: insofar as the conflict was, among other things, a racial war, it seemed to reflect racial discrimination at home.

Cold War policies also provided the SDS with an example of governmental failure to adhere to the democratic process. Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist campaign pervaded all areas of domestic social and political life. Prompted by fears of a Communist majority, Congress established governmental agencies to root out perceived threats to democracy. The most obvious casualty of the campaign was the democratic process itself. Under the pretext of protecting of protecting the nation from communist invasion, the government sanctioned anti-communist campaign attacked individual rights and extended state power into movie studios,, universities, labor unions, and many ostensibly independent institutions (Schrecker 110). Consequently, “the nation lost the institutional network that had created a public space where serious alternatives to the status quo could be presented” (Schrecker 105). For the SDS, the success of their platform rested on the renewal of public political participation. By denouncing the (still fresh) unconstitutional governmental actions of the McCarthy era, the SDS sought to establish a “New Left” that unlike its fearful silent predecessors of the fifties, was unafraid to call attention to the democratic failures of its government.

Other important issues the statement higlighted were poverty, health care, and education. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously declared, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty” (Sherry 259). A cascade of legislation to achieve victory in this “war” was immediately issued. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the by proxy, the Community Action Program, which in turn funded legal services for the poor, Project Head Start for underprivileged preschoolers, Upward Bound to help underprivileged students get into college as well as neighborhood Health Centers (Sherry 260). However, “promises of total victory raised public expectations that could not be satisfied, especially since the core OEO program was only modestly funded (at less than 1 percent of the federal budget, it was only a pale reminder of the nearly $5 billion relief bill of 1935), and hopes to enlarge it fell victim to budgetary restraints Johnson and Congress imposed because of the Vietnam War” (Sherry 263). Consequently, the failure to “beat poverty” provoked organizations like the SDS to expose the gulf between promise and result. In the Port Huron Statement, they deliberately use the phrase “equality of opportunity”—a phrase rooted in American political history—as a reminder of the administration’s failure to guarantee poverty reform. In 1928, for example, Herbert Hoover leaned on the idea that “the very essence of equality of opportunity…[is that] it demands economic justice as well as political and social justice” (Horwitz 196).

By raising public consciousness about failed domestic and foreign policy, the SDS’s Port Huron Statement gained widespread student support. Moreover, through what has been called “offspring lobbying,” they exerted some influence on their elders (Schrecker 206). Their use of historical documents and moments in American history incited an emotional, nostalgic reaction, a positive example of political rhetoric. Wrongly accused by some of their opponents as “a program of revolution solely for revolution’s sake and without future objectives,” the SDS and the reaction it spawned in turn created lasting social changes. Activists reformed the college curriculum by adding courses on peace, black and women’s studies, “removed nearly every restriction on student dating and participation in political organizations, created preferential treatment policies for minority students, and secured academic freedom and the right of unfettered speech on the campus” (Heineman 2). Tom Hayden himself, the writer of the Port Huron Statement argued that his was a “redemptive, not destructive, force in American society, that student politically empowered blacks, brought peace to Indochina, and exorcised malevolent Cold War spirits from the soul of the Democratic Party” (Hayden). While much of that declaration is debatable, it is true that the Students for a Democratic Society played a role in shaping both student and public attitudes toward the Vietnam War and the domestic socio-political reality.

It is important to note that the SDS split at its June, 1969 convention, with a "national office" in Boston supporting the line of the Progressive Labor Party (PL), an older Leftist group that had split from the Communist Party in 1961/1962, and another "national office" in Chicago under the control of the small radical faction of the SDS known as the Weathermen (O'Brien 23). The Weathermen, which grew from some of the members of SDS

