Mid-Century Memoir- "What happened in 1969, when young people tried to remake the world?" Answer PART 2: Activism

ACTIVISM Part 2

This is a personal essay through the imperfect filter of memory. I began this series, when a friend asked what the year was like,  how was activism organized. Here’s the second part of my answer.

It was late August 1969, when I arrived at Syracuse University, then a hard-partying campus. I remember rescuing a naive roomate through a window, after she unknowingly drank quaaludes at a raging frat party. But the war was to intrude on such campus fun and games.

That fall we freshman went about our business often oblivious to teach-ins on campus. They were also held in public schools sponsored by local business. Unlike rallies, the purpose was educational. Speakers, usually teachers, gave slide shows explaining the history of Vietnam and the French involvement, current politics and rationales for U.S. involvement. Financial and human costs were updated. (Our body counts kept rising, despite the napalm, we made and dropped) At the end of a teach-in, there was a Q&A, but it was less for shared feelings than information. Hand-outs with reading lists were available. 

The lottery, instituted in December 1969, brought new urgency to the politics of war.  Network news was pro-war, as were audiences at first. But as time went on, doubts arose and many people wanted to make up their own minds. Teach-ins were in demand. Before the lottery, the war was inequitably fought by those not attending college. Some, motivated by patriotism, deferred college acceptance. Others of draft age, who were “not college material” (and lacked funds to find a doctor to certify flat feet) had little choice. 

Now everyone was eligible.  A low lottery number meant you had to serve and without connections, go to ‘Nam.  If in college, service awaited your graduation. Any academic lapse or failure, a delay in graduation, meant induction.  Families prayed for high numbers. Draft cards were burnt (an illegal act) followed by disappearances. Canada became a haven for draft resistors.  Others disappeared into a nebulous “underground.” Those who had eschewed college for a business, like our class’ star auto mechanic, served, unless the business was designated “essential.” I also met guys with low numbers, who took LSD to appear crazy or faked being gay. They were put through tough interrogations, though the worst was rumored for conscientious objectors. Toward the later days of the war, those close to legally blind passed physicals.   

In 1969, individual cities in the Northeast organized Marches, culminating in a large national one in Washington. My experience was grass roots in upstate New York. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were active in the antiwar movement, as were clergy and student groups. Door-to-door organizing was taken on by students. Novices worked with more experienced activists. Teachers also participated, supported by their universities. 

That this occurred is still a wonder to me.  I remember shock, as the university voted to close down for antiwar work. At a huge meeting of schools and departments; deans, chairmen and faculty stood up, one by one, and stated that their areas had voted to close for the antiwar effort. Students were to receive current class standing for the year.  I had an A average after only a couple months and was free to stay in the dorms (pre-paid) and take part or go home. 

I think my parents didn’t quite understand or believe I had an A average for the year, though there would be no classes. It was kind of unbelievable to me that I would have full college credit for a year of antiwar work.  They listened to me, as though I were speaking a foreign language. They never asked for details but encouraged my idea to transfer to another school. I did my antiwar work days and painted nights in the deserted basement of the art building.  

As I recall, upstate universities and colleges, Cornell, Binghamton, Ithaca, coordinated with Syracuse in this effort. We learned to role-play. understand maps of neighborhoods and work in small mixed groups of men and women. There were expectations and rules. No one was to approach a residence alone. And the group always waited. We had copies of the Declaration of Independence. Circled were lines declaring it was a citizen’s duty to protest an unjust war. 

We knocked on doors, explained the purpose of the March in Syracuse (to end the war), the groups participating, local sponsors, and invited everyone to take part. If interested, we gave a map which showed where their block was to meet the March. We also talked about the later March on Washington, that this one was a first step. My group was part of the effort to organize local marches in individual cities. All would culminate in the big March in front of The White House. There had been previous marches in Washington, such as in 1967, but in 1969 the stakes were higher. 

I remember the slanted porch of a ramshackle wooden house painted slate blue. Set far back from the street, settled into a narrow diagonal shape, I couldn’t imagine people lived there.  When I knocked on the door, a middle-aged woman in a neat but faded housedress opened. “What do you want?” she asked annoyed. I started talking about Vietnam and showed her the Declaration. ”Get the hell off my porch,” she shouted and slammed the door. I quickly jumped down from that porch. My group was in sight. ”Wait,” she said, reopening the door. “Come in a minute.” 

She looked at my group. ”I’ll wait,” said the team leader, ”We will meet you at the next place,” he said to the others. who left. He looked curtly at me, as I followed the woman inside a long low room. Smaller rooms were toward the back, where she said the “old man” slept.  Like the woman, the house was tidy but little looked new. She took me to the front windows overlooking the porch and two framed photos of young men.  I looked politely. “This is my brother and this my son. My husband died in Korea. But his father’s here. We’re an army family. We stay together.” I smiled, figured mine was a lost cause. But when I reached the door, she had her hand out for our giveaway map. “They’re all dead now,” she said. “Except for the old man.”

