 In this lecture, we're going to be focusing on the domestic impact of the Vietnam War and the broader impact on American society and American culture that the war brought about. In our previous lecture, we talked about the international impact of the war and how the U.S. became involved in Vietnam in the first place, the reasons for it, how the war progressed very briefly we discussed, and ultimately the outcome of the conflict for the Vietnamese and for the United States. In this lecture on the other, we're going to focus more on the social trends and the cultural trends that the war era brought about in American society and examine why we see the emergence during this period of a protest movement, a movement that was really unprecedented in American history of people in opposition to the war. The war itself generated a movement that had never been seen before in the United States. There have always been people protesting war in the U.S., all the way back to the American Revolution. There have always been those who felt that war was morally wrong or had various reasons to be opposed to it. But the war in Vietnam generates more conflict in more protest in the United States than any other war. And what's fascinating about the conflict that's generated during the Vietnam era is that in particular the anti-war movement is staffed and led by white middle class educated young people. In other words, as mostly is the case, students. So one of the things we're going to examine in this lecture is why students? Why are students so involved in bringing about this unprecedented level of domestic opposition to the war? What helps predispose students in the 1960s to be involved in that? And then we're going to talk more about some of the various aspects of the protest movement and finally the outcome and the consequences of the protest movement for American politics and for American society during this period. So again, the question, why students? Why are students, both the foot soldiers and in some respects the leaders of this growing protest movement? Well, historians and sociologists and others who have examined this have offered a number of explanations for why students become so radicalized, so active in the 1960s. One of the things that some historians have argued is that this individual here, Dr. Benjamin Spock, played a role in that. And Spock was a writer, was a physician who wrote on childhood issues on how to raise children. And many parents in the 1950s read his books on how to raise their children. And Spock argued in favor of something they called the child-centered family, that children should be the focus of the family. This was a viewpoint that was very different than previous generations' ideas about the role of children. Children typically in the 19th century were seen as an extra pair of hands to help work. And so children would go to work on the farm at a young age or they'd go to work in the factory at a young age to support the families. In the early 20th century, this changes a little bit and people become a little bit more concerned about child welfare and ensuring that children have a safe environment. But children still were expected unless they were growing up in a very upper middle class or wealthy family to pitch in, to work, to contribute to the family. Well, Spock presents a different perspective. He argues that families should orient themselves around providing for the children. In other words, children should become entitled members of the family, entitled to gifts, entitled to being taken care of by their parents. And as a result of this, you see a generation of children being raised after World War II, the baby boomer generation, who are convinced because of how they're raised that ultimately they are sort of the center of the universe. They're convinced of their own importance. They've been constantly mothered and pampered and cared for. And again, this shouldn't say all children, but certainly a lot of these baby boomer children are raised being pampered and cared for and convinced of their own importance. They're convinced that they are really what matters. And so this kind of psychology of how they were raised certainly has an influence on why these students are willing to kind of get up and challenge the system, challenge the way things are in the United States in the 60s because they don't like it and they disagree with it. And they think things should be more like how they want them to be. So that certainly is an influence, is that the influence of Dr. Benjamin Spock on child raising practices in the 50s and early 60s. The other thing that influences why students are out protesting and becoming a hugely important part of American political scene during this period is that there's a critical mass of students in college in the 1960s. This baby boomer generation, many of whom were born in 1946 and after by the early 60s are becoming old enough to go to college or becoming 17, 18 years old. And so the college population in the United States doubles over the course of the 1960s, goes from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million during the course of the decade. And as a result, a huge number of young people in the United States between 18 and the early 20s are concentrated in colleges and universities across the nation. And this provides sort of an opportunistic breeding ground for mass movements, whatever those movements might be. You have a lot of young people who have a lot of free time on their hands, because while they're going to college and while they're taking classes, they