According to a widespread urban legend, the Vietnam anti-war movement was mostly composed of privileged college kids and the war was most enthusiastically supported by blue collar workers. That’s the story perpetuated in countless TV shows, movies, press reports and history textbooks.
Sociologist and labor educator Penny Lewis debunks this story in her meticulous and nuanced book Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement As Myth and Reality (ILR Press, Cornell University Press).
Class and culture divides did exist around the war. It is certainly true that AFL- CIO president George Meany supported the war and that a mob of New York construction workers attacked peaceful anti-war demonstrators outside the Wall Street stock exchange in 1970. However, a national poll found that 53 percent of unionists surveyed immediately after the attacks condemned the hardhats. Anti-war unions in New York organized a peace demonstration in response. In another national poll at that time, a majority of union members opposed the war.
All over the country, many thousands of workers participated in antiwar activities through their unions. The national leadership of a significant minority of unions opposed Meany and denounced the war. Labor for Peace provided a sophisticated analysis in their book, A Rich Man’s War and A Poor Man’s Fight.
Paradoxically, the movement originated on elite campuses, but working class people were more likely to oppose the war. From the earliest days, polls showed that the Americans most likely to be pro-war were those who had the highest education, the highest incomes and high status occupations.
Lewis notes that Charles Chatfield, a renowned historian of peace movements, argued the Vietnam anti-war movement “never succeeded in becoming a ‘positive reference point’ for sentiment against the war, a feeling whose parameters he estimates exceeded the organized movement by a ratio of 60 to 1.”
Chatfield said organized opposition “came mainly from middle class, college-educated whites, materially comfortable and motivated by moral considerations.” He said the “great majority” of Vietnam dissenters were a “people apart.” They were “lower-economic class, often women and black, with grade school educations and lowprestige jobs” who Chatfield characterized as “isolationist,” “politically inarticulate” and “disaffected.” At the beginning, they tended to oppose the war on pragmatic grounds, that it was “a waste of men and money.”
Lewis qualifies and challenges these conclusions. She says the organized movement attracted many individuals and groups who were working class but didn’t identify themselves primarily as “labor.” This was a time when many working class families were able to send their kids to college for the first time. Many of those students got involved in the anti-war movement.
The anti-war movement interacted with predominately working class civil rights, black power and other ethnicitybased groups (especially the Chicano movement). She notes, “Each movement developed its own form of antiwar critique and mobilized against the war on its own terms.”
The GI and veteran peaceniks provided an angry working class perspective. In a large demonstration by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, vets threw their medals on the steps of Capitol Hill. They held “Winter Soldier” hearings about atrocities in Vietnam.
Rebellious soldiers in Vietnam may have been the group that played the biggest role in ending the war. Dissenting GIs could pay a high price for just speaking up. Nevertheless, resistance and sabotage was widespread. In a 1971 article in the Armed Forces Journal, Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote:
“Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. … [C]onditions [exist] among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by … the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.”
Lewis says that the movement was “a massive, sprawling, multiheaded phenomenon” with as many as 6 million active participants and another 25 million close sympathizers. At war’s end, a vast majority of Americans concluded not only that the war was a mistake but also “fundamentally wrong and immoral.”
Many years later in 2011, scruffy young protesters converged on Wall Street saying the one percent was screwing over the 99 percent. Unions rushed to support them, both to protect them from the cops and to provide aid. For the first time in decades, class had become a central issue in American politics.
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This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