 Other Relevant Student Political Organizations

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• The National Student Association was founded in 1947 and comprised of the student governments from several hundred universities.  Although NSA's annual congresses provided a meeting place and forum for activists, the organization itself had no grass-roots support on its "member" campuses and actually played a very small role in shaping student protest (O'Brien 18).  However, NSA is important because in 1967, an investigation prompted by Ramparts Magazine exposed the secret relationship between the CIA and the National Student Association.  According to one account, U.S. intelligence was providing the NSA with as much as $400,000 a year (Agee 12).  Furthermore, the CIA was also funneling as much as $1,800,000 to the International Student Conference, a confederation of over 80 national student unions set up in 1950 by the NSA to counter the International Union of Students (Agee 12).   The funds were transferred through a double screening process, using first dummy foundations and then foundations with histories of legitimate private philanthropy. "Legitimate" foundations would then pass the funds on to the national office of the NSA (Agee 13).  According to Sam Brown, chairman of the Association's national supervisory board in 1967, students representing the NSA overseas would compile data on the personalities of foreign student leaders and the policies and objectives of foreign student organizations. As he told the New York Times, "some of this information apparently was passed directly to CIA employees and some of it, in the course of normal business, went into the files of the N.S.A.," to be later accessed by clandestine operatives within the Association (Agee 13). Those students having signed secrecy oaths with the CIA would then be bound under penalty of law to keep their knowledge from the public and the rest of their organization.

• The Student Peace Union, formed in the in Midwest in 1959 and reaching a membership of more than 3,000 by 1961/1962, was led by pacificsts and members of the Young People's Socialist League (Obrien 18).  The Student Peace Union fell into decline after 1962, when President John F. Kennedy resumed atmospheric testing (O'Brien 18).      

• The Young People's Socialist League was founded in 1907 as the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party (O'Brien 18).  YPSL tended to engage in direct political elections, usually in support of Socialist candidates, although it aslo carried on an active educational program (Altbach 3).  In 1962, YPSL's members numbered over eight hundred, making it by far the largest radical student association during that period (O'Brien 18).  However, internal disputes divided the organization on the Vietnam War and YPSL was temporarily disbanded in 1964.  Although reconstituted two years later, YPSL remained small and ineffective compared to organizations like the SDS.  A smaller Socialist group, the Young Socialist Alliance, although more successful in developing a solid base, was too smaall and too "Left" to play a major role in the student antiwar movement (O'Brien 18). 

Campus Protest: Myth and the Construction of the “Typical” Student Activist

When societies adopt metaphors as ideological doctrine, those metaphors acquire a tyrannical weight that restrains both thought and behavior, binding them to patterns that rationalize and reproduce the traditional order ( Slotkin 77). The mythos surrounding the history of Vietnam antiwar protest argues that student disaffection blossomed at elite state and private universities like Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Wisconsin (Heineman 2). Culturally secure (as the products of elite education), these activists operated from a position of privilege, and since economic factors did not constrict their horizons, their idealism and expectations, even their methods of protest were not reflective of student protest as a whole. Media coverage reinforced this paradigm; it did give attention to the antiwar opposition, but its images of radical, foul-mouthed, long-haired protesters did as much to alienate American from the antiwar movement as to make it respectable. Such images were “vividly received and remembered precisely because they were so atypical—they leapt from the generally bland and careful record of the war offered Americans”(Sherry 289). Other mediums contributed to the myth as well. Contemporary journalists, activists turned memoir writers, and present-day scholars tended to graduate from prestigious institutions. Consequently, their school-ties and high social-class origins colored theirs (and their reader’s) perceptions of actual events (Heineman 3).

There are a number of reasons proving that conservative state-school protest offers a more accurate representation of the Vietnam antiwar movement. In the early sixties, federal funding from Cold War governmental agencies bled onto state universities, essentially culturally tying them to American foreign policy (Heineman 66). The ambitions of these institutions (and their government officials) involved both the search for funds, leading them to undertake military research, in turn making them vulnerable to student criticism (69). Moreover, most of the science and technology students were descendents of conservative working-class parents, many from the local community itself. With the rise in their numbers and simultaneously, the rise in the number of liberal arts students, conservative state schools were made easy targets of the antiwar agenda.

