A Question of Place

Much of the literature on the student anti-war movement has centered on elite higher education institutions located either in states along the eastern or western coastlines or in densely populated, urban areas.[1]  However, beginning in the early 2000s with The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums, a marked shift occurred in the way that scholars approached the geography of anti-war protests, suggesting the earlier focus on elite, coastal, and urban colleges had been overstated.[2]  This new, which has been driven primarily by academics, suggests that the anti-war protests at rural, prairie, and state colleges and universities had a powerful and long-lasting effect on universities and the wider anti-Vietnam movement. [3]

While the thirteen essays in The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums explore less-publicized aspects of the anti-war protests of which rural, prairie campuses are only one example, Robbie Lieberman concentrated on “prairie power” and its impact on the organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the student anti-war movement.  Lieberman argued that it was student activists from the Midwest and the South that “emphasized organizing students around local issues, decentralizing SDS leadership, and focusing on the war in Vietnam.”[4]  These students were often grassroots activists who lacked personal connections with the Old Left; and, hence, they were more willing to sever ties with old guard than the wealthy, liberal student protesters from elite institutions had been. 

Lieberman suggests that the rapid growth of Students for a Democratic Society, which followed the 1965 anti-war demonstration, led to a shift in SDS leadership towards prairie power activists.  These activists organized their own SDS chapters to challenge the complicity of their college administrations with the Vietnam War and the United States government.[5]  Utilizing oral histories from national SDS leaders as well as from local leaders in midwestern colleges and universities, Lieberman illustrates the transition of anti-war leadership from the ideological old guard to a more radical New Left that maintained a strong connection to counterculture and the student rights movement.  One of Lieberman’s objectives is to exonerate the prairie power activists from assuming the full responsibility for both the more violent phase of the anti-war movement and the dissolution of the anti-war and student movements, and she builds a convincing argument by exploring the accomplishments of the prairie power movement, like the creation of a more inclusive culture within SDS that allowed activists to create broad coalitions across student groups. [6]  This contrasted sharply with the factionalized SDS at elite universities.[7]

While the study of SDS leaders and members forms the nucleus of Lieberman’s research on the anti-war movement in midwestern colleges, historian Penny Lewis broadened this focus in Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks in an effort to apply this shift in geography to the wider student anti-war movement.  Building upon Heineman’s Campus Wars and Lieberman’s Prairie Power, Lewis suggests that the anti-war movement became the conduit through which the student rights movement was carried to more rural, working-class campuses.[8]  While earlier scholars like Schreiber had argued that the media and academic scholarship had overemphasized the prevalence of student anti-war protests, Lewis indicates that 50% of colleges and universities experienced anti-war protests and activism in 1970, following Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.  This disputes the claims of many early scholars and proves that anti-war protests were more normative and pervasive than originally suggested.  Additionally, the widespread nature of the student anti-war protests demonstrates that anti-war activists amongst college student bodies were not only from elite, liberal families.  They were representative of different classes and backgrounds.  As one historian asserted, the student anti-war movement “drew upon a diverse membership of red diaper babies, upper-middle-class secularized Protestants, and working- and lower-middle-class Catholics and Protestants.”[9]  

The work of scholars like Heineman, Lieberman, and Lewis provides a more nuanced portrayal of the socio-economic identities and geographic locations of college students who participated in the anti-war protests.  Just as Boren and Hoefferle’s depiction of the development of the student anti-war movement in tandem with other student movements undermined assumptions that public animosity towards students was simply a response to the anti-war movement, the representation of student participants within the anti-war movement as reflective of different social, economic, and religious backgrounds undermines accusations that the anti-war protesters were predominantly elite, draft-dodgers who were oblivious to the struggles of average Americans, the silent majority of Nixon’s constituency.  Importantly, the identification of student anti-war protesters as representative of diverse demographics creates an opportunity to explore the wide-ranging motives that drove college students to protest the Vietnam War.

Place: A Rural, Public University

Like Penny Lewis and Robbie Lieberman argued, student anti-war protests did not only occur at elite, urban colleges and universities....