Jeremy Varon (25 page)

It was the best, it was the biggest, it was the last of the antiwar demonstrations. If it cannot convince the men who make war and peace that they can’t safely go on with the conflict, no amount of marching, praying or singing will change their minds.

The young people will turn to other tactics because they’ve come in supplication and politeness; they’ve walked like pilgrims, holding candles in the windy night, and, one by one in front of the White House, begged for their lives. . . . There’s nothing more they can do to win the minds and hearts of the men who run the government. Either these men understand the shame and reproach of having tens of thousands of people implore them for life and clemency on the streets, or the youth will turn to other ways to stop the killing.51

The November protest did not of course persuade those in power to end the war. Some activists, mostly the young, turned to more drastic forms

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of protest. The November march was the last national demonstration in which the Weathermen publicly participated before committing bombings from the underground. The New Left press openly called for violence and even the overthrow of the government, while bombing collectives sprang up from coast to coast to attack the war machine.

The November demonstration did not by any means, however, mark the
wholesale
turn to illegal or violent resistance. Mostly, the same tension between nonviolence and violence, persuasion and disruption continued to play itself out in antiwar organizations and in demonstrations in Washington and other cities. In early May 1970, the antiwar movement was poised for mass militancy. On May 1, Nixon announced the hitherto secret bombings of Cambodia, which he described as necessary for cutting off enemy supply lines. The nation’s campuses immediately erupted. Among them was Ohio’s Kent State University, where on May 4, the National Guard— called in following the burning of the campus ROTC building—killed four unarmed students, prompting another wave of outrage and disruptions. On May 9, more than 100,000 people again gathered in the capital. According to organizers, as many as 20,000 were willing to commit civil disobedience, with no guarantee that their protest would remain peaceful. Five thousand armed soldiers lay in wait in the basements of government buildings, including the White House. Yet internal bickering and confusion over what to do reigned among the Mobe leaders. The rally remained overwhelmingly peaceful and lawful, leaving many disgusted that only a tepid demonstration had emerged from their boiling anger.52 The Mobe, long the mainstay of national antiwar organizing, dissolved in the protest’s wake.

One year later, in the “May Day” protests of 1971, the militants took the lead. Rallying behind the slogan, “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government,” thousands of demonstrators massed in Washington to
literally
shut down the government by blockading roads and bridges, city streets, and government buildings. Yet police and soldiers outmaneuvered the demonstrators, whose numbers were far too few to pull off the audacious plan. The protest resulted in more than 8,000

arrests, most of them illegal; those arrested were jammed into the D.C.

Armory, converted into an open-air jail. Sustaining the imagery of a war at home, buttons commemorating the protest read, “I was an American P.O.W. Camp Nixon, May ’71.”53 In the aftermath of this last and most spectacular mass protest in Washington, factionalism and demoralization in the movement grew deeper still.

Government repression and internal disagreements were scarcely the 132

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only causes of the movement’s decline. Nixon used strategically timed troop withdrawals, the phasing out of the draft, and, ultimately, the “Viet-namization” of the war to feed hope for its end and deflate domestic opposition. The antiwar movement, for all these reasons, never achieved a unity of purpose and action, nor experienced any clear epiphany, even as it drew closer to its goal of ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

.

.

.

The people, they know

But the people don’t care

The Grateful Dead, “Black

Peter” (lyrics by Robert Hunter)

Mass mobilization is its own kind of body politics. Rather than the act of “throwing oneself on the gears of the machine” that defines militancy, a mass demonstration requires only large numbers of comparatively passive actors. By assembling bodies in public spaces, it seeks to issue a uni-laterally declared referendum that affirms or withdraws consent from the actions of government. Paul Goodman, the author of the counterculture classic
Growing Up Absurd
(1960), captured the basic function of mass demonstrations like those in the fall of 1969 by speaking of “the heady sense of being the sovereign people, the body politic” they afforded.54

Indeed, the strength of the fall protests lay primarily in their sheer size.

The
Washington Post
alluded to the inert quality of the mass—the importance of its simply being there—by saying of the November 15 demonstration, “it was a happening in which nothing happened except that a young crowd, whose numbers will never be known, was there.”55 The
Post
additionally described the demonstrations as heralding an era of

“plebiscitary democracy” in America.56

In
The Nationalization of the Masses
(1975), George Mosse demonstrates the historical importance of mass politics in democratic societies by tracing the genealogy of fascist ritual. He begins by stating the Rousseauian premise that in democracies, legitimacy is rooted in popular consent, or the general will. “The people” or “the masses,” both as a statistical majority and a unified construct, function as agents of legitimacy. In addition, democracy conceives of the national community in terms of universal citizenship, not loyalty to a royal dynasty. Yet no precise way exists to ascertain or represent the popular will; to the extent that that will remains elusive, democracy and the broader conception of the nation are rooted in an abstraction. Democratic societies have there-

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fore since their inception faced the challenge of somehow staging the presence of “the people” to secure mandates for particular activities of the state, to affirm the institution of popular government, and, most fundamentally, to help unify the nation. Civic rituals in democracies, such as those of the early French Republic, exalted the people themselves as the primary objects of worship within a secular religion of the state and quickly became an integral part of the political culture of the democratic West. (They also, according to Mosse, provided the historical basis for fascist mass gatherings that only appear to be wholly antithetical to democratic impulses: while fascism disdains pluralism and restricts membership within the national community, it adheres to the democratic assumption that governmental authority derives from the popular will, and it well understands the importance of symbolism.)57

Antiwar activists faced their own challenge of staging the “will of the people” in a manner that would undercut intermittent elections, poll data, the press, and political representatives as the conveyors of public preferences. None of these, by and large, favored the antiwar cause for most of the war’s duration, despite the movement’s accumulating size and strength.

