|
View the H-Diplo Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Diplo's July 2004 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Diplo's July 2004 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Diplo home page.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SHAFR/H-Diplo Conference Report (Report #4) 2004 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Conference, University of Texas at Austin and the LBJ Library Panel 7: Southern Responses to the Vietnam War Chair: Edward C. Crapol, College of William & Mary "Richard Russell, Southern Nationalism, and America's War in Vietnam" Jeffrey R. Woods, Arkansas Tech University "The Not So Silent Majority: Louisville's Anti-War Movement, 1966-1975" Yvonne Baldwin and John Ernst, Morehead State University "A Marital South?: Individual Southern Responses to the War in Vietnam" Joseph A. Fry, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Commentary: The Audience -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SHAFR/H-Diplo Commentary by Jessica Chapman, jess@umail.ucsb.edu, UCSB New research presented at the 2004 SHAFR conference by Jeffrey Woods, Yvonne Baldwin, John Ernst, and Joseph Fry adds greatly to our understanding of the complex response to the Vietnam War in the American South. All three of the papers in this panel are part of larger book projects focusing on anti-war activities in the southern states during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Woods asserted that LBJ and Georgia Senator Richard Russell, throughout the war, enjoyed a close relationship and a mutual understanding based on shared southern roots. Despite their obvious mutual dismay at the unlikelihood of American victory in Vietnam, though, they were unable to agree on a solution. Russell insisted that America's mission to modernize Vietnam was hopeless, and lobbied persistently for Johnson to get US troops out of Vietnam before it became a greater nightmare. Despite an intimacy between the two men far greater than what Johnson enjoyed with Rusk, McNamara, or Bundy, Johnson ultimately rejected Russell's urgings in favor of advice from the "Best and the Brightest" in his cabinet. Woods explains this discrepancy in terms of a generational difference between the Old and New South. Russell, a representative of the Old South, had an agricultural sense of time and no enthusiasm for progress and modernization if it would mean displacement from or destruction of land. So he understood the futility of an American modernization program in Southeast Asia that would rely on measures such as strategic hamlets and napalm bombs. Johnson, a representative of the New South, had a more industrial sense of time, marked by a desire for progress and modernization. These opposing worldviews prevented Johnson and Russell from seeing the battle for Vietnamese hearts and minds in the same light. Woods pointed out that Russell persistently opposed the war until it became inevitable that American boys would fight and die in Vietnam. At that point, he adamantly insisted that US soldiers should be imbued with pride and confidence in their mission. Moreover, if the US was intent on fighting the war, it should fight to win. Woods' talk extended beyond the narrow bounds of the JohnsonRussell relationship to place the Vietnam War in the wider cultural context of 1960s America. He explains the war as a 1960s WASP catharsis, by which a nation in revolution sought to atone for its own past and present racial discrimination by helping non-whites resist communism in Asia. Baldwin and Ernst's presentation stemmed from an oral history project on the Louisville anti-war movement. Most of their subjects were middle class white liberals, often active in the Civil Rights movement as well, no different from others across the country protesting the war. These protesters were found in much smaller numbers in the South, though, and risked their respectability and established roles in the community by opposing the war. One of Baldwin and Ernst's most interesting interviews was with an activist named Suzy Post, who claimed that most Louisville activists didn't have a political perspective, but a moral one grown in churches. They struggled with the conflict between traditional values and the need for change, and saw the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement as a "lightning rod for change." It was not the specifics of the Vietnam War itself that mattered to these activists, but the social justice issues regarding race and class that the war brought forward. To combat the injustices of the draft, Louisville activists established an underground railroad from Louisville to Toronto by which 50,000 draft age males and Fort Knox soldiers escaped military service. An active GI press and several underground anti-war news-papers also helped activists publicize their resistance to the war. Joseph Fry's discussion of anti-war letters from southern constituents to their senators is part of a larger project on the South as a whole during the Vietnam War. He claimed that the sum of these letters constitutes a devastating collective Southern critique of Johnson's war, more complex than previously thought. That many of these letters were written early in the war (1964, 1965, and early 1966), demonstrates significant southern opposition to the war from a very early stage. Like Baldwin and Ernst, Fry pointed out that the decision to oppose the war was agonizing for many of these writers, as it was socially unacceptable in the southern context. Nonetheless, a vocal minority of southern opponents formulated a broad and devastating critique of the war. Although Fry admitted to finding more pro-war letters than anti-war letters in all of the collections he has surveyed in the South, he claimed that the existence of large numbers of anti-war letters demonstrates a more varied and complex response to the war than historians have previously assumed. One research problem that Fry identified is an absence of identifiable black opinion. Much of the commentary and discussion on this panel focused on questions of how to define the term "Southern" during this period of great turmoil and change. Should southerners be defined by geography or ideology? Woods raised the question of whether war protesters could even be considered southerners in the ideological sense of the word, while Fry claimed that both the pro-war and anti-war letters he has seen reflected traditional southern traits and values. The vibrant discussion provoked by this panel makes it clear that there is still a lot of exciting research to be done on the anti-war movement in America, starting with these three excellent papers. Jessica Chapman University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) For a complete listing of all sessions at SHAFR 2004, the conference program may be viewed at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/shafr/program/. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Diplo, all rights reserved. For any proposed use, contact the H-Diplo Editors at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu or the H-Diplo article discussion coordinator, George Fujii, at gfujii@umail.ucsb.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|