have their summers off. They have a lot of free time before and after classes and probably many of them are willing to skip classes if necessary. And they have that ability to organize themselves and to be influential in protesting whatever there is to protest. You've got a couple of other influences. You also have the civil rights influence. And there are a lot of young people involved in the civil rights movement, both white and black. And they bring back to college a lot of the lessons they learned being involved in the civil rights. There were a lot of young white people who participated in freedom rides and in freedom summer, which were campaigns to integrate public transportation and campaigns to bring voting rights. And they went back to college at the end of the summer after participating in freedom summer, and they were inspired by the civil rights movement. And they brought a lot of the organizing techniques they had learned in the civil rights movement back to the campus, the growing student protests against the Vietnam War. A couple of last things. Also, there's a certain generational influence here. Young people, young baby boomers in the 60s were convinced that they knew more than their parents, they were convinced they were better than their parents, they were convinced their parents were just wrong about a lot of things. And there's a certain rebellious generational influence that influences student protests. And finally, the last thing to mention is that this isn't just an American phenomenon. We definitely see student protests in the 1960s in places like France, in places like England. So this isn't simply strictly an American phenomenon, although it's probably more present in America in some respects than in other places. We definitely see huge student protest movements in England and France and Western Europe in general during this period as well. So it's part of a broader international phenomenon. The growing protest movement in the United States really takes on two different aspects. And we're going to talk briefly about both of those. The first is that it's a, the first aspect is it's a political movement, a growth of a new left wing in American politics and young radicals as they were often referred to. And that this is a new movement, a very radical, very left wing, very liberal as opposed to conservative movement. The other side of this protest movement are cultural protesters, those who are challenging cultural norms and rules in society. And these are sort of the hippies that we think of as being influential in the 1960s and people advocating free love, drug use and so forth who are challenging sort of cultural notions within American society. There definitely are tensions and conflicts between these two groups. Plenty of these political radicals look at the hippies as a bunch of idiots who are just wasting their lives when they could be involved in political protests. Hippies look at all these young radicals as being too uptight, too kind of wrapped up in their own importance and in need of serious attitude adjustments. So these two sides of this kind of same coin don't necessarily get along very well and there definitely are tensions between them during the course of the 1960s. To talk a little bit about the origins of the student protest movement in the 60s, we first have to look at an organization called Students for a Democratic Society or SDS as it's shorthand referred to. The Students for a Democratic Society was a very kind of leftist student protest organization that evolves over the course of the 1960s and plays an important role in helping organize many of the early student protests against the Vietnam War and against other things such as nuclear weapons and the military-industrial complex and so forth. The SDS is organized in June of 1962 and actually comes out of the labor movement of unionism in the United States. It comes from a number of young college age people who are members of an organization that's sort of an offshoot from the labor movement called the League for Industrial Democracy and they meet each other at a summer camp that's run by the United Auto Workers at the place of Port Huron, Michigan. And two of the guys who are very important in this movement, one of whom here, Tom Hayden, Hayden and Al Haber, they decide that they want to take this organization, this League for Industrial Democracy that was sort of a youth auxiliary to various labor organizations and they wanted to reinvent it as a more effective, more powerful political force in American society. And so during the summer of 62 when they're at the summer camp at Port Huron, Michigan, they sit down and they write something called the Port Huron Statement. And this is essentially a statement that outlines what they think is wrong with the world. It's wrong with adult society. And it's a statement that sort of argues that young people and students are in a good place to reform the society that their adult parents have made and have basically screwed up. It offers the Port Huron Statement a very kind of touchy-feely approach to solving the world's problems and argues that things such as liberalism, communism, other isms are not the way to make the world a better place. And in fact, the only way to make the world a better place is to empower people, is to give power to the people and help people escape from this kind of institutionalized, corporatized American political economic social system that they felt dominated the United States by the early 1960s. And so it's really, in many ways, the ideas within this