The Anti-war Movement

and the Counter Culture

The Beginnings

• Based on the old anti-nukes people– War Resisters League– The Quakers– SANE – Physicians for peace– Women Strikers for Peace– War is morally wrong, antithetical

to American ideas, the government in the south was as corrupt and oppresive as the north’s government

The Students for a Democratic Society

• The Port Huron Statement– Disillusionment with the

consumer culture– Social divide between the rich

and the poor– Rejected cold war ideology

and foreign policy– “New Left” – not Communist

or Socialist– Leader Tom Hayden

SDS• SDS held its first antiwar march in

1965, which attracted at least 15,000 protestors to Washington and commanded wide press attention.

• Over the next three years, the organization grew phenomenally, from fewer than a thousand members in 1962 to at least 50,000 in 1968.

• Members of SDS also tried to organize a democratic "interracial movement of the poor" in Northern city neighborhoods.

Radicalization of the SDS

• After 1968, SDS rapidly tore itself apart as an effective political force

• its final convention in 1969, degenerated into a shouting match between radicals and moderates.

• The Weathermen, a surviving faction of SDS, attempted to launch a guerrilla war in the streets of Chicago-

• Finally, in 1970 three members of the Weathermen blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village brownstone trying to make a bomb out of a stick of dynamite and an alarm clock.

Free Speech Movement

• Cal-Berkeley – Mario Savio• Break off from the Civil

Rights Movement – Nonviolent passive resistance

• Spreads to colleges in the East

The Anti war Movement Grows

• Regular students join in at teach-ins to learn about the war

• Protest about ROTC being on campus

• 100,000 met in Washington for “Stop the Draft Week” in 1967

The Turn• Congress repeals the Gulf of Tonkin

Resolution• Soldiers in Vietnam turned against

the War• Vietnam Veterans against the War• Norman Morrison, a 32-year-old

Quaker drenched himself with gasoline and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon;

• Pacifist Roger La Porte, who immolated himself at the United Nations

• 82-year-old Alice Herz, who burned herself to death in Detroit to protest against the war.

The Fall

• The riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention

• The Vietnamization of the War by Nixon

• Kent State and Jackson State• The end of the draft by 1973

The Point of it All• Opposition to the war was inversely proportional to both wealth and education.

• Blue-collar workers -"doves" and tended to favor withdrawal from Vietnam,

• The college-educated, high-income strata - "hawks" and supported participation in the war

• Opposition to the war was especially intense among people of color (Chicano Moratorium)

The Counterculture

• A general revolution against authority and middle class respectability

• Hippie attire – ragged blue jeans, tie-dyed shirts, beads, army fatigues, long unkempt hair

Music is Important

• Pete Seeger – “Where have all the flowers gone”

• Bob Dylan – “ Blowin in the Wind”

• Beatlemania

• The Rolling Stone’s “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”

Drugs

• Recreational use of drugs such as marijuana and LSD become part of the culture

• Musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane develop acid rock

The Summer of Love

• “Turn on to the scene, tune in to what is happening, and drop out.” Timothy Leary

• Young people flock to San Francisco and Greenwich Village in NYC. “The Flower Children”

The Nightmare

• Bad Trips• Sexually transmitted diseases• Loneliness• Violence• Panhandling• Prostitution

The Manson Family Commune

• Group of young “hippies “ who join a cult led by Charles Manson. Plenty of drugs and free love ($21,000 in medical bills for std’s)

• He convince his followers to kill for him

• Tate-La Bianca Murders• Still in prison