While there is a rich body of popular and scholarly research utilizing polls, government documents, college policies and rules, and newspaper and magazine articles to examine the history of the student anti-war movement; documentary filmmakers, historians, and journalists have also used oral history to capture the personal narratives of student leaders and demonstrators. These personal narratives create powerful pieces of popular history that highlight the diverse perspectives that have often been ignored or downplayed in more scholarly works, which often concentrate instead on policy, well-known leaders and figures, and overarching trends.
The War at Home, a 1979 documentary that explores the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the early 1970s, is an excellent example of an early compelling application of oral history to the study of the anti-war movement. Directors and producers Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown use archival footage and interviews with a diverse group of protesters including students, housewives, veterans, and conscientious objectors to emphasize that the Vietnam War was a war on two fronts: one fought in Vietnam between the North and South Vietnamese and one on the American home front between the government and the protesters. For example, Karl Armstrong, who was responsible for bombing the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970, justified his actions on the home front by arguing that “if they were going to make war on us, we were going to make war on them.”[1] While The War at Home communicates a poignant story of personal motives and the unraveling of events at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, its narrow scope is less successful in placing the personal stories within the wider context of anti-war protests across the country. It effectively demonstrates what happened, but often misses the mark in explaining why things happened in a particular way.
Later writers were able to balance the narrow scope of oral interviews and personal narratives of student anti-war activists with the wider context of the Vietnam War and American life in the 1960s and 1970s by supplementing these narratives with accounts of government policy changes, military history, and the narratives of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. For example, sociologist and free-lance writer Tom Wells outlined the development of the war both in Washington D.C. with government officials and key policy makers as well as at colleges and other sites of protest against the war. He uses this juxtaposition to explore motives for the anti-war movement. Like Lieberman and Lewis, Wells argues that the anti-war movement had a diverse base, although he suggests that political hopes were the primary motivation for the escalation in anti-war protests. With this understanding, he uses his research to explore “protesters’ multifarious reasons for undertaking particular types of anti-war activity, including legal demonstrations, civil disobedience, electoral challenges, grass-roots organizing, fasts, and political violence,” reasons that were based on personal experiences, attitudes and principles.[2]
Similarly, in They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, journalist David Maraniss utilizes a rich collection of interviews, letters, and other primary sources to weave together the experiences of anti-war protesters at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and soldiers fighting in Vietnam, illustrating that both groups were moving toward situations for which they were ill-prepared in October 1967. As a journalist and a veteran of the University of Wisconsin-Madison anti-war protests in 1967, Maraniss is well-positioned to explore the different motivations for student protest in the late 1960s. He points to counterculture stereotypes that were later imposed on the university and the decade of the 1960s as eliding the complexities of the student anti-war movement and failing “to capture the more variegated reality of time and place.”[3]
The work of Silber and Brown, Wells, and Maraniss has created a rich tapestry of the motives, goals, and experiences of individual student anti-war activists. This emphasis on narrative personalizes the student protesters, an outcome which could be linked to Silber and Maraniss’ personal connections with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where both men were college students during the protests against the Vietnam War. However, while the granular approach to the anti-war movement on college campuses offers a compelling narrative of how events unfolded, it provides a less convincing analysis of those events. Maraniss, in particular, writes of the student demonstrations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a way that isolates it from the larger anti-war movement. Nonetheless, these accounts provide a series of human faces and narratives for modern readers and viewers, illustrating the diversity within the movement and creating a more nuanced understanding of its appeal to college students across the United States, students who often shared little more in common than their temporary affiliation with an American college or university.
Motives: Individual Voices from URI
During the 1960s and 1970s, students and faculty members used the school newspaper, The Beacon and then The Five Cent Cigar, to...
[1] The War at Home, directed by Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown (1979, First Run Features, 2003), DVD.
[2] Tom Wells, The War Within, 1. Wells also suggests that it was the failure of activists to acknowledge and use their political power that led to the internal divisions within the anti-war movement and strengthened resolve against the movement (2-4). Despite these shortcomings, Wells does argue that the protests did achieve an overall success with the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Scholarship and literature is often divided on whether student anti-war protests (as well as the overall anti-war movement) were a success or failure. Lieberman, for example, argues that while anti-war activists (particularly prairie power activists) contributed to the split in SDS and its subsequent loss of prominence in the early 1970s, they also spurred greater success in the overall student rights movement as well as saw the end of American involvement in Vietnam. See Lieberman, Prairie Power.
[3] David Maraniss, They Marched in Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2003), 78.