document are very influential, both in terms of political and cultural context for an entire generation in the 60s. The idea that people needed to be free, they needed to be able to express themselves. The corporations and the government and the man and all these sort of forces that were beyond the ability of the individual to deal with were keeping people down. And it was only if students got together and really believed in themselves and really worked hard and tried to band together and challenge these economic, political, social institutions that were oppressing individuals within the United States. That was the only way to achieve true enlightenment and true freedom. SDS gets involved in a number of activities. Initially, they are involved in community organizing, helping to challenge social inequalities and discrimination. They're also involved in freedom summer. A lot of SDS people get involved in going to the South and helping to organize voting rights drives and so forth. And ultimately, they face a choice. They face a choice for either a revolution for themselves or a revolution for others. In other words, a revolution for others being the civil rights movement, a revolution for themselves being kind of a student protest movement. They decide to sort of go on the favor of a revolution for themselves. And so they come out against the Vietnam War. And they probe to be one of the early sources of major organization for growing anti-war protests after 1965, after the United States becomes involved in a significant way by sending troops into South Vietnam and by bombing the North. So the SDS play an important part in helping provide a kind of a basis of organization for the student protest movement. Another aspect of the protest movement comes out of Berkeley, California in the early 1960s, coming out of the West Coast. And then to understand why the Berkeley free speech movement matters and why it comes about, we have to understand a little bit about college life at the beginning of the 1960s. And California is a really good example of the way that colleges were changing in the United States between the 1950s and the 60s. In the 1950s especially, colleges had become a source for research, for industry, for research for business purposes, research for the government, for military and weapons development. And the universities from being these institutions of liberal arts and higher education that were sort of there to help make people better, improve their lives, make them smart, were becoming centers for research and development of commercial and military technologies. This is the beginning of what some historians have called the military industrial academic complex. Well, universities were becoming more professional oriented as part of this shift. And we're moving away from being simply centers of higher education and liberal arts. Many universities, especially in California, whose population had boomed in the 1940s and 50s, were experimenting with mass education, putting 1,000 students in a classroom or putting up multiple classrooms and using video monitors to show the professor lecturing in one room. And students were beginning to get upset with this. They didn't like this change in how universities were functioning. They didn't like the fact that universities were working on bombs and weapons development. They didn't like the fact that they were going, paying to go to college and they were sitting in classrooms with 1,000 students and they weren't getting any sort of real interaction with their professors. And so at the University of California at Berkeley, which was a real pioneering university for some of these changes, students become increasingly frustrated with the university and the administration. The other aspect that helps bring about this free speech movement is that in the 50s, late 1560s, the overriding view of universities was that they were there to kind of keep an eye on students and to make sure that students didn't get out of hand. They were essentially acting as parents. The phrase is in local parenthesis. In other words, universities were there to act as parents for students, for young people. And so as a result of that, universities had all sorts of rules on the book to prevent what they thought was inappropriate behavior for students. Well, in 1959 in Berkeley, California, the chancellor of the university, a man named Kerr, puts a new rule on the book. He's worried about student political activism on campus. This is really when the early beginnings of the civil rights movement are happening. And Kerr feels that it's inappropriate for students to be discussing political events or engaging in political activism on campus. And again, as part of this sort of in-local parenthesis function, he issues a ruling that says that student groups were not allowed to express public opinions about off-campus issues on campus or pass out literature or do anything that was sort of engaging in political protest. And Kerr felt this was perfectly legitimate as his role as the chancellor of the university, he could tell the students what they should or shouldn't do because it was in their best interest. Well, this initially is not popular, but kind of is ignored. But beginning in 1964, after the summer of 64, where a lot of the students in Berkeley, not a lot, but a number of the students in Berkeley participate in the Freedom Summer, they come back from this and they want to talk about civil rights. They want to pass out literature on political issues. And Berkeley, the University of California, Berkeley attempts