From teach-ins to mass marches
Opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States did not begin in 1967. Campus teach-ins had started in 1965, and there were marches in Washington and other cities in 1965 and 1966. What changed in 1967 was scale, variety and the arrival of mainstream figures. The movement was never a single organisation; it was a loose collection of pacifist groups, church bodies, student organisations, veterans, civil rights activists and political radicals who often disagreed on tactics.
The April mobilisation
On 15 April 1967 a coalition known as the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam held two large demonstrations on the same day. In New York, marchers walked from Central Park to the United Nations, where speakers included Martin Luther King, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Stokely Carmichael. In San Francisco, a rally was held at Kezar Stadium. Estimates of attendance varied widely, with organisers giving much larger figures than the police; for New York, figures from the low hundreds of thousands are often quoted, and for San Francisco tens of thousands. At Sheep Meadow in Central Park, young men burned draft cards before the march, and one report put the number at about 150 to 175.
King’s participation followed his Riverside Church address by less than two weeks, which linked the antiwar and civil rights causes and was met with criticism from some civil rights leaders and newspapers. The April marches also gave rise to a new organisation. Several returned servicemen who had marched formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War in New York that month, an early step toward a veterans’ movement that became more prominent after 1970.
Resisting the draft
For many young men, the principal contact with the war was the Selective Service draft. In 1967 the system still allowed many student deferments, which meant that the burden fell more heavily on those who did not attend college, an inequality that fed resentment on and off campus. Resistance took several forms:
- Conscientious objection, which required applicants to prove a sincere moral or religious objection to war in general.
- Draft card burning or turning in cards, which was against federal law and prosecuted, after legislation in 1965 and a 1968 Supreme Court ruling against the burners in United States v. O’Brien.
- Refusal to be inducted, as in the case of the boxer Muhammad Ali on 28 April.
- Leaving the country, typically for Canada, which began to increase in number around this time.
Organisers also called for collective acts. During the week of 16 to 20 October, “Stop the Draft Week” in Oakland, California, saw demonstrators try to close the induction centre. There were clashes with police during the week, with more arrests and injuries. A group known as The Resistance encouraged young men to hand in their cards in public ceremonies in several cities.
Campuses and the war industry
Universities became a main site of conflict. On 18 October a protest against recruiters from Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison ended in a confrontation with police using clubs and tear gas, and many students and bystanders were hurt. The incident drew criticism of police tactics and showed how quickly a sit-in could turn violent. Demonstrations against campus recruiting by the military and by weapons contractors occurred at many other colleges. Off campus, the summer’s community organising project known as Vietnam Summer sent volunteers door to door to talk with ordinary voters about the war.
Several days later, on 21 October, the March on the Pentagon in Washington drew a crowd of tens of thousands, and its mixture of civil disobedience, street theatre and confrontations with troops produced the decade’s best-known protest photographs.
Beyond the protesters
It is easy to overstate how far public opinion had turned. Polls showed that large numbers of Americans doubted that the war was going well, and in the autumn, according to Gallup, those calling the intervention a mistake reportedly began to match or exceed those who did not. Yet many of those uneasy about the war disliked the protesters even more, and a hawkish minority wanted a stronger military effort rather than withdrawal. Newspaper coverage often focused on the most striking or disorderly acts, which could harm the cause. Polls taken at the time suggested that people could simultaneously doubt the war and disapprove of draft-card burners and street confrontations.
A different strand of opposition was political and moderate. Members of Congress, including senators in the Democratic Party, voiced doubts about the course of the war in committee hearings. A “Dump Johnson” movement, led by the organiser Allard Lowenstein, sought a candidate to challenge the president in the primaries and eventually persuaded Eugene McCarthy to run; he announced his candidacy at the end of November. Meanwhile the debate on the war was reaching religious communities and business circles, and prominent entertainers and writers made their views public. Black Power advocates added a further critique in which the war was linked to racism both at home and abroad.
Assessing the effect
Historians still argue about how much the protests changed policy. Some say they hardened the administration’s resolve and enabled critics to portray the opposition as unpatriotic; others argue that sustained public dissent limited the room for further escalation and helped lead to the decisions of 1968. A cautious view is that the protests helped to turn the war into the central issue in American politics, while the specific effect on any one decision is hard to isolate. Events on the battlefield, casualties and the credibility of official reports were also major influences, and the shock of the Tet Offensive in early 1968 is generally seen as a larger turning point in opinion than any 1967 march.