Who Protested Against the Vietnam War?

By Richard Spilsbury

How do we know about the thousands of people who protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s? What did they do and what happened to them? This book shows how we know about the protesters and their experiences from primary and other sources. It includes information on some historical detective work that has taken place, using documentary and oral evidence, that has enabled historians to piece together the fascinating story of Vietnam War protesters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
• Release date: Dec 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781484635605

Richard Spilsbury

Richard Spilsbury is an experienced author of nonfiction books for young people. He has written about a wide range of topics including science, nature, and history.

Book preview

images/cover.jpgimages/img-1-1.jpg

CONTENTS

MARCHING ON THE WHITE HOUSE

HOW DID THE VIETNAM WAR BEGIN?

WHY DID PEOPLE START TO PROTEST AGAINST THE WAR?

WHAT DID STUDENTS DO TO PROTEST?

WHY DID SOLDIERS PROTEST?

WHO TOLD THE WORLD ABOUT THE WAR?

HOW DID WAR PROTESTS BECOME WIDESPREAD?

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PROTESTERS AFTER THE WAR?

WHY WERE THE PROTESTERS SIGNIFICANT?

TIMELINE

GLOSSARY

FIND OUT MORE

INDEX

Some words are shown in bold, like this. You can find out what they mean by looking in the glossary.

MARCHING ON THE WHITE HOUSE

It is November 15, 1969, in Washington, D.C. A crowd of over 250,000 people has converged on the city, making this the biggest single antiwar demonstration in U.S. history. The Vietnam Moratorium movement had organized the march. Moratorium means a suspension of activity, and the group aimed to force the U.S. government to stop its military activity in Vietnam. The Vietnam War had been raging since around 1965, and its costs to the Vietnamese people, to U.S. soldiers, and to the U.S. economy were becoming widely known by the late 1960s.

images/img-4-1.jpg

These marchers in 1969 represented a wide cross section of Americans strongly opposed to their country’s war in Vietnam.

GROWING PROTESTS

Protests against the war had been growing in frequency and popularity. The Washington March organizers had promoted the event nationwide to encourage more protesters. David Wilcomb recalls, Nine friends and I pooled our money, crowded into a Ford van, and drove all the way from Oklahoma to D.C.

Organizers provided free meals and lodgings at Washington schools, churches, and other organizations. Police and troops stationed around Washington watched the crowds carefully and were ready to defend the capital if they thought the protests got out of hand.

DAY AND NIGHT PROTESTS

By day, politicians, soldiers with firsthand experience of war, students, families, and other people from all walks of life gathered by the White House to hear speeches against the Vietnam War. They sang along together to popular antiwar songs such as John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance. Hippies with long hair and colorful clothes pushed flowers into soldiers’ guns as a symbol of peace, while crowds including business people such as store owners looked on approvingly. By night, protesters gathered in front of the White House gates. They laid out empty coffins representing some of the 45,000 U.S. soldiers who had been killed in the Vietnam War so far. Protesters took part in a candlelit vigil in which they read out the names of some of the dead soldiers.

SUCCESS?

President Richard Nixon claimed that a small but vocal minority of protesters was drowning out a silent majority who approved of the war. But to many people who had been at the march, read newspaper reports, or seen TV coverage, the Washington March demonstrated widespread support for the antiwar movement. As we shall see, this march and many other protests had a major impact on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. As Sam Brown, a Vietnam Moratorium movement activist, said in 1982:

At the time my judgment was that the moratorium hadn’t really succeeded because the war didn’t end, but…it…brought in people who hadn’t been involved in [antiwar activity] before... In that sense it was a tremendous success.

HOW DID THE VIETNAM WAR BEGIN?

Imagine you were a student in college or an adult at work getting the news that you had to leave your normal life and go to the jungles of Vietnam to fight for your country. This was the reality for thousands of ordinary Americans in the mid-1960s until the early 1970s. But how did the United States and other countries become involved in the war?

images/img-6-1.jpg

U.S. soldiers crowd onto the decks of a troop ship arriving in Vietnam.

PRELUDE TO WAR

Since the late 1940s, the United States had been involved in a Cold War with the USSR and China. The United States was trying to prevent the spread of communism. Vietnam had been split in two in the mid-1950s, following the end of long-term colonization by France. A civil war had then started. North Vietnam had a popular communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, who received support and military aid from the USSR and China. South Vietnam had corrupt, unpopular, but anticommunist leadership. The United