Protesters inherit traditions of 1960s

Students were the force behind the anti-war protest movement during the Vietnam War in the… Students were the force behind the anti-war protest movement during the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

Now, more than 40 years later, the United States is five years into the war in Iraq. Students are still protesting, but the effects of a volunteer army, the Internet and a risk-adverse society have changed the nature of protests and the desire of students to take to the streets.

“It’s hard to predict the future,” said Pitt professor Richard Oestreicher, “but I could imagine if the [Iraq] war continues and escalates in ways that raises both casualties and the costs of the American public, the sense of urgency will grow greater.”

Taking Action: Now and Then

Several hundred people showed up Saturday, March 29, to protest the Iraq war. At least half of them were high school- or college-aged students, said Edith Wilson, administrative director of the Thomas Merton Center, a peace and social justice center in Pittsburgh and one of the sponsors of the day’s march. Some student peace organizations were also present.

Earlier that week, the radical anarchist organization, Pittsburgh Organizing Group, took a more humorous approach when it tried to trick both the media and pro-war activists.

Its members carried a 12- by 5-foot cage across Carnegie Mellon University’s campus. Their plan was to capture military recruiters from the Army recruitment center on Forbes Avenue and confine them in a cage so they could “no longer pose danger to our community,” according to the POG Web site.

POG member and Pitt sophomore Noah Willumsen said the anti-war action was not meant to be a huge rally. The goal to cage the recruiters was, in fact, a joke.

“It’s important to act with a sense of humor,” said Willumsen. “Otherwise, you just get burnt out.” Although just 65 people showed up, Willumsen was pleased with the turnout.

But Willumsen’s nonchalance reveals the evident contrast between him and his Vietnam-era predecessors.

In 1968, student leaders at Columbia University were serious. They called for a campus-wide boycott of classes so students could instead participate in a series of lectures on the Vietnam War. At Stony Brook University in New York, students cut classes to gather and discuss the war, civil rights and draft resistance.

Columbia made class attendance voluntary after four students were killed at an anti-war protest at Kent State University in 1970. Instead, 3,000 students met in the school’s auditorium and voted to strike through the rest of the term.

Is there that kind of anti-war sentiment at Pitt today?

“I could get 10, maybe 20 people, and it wouldn’t be very effective,” said Lissa Geiger, president of College Democrats at Pitt. “It seems like you need thousands of people. It needs to be a real movement in order for people to take that kind of radical action seriously.”

This kind of radical strike is possible but not probable, said Jerry Lewis, a sociology professor at Kent State. The May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State during the height of the Vietnam era were what triggered nationwide student strikes, said Lewis and Thomas Hensley, a political science professor at Kent State.

Tension and student protest increased dramatically after the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State demonstrators that day killing four and wounding nine Kent State students.

“What you really need for a student strike now is conditions that are as dramatic as what happened there,” said Lewis, referring to the “outrageous force” used against students at Kent State, the Nixon Administration’s announcement that the Vietnam War was spreading, and the public’s discovery that U.S. forces had been in Cambodia for more than a year.

But both Lewis and Hensley doubt there will be this kind of convergence again.

Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, the largest anti-war protest took place in Washington, D.C., Saturday, Sept. 24, 2005, when more than 100,000 activists marched. Just 50 University of Maryland students participated, according to The Diamondback, the university’s newspaper.

It didn’t come close to the ’60s when more than 250,000 activists protested the Vietnam War Nov. 15, 1969, on the exact same real estate – the largest anti-war demonstration in history.

‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll’

In 1959, Students for a Democratic Society formed as the collegiate branch of Old Left institution League for Industrial Democracy. Its members, much like other students at the time, supported Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. They participated heavily in the civil rights movement.

Then, they wanted to be heard.

The Free Speech Movement formed at the University of California at Berkeley in December that year. Soon college campuses became anti-war hot spots, and the movement invaded schools across the United States.