to stop them by arresting them or essentially preventing them from protesting or from passing out literature. And this creates a great deal of anger within the population, those who were politically active on campus. And they demand their free speech rights and they begin giving impromptu speeches about political issues and daring the university to arrest them. And this grows into a broad movement on campus. And ultimately, Berkeley backs down in 1965 and withdraws these restrictions on free speech. But this helps energize, again, a generation of students at Berkeley about the importance of free speech and helps bring about, again, another nucleus of organizing against issues, evolving civil rights and eventually the Vietnam War, that helps grow the student protest movement into a very powerful force within the United States. As I said, the protest movement's about more than just war. Protest movements during the 1960s involved a lot of things, civil rights, women's rights, anti-nuclear weapons research protests, environmentalism, and so forth. And initially, the war is only a small part of this broader kind of protest movement of the 1960s and really kind of marginalized until at least the mid-1960s, probably because America's involvement in Vietnam had been fairly minimal until the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of mid-1964, and it was only after that date that a lot of American troops start going to Vietnam. But between 64 and 68, the student protest movement definitely grows in strength and grows in power. And they engage in a number of different ways of protesting. One of the ways is that students engage in sit-ins, kind of taking inspiration from the sit-ins that African-American students had done at the counters at Woolworths in the 1950s. Students engage, I should say, beginning of the 1960s. Well, students begin to engage in sit-ins and classroom buildings and office buildings and the buildings for the presidents of universities in order to protest and just sit there and force them to try to call on the police and remove them. So we have sit-ins as a means of protest. Marches, of course. Mass marches become a hallmark of the student protest movement, both on the West Coast as well as the East Coast. So you have these large mass protests engaged in by men and women against various things, especially after 1964, the war itself. Other things that happen, we have draft carb burnings, we have mass events where people are engaging in civil disobedience against the government. And so all of this plays a big part in generating this kind of nucleus of the movement. The movement remains largely a student movement until 1968. And for reasons we'll discuss in a few minutes, that's really when it becomes a mass movement that embraces both students and non-students in the United States. So from 64 to 68, this is sort of the peak of the student-led protest movement. Again, the other aspect of this movement is the counterculture, is those who are the cultural warriors against what they saw as this restrictive, stifling American society that didn't respect women, that didn't respect freedom, that didn't expect and people's rights to express themselves however they wanted to. The counterculture emerges a little bit after the political part of the student movement. And they are really demanding cultural freedom. Freedom to have alternative lifestyles, hippies and so forth. Communes, there are ecological offshoots, people creating sort of environmental communes in New Mexico because they don't produce waste and they'll be environmentally much healthier. It's also where the early origins of the environmentalist movement that becomes important especially in the 70s and 80s comes from. People in the counterculture begin to sort of reject traditional religions and look towards Eastern mysticism, Buddha, Buddhism, yoga, Hinduism and so forth as an inspiration. Well, of course sex, drugs and rock and roll play a part in that. Here we have the famous Woodstock concert where there's a lot of all three of those activities taking place. So it's a very vibrant culture and the counterculture didn't necessarily all agree on anything, many different offshoots of the counterculture but in general the demand was personal liberation, anti-greed, anti-corporation, anti-hatred, whatever hatred might be, anti-social bad behavior. So counterculture was all about personal liberation, feeling good, doing good, doing the right thing, anti-business, anti-government, you name it. But it much more of a kind of cultural sense than the political side of the protest movement which was very much about specific political issues that students were unhappy about. Now I said 1968 was an important transition point. Well why was 1968 such an important critical turning point in the student movement? A number of reasons. One of the first of these was that 1968 is when you have the Tet Offensive of Vietnam and suddenly the American public kind of wakes up to the fact that the war is far from won. And so a lot of Americans who've been supportive of their government have been patriotic. I thought these student protestors were idiots or maybe they were communist dupes or whatever who start to realize that the government had been lying to them for years about how close the war was to being won. And as a result of the Tet Offensive the more people, middle-aged people, older people, people who weren't in college start to protest against the government. And so that's certainly an important aspect of why the student movement begins to turn into a mass movement. The other aspect of one of the reasons why the student movement starts to sort of disintegrate a little bit after 1968 is that in the summer of 1968 the Democratic Party holds their national convention. They didn't have Lyndon Johnson to reelect. They needed to find somebody else to run. It had been a very contentious primary season. Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated while running during the primaries while running for president. So it was a rather difficult year for the Democratic Party to try to kind of figure out what they were doing. They hold their convention in Chicago and many of the student protest groups like SDS, the Black Panthers, other student protest movements use as an opportunity to protest against the Democratic Party because they felt that Lyndon Johnson was a war criminal. He was responsible for the war even though he had really inherited it from Kennedy and they saw it as an opportunity to challenge the Democratic Party. So all these student protest groups descend on Chicago and they riot and they protest and they get in fights with the police and the police certainly are quite willing to use force against these student protestors. And all this is being broadcast on national television on the nightly news. And so the middle class and upper class people in the United States see this and there's a strong reaction that these students have gone too far, that they've lost all respect for society, that they're a bunch of whiny privileged brats in some respects. And as a result, the middle class really lose their support. The students really lose their support among the broader American population. And afterwards the movement begins to lose cohesion and focus and starts to splinter a little bit into a lots of different offshoots. The most committed of the student protestors, some of them decide that the only way they're gonna make anything changes is if they get into politics. So you begin to see student protestors running for public office at the local and the state levels. Other student protestors decide that the only way to get anything done is to become true radicals. In other words, engage in terrorism. You get groups like the weathermen here who are an offshoot of SDS. You start blowing up buildings and businesses and government offices and things like that in protest of the war and in protest of other issues. And then of course you have the counterculture who in some cases go off and start communes or end up in really kind of radical sort of living arrangements. The more committed of them do that, the less committed of them oftentimes go back to school. They get jobs, they become guppies and they sort of enter the middle class. So movement begins to definitely splinter off in a lot of different directions. But if we wanna talk in a broad sense about how the student protest movement of the 60s influences and impacts American society, a couple of different ways we can say that. Number one, it introduces this notion of as I would say touchy-feely politics to American society. That politics isn't just about about making the most efficient decision for the most number of people or about contributing to specific special interest groups. Politics is about people feeling good, people feeling happy, people having empowerment. And so these sort of these very soft notions of what was good for society we start to become embedded in American politics and it really changes how politicians have to campaign and have to run for office. It also the notion of personal empowerment becomes very important that you had to be free and empowered, that you had to be able to kind of do what you wanted when you wanted it. And that becomes an important part of kind of American culture and it's really important offshoot of the protest movement. So these changing notions of American society, personal empowerment and freedom, a desire to be more kind of the touchy-feely aspects of politics, feel good politics if you want to put it that way. Are very important legacies of this protest movement. And of course, as I said, the irony is that when the protest movement really is at its peak in 1968, it begins to, the student side of things began to splinter and the student protest movement really begins to fall apart as the protest movement is becoming mainstream and as more and more Americans, not just students, not just young people in their early 20s, embrace the criticism of the Vietnam War, embrace some of the criticisms of the government that the student protestors had initially been talking about. The last thing to mention by way of wrapping up the lecture too is that oftentimes we have this mistaken notion that everybody was protesting in the 60s, certainly in the early 60s that every student on campus was protesting. The reality is that this notion of universal protests was a myth. Student protestors were always in the minority of students. Protesters in general are always in the minority. There were no universal protests. There were plenty of young people who kept their heads down, went to classes, got degrees, got jobs during the turbulence of the 1960s. And there were plenty of people in general who didn't agree or didn't engage in the student protest movement. So we had to be cautious. We can't say that the student protest movement was universal, but it certainly was influential and it had very important impact on politics, on American society, and ultimately on American culture and created an environment that looked very different by 1970s than had looked in the early 60s or certainly in the late 50s.