Then came the day of our March. All neighborhoods joined the March to City Hall, as were other neighborhoods in other cities. Each city had a statement with mention of the Washington March. There were military groups in uniform, including the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  Clergy of different denominations linked arms. I saw chamber of commerce and business people, teachers. The University had student and faculty groups.  “Bring our boys home!” banners were carried by families with loved ones overseas.  Among the stream of people, we had walkie-talkies, water, snacks, extra supplies for the first-aid groups. We also had marching orders; wheelchairs in the middle and sides, check old people and kids.

Among the wheelchairs in the center, I saw the woman in a fresher dress, pushing an old man wearing a military jacket. I was supposed to gather slips of paper from people in my neighborhood but I had lost track a while ago. Some came to the start point to march together. Others just showed up. Then we were together, walking. I remember the heavy thud of feet, an occasional hymn, antiwar song, a spiritual. This was a determined serious crowd, not a rowdy angry mob, yet I was claustrophobic.

Someone panicked in the crowd, stopped moving in my sector. I had to get through, make sure no one was trampled, offer an arm and water, get them to a side. With the walkie-talkies we got through to medics, who used megaphones to clear paths. These regular Americans weren’t drunk or drug addled. Yet I remember seeing a stampede, quickly headed off by an organizer.  I am sure there were others.

After a final prayer by clergy, veteran and student groups thanked all who participated and local sponsors. The March ended with a rally in support of those fighting. There were fervent wishes for the war to finally end. Exhausted but feeling I had done something,  I signed out.  It was yet evening on the quiet campus. I slipped into my basement studio to forget the world in paint. 

As the war continued, in the face of growing opposition and infernal body counts, the Antiwar Movement expanded from student, clergy and veteran groups to outspoken politicians and coalitions of peace groups. There was a unified national strategy with both teach-ins and financial appeals to aid the anti-war effort. These culminated in the March on the Capital in November 1969. This was the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history with an estimated 500,000 people. In Syracuse, my activist group helped participants onto buses. We worked to make it safe, peaceful, orderly.  Did I board the bus? Not exactly.

Though I had wanted to escape before, peace and my job were foremost in my mind in the middle of the crowd. A quiet person, I have never liked crowded places. Yet I had prevented injury and done a job I believed in.  Was it time for me to leave The Moratorium March to others? Being a full-time activist was not a life I wanted.  It seemed trivial, but I wanted to complete my portfolio and try to transfer to an excellent art school with low tuition. (I had been rejected initially for a B/C average.) 

On May 4th 1970, students were shot in Kent State at a peace demonstration. Around the country, camped out in student unions, students watched the loop of the event over and over.  A sweet-looking girl put a flower in a guardsman’s rifle. The sound of rifles. Unarmed students fell dead in a nonviolent protest.  After Kent State, there were mass rallies around the country, petitions to raise money for the defense of those in custody. “They Shoot Students Don’t They” marathon dances were held (after They Shoot Horses Don’t They, the Jane Fonda Depression era movie). Student leaders, working with faculty, coordinated efforts to find sponsors. My roommate, a young woman from a prominent St. Louis family,  danced nights on end raising the most money. She had incredible stamina and dedication, until her angry father arrived and dragged her to his car.  

Her family had little objection when the “Stumpies,” a forest fraternity, chained her half-naked in a locked trunk and threw it into a fountain. Only by chance did campus police fish it out. When she sobered up, indignant that she “could have suffocated!”, her feelings were smothered in parental pride that she had been selected. (The “prank was part of a competition to choose a mascot). That was all in “fun”. The movement to defend the Kent State students arrested and prosecute the officers (which had spread nationwide) was a “disgrace.” 

I was accepted to transfer into Temple Univ.’s art school.  Ironically, my activist A’s were considered a great achievement. (I believe they were unaware of the college shut-downs in New York State.) They also liked my 6-foot Payday Candy Bar painted with obsessive pop detail. Before dorms closed, I decided to visit an old boyfriend in Providence, who was part of a group with an incendiary approach to political change.  I was afraid of his maps. My cowardice was the practical kind learned in high school. Safety first, trouble can find you anyway. 

Fall 1970, I was so behind in my drawing skills, the instructor offered private crits until my work was up to class standard. The goal was to be able to draw whatever you could see. (If given an assignment of a 20-hour rendering, it was obvious if you only spent 10.)  Toward the end of the semester. I could put drawings in weekly “hangings” critiques. I also was able to process my activist work. For me, commitment to a political goal meant being useful, a cog in some wheel for the greater good. 

On network news, I had seen the thousands of people, young and old, Veterans, Jaycees, and Lion’s Clubs; families, teachers, priests, ministers, rabbis.  Black and White people, marching as separate individuals or parts of groups. (Writing this, I wonder where were the Hispanics and Asians?  Did I not notice, or did they blend-into other groups?) All I know is that we were Americans together to end the war, as a peaceful community. An LBJ biography said that when he looked out his window at all the demonstrators, he knew it was time to go. Was that the March of 1969 or 1967?  My recollection was 1969, the rarely-aired Moratorium March. 