“It was more of a social kind of thing,” said Vietnam vet Dave Thomas. “It was sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It was an explosion.”

One of the hottest spots was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Ill. Outside of the convention riots ensued. Anti-war demonstrators clashed with 11,900 Chicago police, 7,500 Army troops, 7,500 Illinois National Guardsmen and 1,000 Secret Service agents, according to press reports.

The city denied protesters permits to sleep in Lincoln Park, a few miles from the convention location. When the park closed, police officers bombed protesters with tear gas and used billy-clubs to remove them from the park. When it was finally over, police reported 589 demonstrators arrested and 100 injured.

A ‘Sense of Urgency’

The 1960s marked the rise of the anti-war movement, but the decade didn’t begin with radical protest.

When Jon Bjornson, a Vietnam veteran, was discharged in 1965 and returned to the United States, he wasn’t spat on or called a “baby killer,” which happened to some returning soldiers later in the war. Instead, there was a bigger problem.

“Americans did not care, very much like now,” said Bjornson. “The biggest problem was apathy.”

Even Vietnam veteran Dave Thomas, a former member of the Thomas Merton Center’s anti-war committee, said that although he is against the war in Iraq, he felt indifferent about the Vietnam War.

“Probably like most students [feel] today, it was just there,” he said. Thomas returned to the United States in March 1969.

“I was just happy to be alive,” he said. “I just went about my business. I had no political consciousness.”

But unlike many U.S. soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War, Thomas enlisted in the war because he said he wasn’t mature enough to go to college.

By December 1969, the government had instituted a draft – the first since World War II – which was one of the most significant aspects of the Vietnam War that helped ignite the anti-war movement, said Pitt sociology professor Mike Epitropoulos. Today, young people don’t face the same threat to their future plans, livelihood and personal security.

The ways in which they protest reflect it.

On Valentine’s Day, Pittsburgh Organizing Group and CodePink handed out candy bars that said, “Make out, not war!”

“If you or your brother were told you’d be going to Iraq in a month, you probably wouldn’t be passing out candy bars,” said Epitropoulos. “You’d be doing something more direct,” as college students in the ’60s did.

“They would think, ‘Hell, I could go. I could be drafted,'” Bjornson said of the college-aged protesters in the ’60s.

“Even people and students who disapprove of the [war in Iraq] may not have the same sense of urgency,” said Richard Oestreicher, a history professor at Pitt.

‘Blood,’ ‘guts’ and the media

Today’s sense of urgency might not be as noticeable in the streets, but it hasn’t disappeared, said Karen Peterson. Instead, it’s online.

The Internet has helped expand the anti-war movement because people sign online petitions, said Peterson, a member of the Raging Grannies, an anti-war group that staged a protest on Forbes Avenue last month. She said protest against the war in Iraq is booming.

Plus, the demonstrations of the 1960s attracted media attention, and the coverage led people to believe the protests were more successful or bigger than they are now. The lack of media coverage of the Iraq war protests may fuel this belief.

In his essay describing the effects of photojournalism on the protest movement during the Vietnam War, Brady Priest called the movement “the news story of the late 1960s and 1970s.”

The media responded to a “voracious appetite for all Vietnam-related news events” by flooding newspapers, magazines and TV newsrooms with information about the war, Priest said.

“The Vietnam War was the first time on TV you saw the blood and guts,” Bjornson said. “I mean, you really saw the war. And the TV broadcasters reveled in the fact that they could show all this.”

This time around, the media has not been as instrumental or consistently interested in the story.

“The media has been able to limit students’ ability to identify with the people who are killing,” Willumsen said. “[Iraqis and Afghanis] are totally stereotyped as inhuman terrorists. So it’s difficult to get people to identify with them and struggle on behalf of their lives.”

Butler added that people will only join the anti-war movement if they see it as successful in putting an end to a war.

“Empowerment is huge,” said Butler. “People don’t want to join a movement to be crushed. They want to feel like they’re winning or they can win. Without that, the movement will die.”