PROGRESS OF THE U.S. ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
By Les Evans
It is little more than two years since President Johnson ordered the bombing of north Vietnam in February, 1965. The U.S. government counted on the docile acquiescence of the American people in order to paint its aggression against Vietnam as representing a "consensus" of the whole population. Opposition to the war seemed to be limited to small radical organizations and isolated groups of students.
The immediate response to full-scale American intervention in the Vietnam civil war was a call by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for a March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam. This brought 20,000 students and young people to the capital on April 17, 1965.
The SDS march marked a radical departure from the practice of conservative pacifist organizations in the United States of excluding "Communists" from participating in demonstrations. The policy of nonexclusion, a welcome change from the customs of the McCarthyite period, has become a hallmark of the present antiwar movement in the United States.
The movement has gone through a series of stages since the SDS March on Washington. Following the march, local committees which had been formed to bring people to Washington, reorganized as permanent "Committees Against the War in Vietnam." Hundreds of these independent committees sprang up across the country, primarily on college campuses, in the spring and summer of 1965.
The largest and most dynamic of these independent committees in this period was the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee, which staged a "teach-in" at the University of California in Berkeley on May 21, 1965. At the rally 15,000 people heard opponents of the war, ranging from student leader Mario Savio to historian Isaac Deutscher.
The Berkeley VDC was also the initiator of the "First International Days of Protest," October 15-16, 1965. On those days demonstrations against U.S. aggression in
Vietnam were held in a score of countries while in the U.S. itself 60,000 marched in major American cities. In Berkeley, 15,000 set out for the Oakland army base, but were turned back by steel-helmeted police at the "frontier" of the neighboring city of Oakland.
Sentiment rose to unify the innumerable local committees scattered across the country into a national organization. In the late summer of 1965 the question of the political basis for unity began to be hotly debated in the independent committees.
Two views emerged from the discussion. The one centered around the slogan "Negotiate" and the other around "Immediate Withdrawal of U.S. Troops." Proponents of the former view argued that the call for immediate withdrawal was too radical and would isolate the antiwar movement from the broader layers of the population. Many in this sector of the movement looked toward the election of "peace" candidates, generally within the ruling Democratic party, for ameliorating or ending the war.
The advocates of the withdrawal position pointed out that the United States had no right to "negotiate" the internal affairs of Vietnam; that the demand for negotiations had initially been raised by the warmakers in Washington, and for the antiwar movement to try to adopt the slogan for its own purposes would only blunt the movement; and finally, that the Democratic party is part of the machinery of America's ruling circles for prosecuting the war. They argued that it was more effective to organize mass demonstrations than to engage in high-level maneuvers with a few "peace" Democrats inside Johnson's party.
The debate came to a head at a national convention of antiwar activists held in Washington in November, 1965. At that time those who advocated negotiations predominated; and they assumed control of the National Coordinating Committee Against the War which was established by the conference. The NCC was a loosely structured formation that sought to play the role of the central coordinator of the national antiwar movement.
The radical wing of the conference grouped itself around the "Bring the Troops Home Now" Newsletter, which increasingly played an independent role.
The equivocal stand of the NCC on the question of withdrawal of U.S. troops and its support of "peace" candidates made it plain that it was only one tendency within the antiwar movement, and in February of this year it finally announced that it will no longer seek to function as a national organization.
A second International Days of Protest was staged on March 25-26, 1966. Hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in this. The largest single demonstration, a march of 50,000 people, took place in New York City. The New York action was organized by the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, today the largest of the local committees. Similar national protests were held in August and again in November of last year.
In the past year, antiwar sentiment as a whole has increased considerably. Along with it, those favoring the slogan of withdrawal have experienced an encouraging expansion of forces. The movement today is significantly larger than was the opposition in France to the colonial war against the Algerian people.
After the November demonstrations, a representative national conference of activists in Cleveland set up the Spring Mobilization Committee, which has called for massive demonstration in New York and San Francisco on April 15. The committee represents a broad coalition that includes students, radical pacifists, the Communists and Socialist Workers parties, and other tendencies.
A week of campus protest is scheduled to precede the Spring Mobilization. This is being organized by the Student Mobilization Committee, founded in Chicago last ecember.
At its inception, the antiwar movement was composed almost exclusively of students and intellectuals. It has been a long and difficult process to extend organized opposition to the war into other sectors of the population. In its first year and a half, the movement concentrated on building a mass base among students. They still constitute the great majority of antiwar activists.
In the last six months the first organized reflection of the deep antipathy to the war in other sectors has begun to take form. Militant black leaders, such as Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Floyd McKissick, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, have become sponsors of the Spring Mobilization. The Reverend James Bevel, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther
King, has become national director of the Spring Mobilization and is working full time to build the action.
The antiwar movement has made increasing efforts to bring its antiwar views to the troops, and there are scores of instances of American soldiers speaking out against the war or refusing to serve in Vietnam. The best known case is that of the "Fort Hood Three": James Johnson, David Samas and Dennis Mora, three GIs who refused to go to Vietnam. Johnson and Samas were sentenced to five years imprisonment and Mora received three years.
The most difficult area to reach has been the labor movement. The case-hardened bureaucrats who sit on top of the trade unions in the United States have been among the staunchest supporters of the war. At its February meeting the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) voted to continue unconditional support of Johnson's policy in Vietnan.
Nevertheless, small but significant fissures have appeared even in the unions. The Northern California District Council of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union has endorsed the Spring Mobilization. Marshall Axelrod, president of the California State Federation of Teachers has become a sponsor of the Mobilization, and his union in a statewide convention in December passed a resolution demanding immediate withdrawal of American military forces from Vietnam. Cleveland Robinson, president of the Negro-American Labor Council recently became a vice chariman of the Spring Mobilization Committee.
Now, the powerful United Auto Workers Union, the largest union in the AFL-CIO with its 1,300,000 members, has begun to take tentative steps in the direction of opposition to Johnson's "consensus." Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the UAW, and generally regarded as a spokesman for UAW president Walter Reuther, has agreed to speak at an antiwar protest demonstration scheduled for March 25 in Chicago.
All indications are that the April 15 Mobilization will be the biggest demonstration of antiwar sentiment to date and will be militant in character. The call for withdrawal is predominant among the slogans adopted for the Mobilization, and a large majority of antiwar activists today favor the withdrawal position.
One of the most valuable accomplishments of the antiwar movement has been the encouragement it has given the heroic people of Vietnam by showing that in the heart of the American colossus there are people who are fighting for the right of the Vietnamese to self-determination. There have been frequent visits to north Vietnam by delegations from the American antiwar movement. Shortly after his return from such a visit, A.J. Muste, veteran American pacifist and chairman of the Spring Mobilization Committee, died on February 11. Ho Chi Minh sent condolences on Muste's death in which he described him as "a loyal and valiant friend of the Vietnamese people."
CANADIAN WAR CRIMES COMMITTEE