2022, “We the People” seemed to have lost touch with the yearning for peace that once remade America. The horrors of the Ukrainian war may have refreshed our minds. In 1969,  though sidelined by corporate objectives and elected officials, the big March, signalled crucial change. In 2022, our handlers cannot manage the crisis of environmental change. We are called by planetary crisis of epic proportions. Future shock is now, Facts broaden our nation to the entire human race. 

The peace movement showed unity came with a common purpose. And it took discipline not to fragment into groups.  Social media makes this harder, encouraging people to take sides, identify with a racial or social group, vent their frustrations. Yet listening to those with differing ideology and working to find understanding, common ground, is still essential–to create agency for an ongoing movement. Peace groups included Panthers and SDS. “Identity politics” work against mass societal change. 

The “Woodstock” generation was the first in U.S. history to publicly seek the end of an unpopular war. It succeeded in influencing the outcome, because it became a broad mainstream movement. The Vietnam War, when it is studied in schools, rarely focuses on what the Antiwar movement actually accomplished. We have always had propaganda to nullify political or social movements but in 2022 such controls have a multiplicity of objectives. 

Marginalizing environmental change seems to protect the profits margins of corporate business. Managing “hopelessness and eco-fear” are less expensive than changing their product or means of production to halt environmental crisis. Covid narratives in media focus on the isolated individual and their country’s reaction to the virus. Few focus on the National Geographic story about the link between the depreciation of environments and the emergence of Covid and other viruses. All over the world, the usual hosts of these viruses, small mammals (who don’t get sick from it) disappeared with their environments. That they jumped to human hosts is a fact, not some debatable possibility. How are world leaders restoring those environments and animals?  Why for convenience and profits, are some choosing  extinction?  (Other primates don’t destroy their habitats).

But there are positive actions also occurring, little perceived by the obsessive churning “breaking” news of the 24/7 news cycle. A teenage boy invented an app for plastics and has cleaned the North Sea.  Defunct dams have been removed in every state and at least 1800 free-flowing rivers having been restored. Whole ecosystems including fish, have returned. Every city in the nation has removed one or more defunct dams. Coral reefs are being built. Young people growing up with serious environmental threat, are learning they can connect with others and make changes. What are our corporate overlords doing? Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg seem invested in vehicles to flee Earth. Branson is also joining the space race. Gates is one of the few focussed on Earth’s ecology and the survival of people. (I am all for space exploration, not the spectacle of an Exodus of rich people abandoning Mothership Earth).

As we celebrate the fight against Britain for Independence, the first generation in U.S. history to halt an unpopular war should also be discussed. History is in books, free in libraries that are still funded. I have worked publicizing political books for many university presses. There are two you might want to reference in terms of the Vietnam War and propaganda, information unknown today or forgotten. 

M.I.A.: Mythmaking in America by Bruce Franklin (Rutgers University Press). Excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly in the 1980s (and accepted as fact) shows the origins of the M.I.A. myth as a negotiating tool for the Nixon administration in the Paris Peace Accords, They took place ten years after the war was over and no soldiers were left. 

The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam by Jerry Lembcke, Sociology Professor at Holy Cross College and former member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, analyzed the widely believed narrative that American soldiers were “spat upon” and insulted by anti-war protestors upon returning home. After extensive documented research, Lembcke found not one case of any soldier being spat upon. Antiwar activism-the peace movement was widespread and included the participation of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The enemy was never our brave soldiers but the hidden “military industrial complex” well depicted in “Dr. Strangelove.” Yet Hollywood movies like “Coming Home” sold that narrative. 

Hollywood characterizations of the antiwar movement rarely stray from deranged “hippies” obsessed with drugs and sex. Most films ignore the sane young men, who did not feel it was patriotic to die for geopolitical advantage. Also ignored in depictions of easy 60s “chicks,” is the fact young women faced death from illegal abortion. Planned Parenthood gave many women, for the first time, access to gynecological care and counselling about sexuality. 

So many narratives of young women “getting into trouble” (their fault obviously) and no reference to a clean clinic they might go to–without shame. There is a reason Margaret Sanger, born in 1950s, became a birth control activist, sex educator, writer and nurse. Google her.  Today, any man can choose a vasectomy, even a reversible one. Why then the cultural desire to deny women’s choice? The woman’s movement was about the value of female lives as human beings. The worth of those lives was not equal in 1969 and still  disparaged in 2022.  

In 1969, grass-roots education, door-door work were essential. Soliciting donations was important, but the more impersonal, the less useful.  In 2022 a “the World First, save the planet movement” might focus on deliberate thoughtful actions occurring around the world.  Anyone can do something useful. For instance, during the early days of the Trump administration, scores of media people worked quickly to save scientific information on public sites, particularly NASA, that were being erased. People with skills were asked by government employees (many losing their jobs) to help preserve science.

Imagine where our diplomacy would be today, if all the career diplomats, forced to leave, after spending lifetimes working with other countries, had been able to store their knowledge for what has come.

S.W.