The Vietnam War was perhaps one of the most widely unpopular wars in U.S history. When one learns about the Vietnam War they cannot avoid the section on the Anti-war movement, and that is because this movement was a very large part to the war. Anti-war feelings ran rampant through the people of America, but what was surprising was with whom these feelings blossomed. It was the youth of America that led the protests and movement against the Vietnam War, specifically students in college. During the Vietnam War, these college students formed many protests groups to voice their anti-war feelings.
During the war, student protesters joined the counterculture movement in denouncing the national government, which they felt was corrupt and amoral. The overall consensus was that the United States had no place fighting in Vietnam and that the American girls and boys overseas should be called back. Nobody said this more than the student protesters from the colleges at the time. These students usually were the middleclass children who had avoided the draft and gone to college instead. However they still fought against the war with a never wavering fury. The war was wrong in their eyes, and they would stop at nothing to have their outcries known. On the college campus, students protested in many ways, including sit-ins and rallies, all ways of protesting the deplorable violence overseas. In 1964 a coalition of student groups at the University of California proclaimed the right to conduct political activities on campus. This group of student activists took the name Free Speech Movement and their policies of political activism and protests spread to other campuses. (Kinsley, 1). The Free Speech Movement was but one of many student organized protests groups working to end the war in Vietnam.
However this protesting was not without consequence. Once the protest movement grew and spread, conflicts began to arise in all parts of the country. Hundreds of campuses now sported student protests and at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, these anti-war protesters met with resistance. The police were called in more than once during the span of the anti-war movement. People were shocked as footage was shown on the beating of students at the hands of the police. (Kinsley, 1) In May of 1970 the National Guard broke up a protest at Kent State University in Ohio and killed four student protesters, wounding nine. (Lewis, 1) The incident at Kent State University marked the unofficial decline of the student anti-war protests. (Soldz, 1)
However the Kent State shooting came at the tail end of the student protests. What came before during the first years of protesting? Many student protests groups were formed during this time, the pioneering one being the Students for a Democratic Society or SDS. Early on in their organization, the SDS concentrated on issues such as civil rights but as the organization grew their ‘all-purpose progressivism’ helped them spread to campuses across the country. By 1966, the SDS had begun to focus much of its attention on the Vietnam War and on antiwar efforts. (Kindig, 1) This student protest group adopted the Port Huron Statement which was written by their founder Tom Hayden. (Kinsley, 1) This document detailed what this founding anti-Vietnam War group stood for. It wrote out and specified what was necessary for fighting the Vietnam War. In it, it detailed a participatory democracy. This was not a new concept. Since the beginning of the United States, people had willed for a government in which it was not simple the social elite that controlled the fate of the nation; the SDS simply modernized this idea and applied it to the government and its policies concerning Vietnam. The Students for a Democratic Society, which spurred the counterculture movement existing under the umbrella name ‘New Left’, sought to create a government that adhered to a more Marxist image and tear down the existing democratic government. (Students for a Democratic Society, 1) In their eyes, the national government was flawed; one of its biggest mistakes was fighting in the Vietnam War.
In February of 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson rose tensions even high when he issued the order to bomb North Vietnam in Operation Flaming Dart and then pushed for ground troops to fight directly with the Viet Cong in the South. (Canaday, 1) This decision left Johnson, who was already highly unpopular with the American youth, with even less standing among the college students. Chapters of SDS that existed on the campuses of colleges all over the country began to organize demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Endorsements came from many if not all of the leading peace groups at the time and with the raised funds, SDS created a total of fifty two chapters by the end of March, only a month after Johnson’s orders. It is shocking, the kind of support the Students for a Democratic Society were getting. It was not simply a few people who opposed the war, it was a common consensus. As the SDS continued to grow, the media began to take an interest and cover this organization along with the growing New Left.
As the Vietnam War continued however, a faction of the SDS broke off and began to change. This faction called itself the Weather Underground Organization or simply the Weathermen. This organization created a very bad name for the rest of the Students for a Democratic Government as it entertained very radical policies, more so than the SDS. The Weathermen felt that all of the protesting and rallying being done by the SDS was ineffectual and thus they took matters into their own hands. (The Weather Underground, 1) The Weathermen’s tactics however were nothing short of terrorism. They frequently participated in bombings and other violent protesting, for they felt it was the only way to gain the government’s attention and end the war. (The Weather Underground, 1) In the end, the Weathermen were less successful than the SDS as violence usually is. While the Weathermen were labeled a terrorist group, the SDS continued its peaceful student protests.
So maybe the SDS was not violent, but wherever one looks in history it is not uncommon to find that violence often begets violence. The SDS did things their own way, with peaceful protests: sit-ins, rallies, and demonstrations. The Students for a Democratic Society were often labeled a socialist or even communist group, and perhaps they were, but they strove for peace not violence. The SDS is known for their backing of the civil rights movement and they can be accredited with spurring the anti-war movement. The Students for a Democratic Society was the first student protest group formed in opposition to the Vietnam War. All the others grew off of it. Perhaps they were not involved in the end of the anti-war movement, but they were the start of it.