Large demonstrations, like militant direct action, sought to address those in power “directly.” They were a way, in short, of having the people speak.

Yet the movement, never able to field a literal majority in a single protest, had to rely on logics of equivalence and the signifying acts of the media to convey that it stood in for a majoritarian whole. In its crud-est form, that principle of equivalence held that for every demonstrator who had the opportunity and the initiative to show up, there were many others who could take her place. The
Guardian
invoked precisely this logic in its coverage of the November protest when it wrote, “For every person who traveled many miles under difficult circumstances . . . there were dozens, scores, who for some reason were unable to attend the massive demonstrations.”58 For such a claim to be credible, it was crucial that the crowd appear more or less representative of the American populace as a whole. The common emphasis among the leaders of large antiwar demonstrations on respectability, lawfulness, and even displays of patriotism, such as the waving of American flags on the speakers’ platform, sought to encourage the public’s identification with the protesters and thereby geometrically expand their numbers. In a perfect illustra-tion of this gesture (if one out of keeping with the sentiments of many in the audience), Senator George McGovern declared from the November 15 stage “We love America enough to call her away from the folly of war. . . . We meet here today because we cherish our flag.”59 Con-134

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versely, organizers feared violence partly because it permitted politicians, the media, and the public to think of the demonstrations as dominated by “extremists,” out of touch with “ordinary” Americans. Even while condemning the government, demonstrations could be quasi-nationalistic rituals: their very existence celebrated America’s tradition of sanctioned dissent; their message, “We are the majority! We are the people!” affirmed the principle of popular sovereignty.

The fall demonstrations, according to their organizers and supporters, succeeded precisely by rallying a
symbolic
majority. “It is obvious that the majority has spoken,” the
Guardian
proclaimed, despite the disproportionately young and white character of the crowd.60 The New Mobe’s Sidney Peck similarly concluded, “the great majority of Americans opposed this war.”61 The next step in the democratic process, the organizers determined, would be to translate that freshly evident majority opinion into congressional action.

Exploiting the heavily mediated nature of the movement’s message, the Nixon administration claimed just the opposite. In the wake of the November protest, one Nixon aide, Herbert Klein, commented that the

“small” demonstration should be ignored because, “all measurable devices . . . indicate that there is no question but what [
sic
] the American people do support the President.”62 To buttress this claim, officials pointed to the 80,000 pro-Nixon telegrams and letters the White House allegedly received following Nixon’s “silent majority” speech, poll data backing the president, the continued support of most congresspersons for the war, and the D.C. police’s low estimate of the crowd’s size at 250,000 (the organizers estimated 800,000). Attorney General Mitchell characterized the protests as, on the whole, violent, unlawful, and un-American; the demonstrators could therefore not possibly speak for the public. Vice President Agnew added for good measure that the media were biased in favor of the protestors. “It has been so important that thousands of silent Americans are beginning to speak out, so that a government which misjudges American public opinion—and it’s obvious that Hanoi does—isn’t deluded in its own feeling that the only real Americans who speak out speak against the President’s policies,” Klein said.63

To believe that a majority opposed the war was to aid and abet the communist enemy!

Nixon’s invocation of the “silent majority” was, however, the administration’s masterstroke. The use of the phrase on the heels of the Moratorium and the eve of the November rally struck at the heart of the demonstrations’ purpose.64 Those abstaining from protest, Nixon im-

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plied, sided with his policies, making
inaction
the essence of his own plebiscitary politics. The alibi was perfect. By definition, the silent majority could not express itself nor be demonstrated to exist in the manner of the antiwar movement’s vocal constituency. For it to exist, Nixon only had to declare that it did.

Was there any truth to Nixon’s proclamation? More fundamentally, what
did
the majority of Americans think of the war in the fall of 1969?

No clear answer shines through the thicket of competing claims. U.S.

participation in the war was a mistake, 58 percent of Americans polled in October 1969 thought, but a poll the very next month found that 65

percent backed Nixon’s Vietnam policy. As the question subtly changed, so too did the result. The preferences of the working class, commonly considered the backbone of the silent majority, were equally hard to de-cipher. Separate polls suggested that workers were by turns more hawkish
and
more dovish than the rest of the country.65 Beyond public opinion research, the waters remained muddy. The millions who protested could not plausibly be dismissed as politically insignificant, and neither was it remotely credible that everyone who did not demonstrate against the war approved of it, as Nixon suggested. Yet the number of Americans who agreed with the demonstrators could not be known, and many among the silent no doubt did support the president. So intent was the patriotic businessman Ross Perot on proving this that in the fall of 1969, he ran prowar newspaper ads with coupons that sympathetic readers could return to the ads’ authors. The (aborted) plan was to dump the coupons in front of the White House for news cameras to see.66 To the movement’s mass rally—promoted as the voice of the people—the war’s supporters thought to counter with a mass of letters through which the silent majority murmured.

Behind the passion, partisanship, and occasional absurdity of the debate over the war lay a contradiction approaching paradox: in 1969, both pro- and antiwar forces claimed with some credibility that they were the majority. The judgment of which side was right—and logically, they both could not be—was scarcely a matter of applying some perfect measure of public opinion. None existed, or could exist. Rather, it lay in the highly subjective choice of
which code
(polls, bodies, legislation, letters) one took as the truest measure of the people’s will. In this battle of codes, perceptions counted for more than an ultimately inscrutable reality. It did not necessarily matter, for example, whether Nixon’s silent majority was real or imagined.67 As Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones asserts, Nixon’s speech enforced “the idea that a good leader ignored raucous minorities and heeded 136