The emergence of student activism at state schools predated the 1964 uprising at Berkeley, which according to many scholars, spawned white student activism.  Student activists at Kent State, Michigan State, and SUNY-Buffalo, their numbers varying from campus to campus, were involved in free speech protests several months prior to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (Heineman 124).  Furthermore, student activists at Kent State, Michigan State, and Penn State, had instituted antiwar organizations months, if not years, before the military escalation of the Vietnam War and the founding of the famous Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee (124).  In addition, it is important to note that some of the most well-known student activists came from state schools, including: Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson, Howie Emmer, Carl Oglesby, and Andy Strapp, to name a few (Heineman 126). 

The Climate of Kent State

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Both on and off campus, the political environmnet reacted pejoratively to Kent State activists.  Community residents heaped verbal and physical abuse upon student protestors, local law enforcement routinely launched annual investigations of drug abuse that invariably involved student protestors, and even the university president, Robert White, viewed liberal and radical students as juvenille delinquents (Heineman 37, 38).  As a matter of fact, in 1969, when several hundred conservative, prowar students attacked SDS activists at an anti-racist rally armed with motorcycle chains and baseball bats, President White suspended the SDS chapter but chose not to to take disciplinary action against the prowar students (Heineman 37).  Local attitudes played an important role in shaping the campus antiwar movement.  While students responded to national politics, their perceptions reflected their immediate cultural and political environment (Heineman 124).  So, the hostile relationship between Kent State activists and their opponents (university administrators, prowar students, law enforcement, and the Kent, Ohio community) determined not only the mode of dissent but the ways in which confrontation unfolded as well (Heineman 125).  So, in the early 1970s when Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnamization program and invaded Cambodia, demonstrations at Kent State were especially heated (Morrison 329).  When activists broke windows of local businessses and bombed the ROTC building, Ohio Governor responded by imposing martial law on the campus; he sent 3,000 National Guardsman to "control" the situation (Morrison 329).  One day later, May 4, 1970, 2,000 students gathered for a peace rally while 10,000 others stood off and watched (Heineman 248).  An altercation began when campus police tried to disband the rally; protestors threw rocks and Guarsmen responded by unloadeding sixty-one rounds in thirteen seconds (Heineman 248).  One student remembers the Guard commander ordering the students to "move or be fired upon again" (Heineman 250).  Altogether, the massacre left nine wounded and four dead.  None of them were activists. 

After the slayings, President White blamed activists for starting the alteracation, characterizing them as "human debris" who did not belong at the university (Heineman 38).  A decisive point in history had been reached.  In one of the most unlikeley campuses in the United States, all of the cultural ambiguities of Cold War-Vietnam War America which had been building up for years, suddenly exploded.  Nationally, Americans hated the peace movement as well as despised the war; supported Nixon but demanded troop withdrawal.  The student antiwar movement, also disgusted by the war, felt disconnected from cultural and national values they believed were at the heart of democracy.  Though their demonstrations became more violent (as the war escalated), it is important to note that their agressive reaction was in response to local and nationally-sanctioned repression; their rights WERE in fact, compromised.  However, the national community responded favorably to the Kent State murders.  In fact, citizens sent President Nixon letters praising his decision to militarily intervene on Kent State's campus.  Here are a few responses:

                   "Live Ammunition!  Well, really, what did they expect, spitballs? How much warning is needed indeed.  Hooray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marital music, ice cream cones--America, support it or leave it" (Michener 436).

Ravenna, Housewife

                   "Congratulations to the Guardsmen for their performance of duty on the Kent State University campus.  I hope their actions serve as an example for the entire nation...I extend appreciate and whole-hearted suport of the Guard of every state for their fine efforts in protecting citizens like me and our property" (Michener 443).

Mother of Guardsman

                   "I am no radical.  I do not believe that arson and violence should go unpunished, but I know of no state in which arson carries a death sentence, and there are certainly none in which "illegal" assembly is punishable by execution" (Michener 444).

Kent State Student

To see actual footage of the Kent State Shootings, click here (the documentary is quite graphic).

References

External Links