power to be most feared. Even a respected leader like Senator Fulbright suggested that

America is showing some signs of that fatal presumption, that overextension of power and mission which brought ruin to ancient Athens, to Napoleonic France and to Nazi Germany.59

And the late Martin Luther King Jr. felt compelled to call his government "the great purveyor of violence in the world today."60 For many, disapproval of the American role in Vietnam spilled over into scrutiny of our attitude toward numerous oligarchies in Latin American, Asia, and southern Europe. The concept of a "Free World" devoted to "democracy" began to look faulty, and the history of the Cold War was reassessed as a power struggle rather than as a morality play.

Even the term "Imperialism," once the exclusive property of sloganeers of the Left and Right, gained currency as a respectable characterization of American behavior. It was argued that we had become the world's major counterrevolutionary power, prepared, as Secretary Rusk announced, to intervene anywhere with or without treaty commitments. The Secretary's exact words, spoken before the Senate Preparedness Committee on August 25, 1966, were as follows: "No would-be aggressor should suppose that the absence of a defense treaty, Congressional declaration or U. S. military presence grants immunity to aggression."61 Many observers interpreted the Secretary to be implying that no legal restraints would prevent the United States from forcefully imposing its will on other nations to prevent internal change. The same observers argued that this influence was being constantly exercised already in the form of economic and military subsidies to fascist regimes, counterinsurgency training programs, and actual infiltration of other governments-as, for example, in the successful placing of admitted CIA agent Antonio Arguedas in the Bolivian cabinet as Minister of the Interior.

The Domestic Scene

During the period of the Vietnam war there were other developments within the structure of American society that gave impetus to radical dissent. The racial polarization described in the report of the Kerner Commission assumed frightening proportions, and was worsened by the diversion of "Great Society" funds into war spending. The major political parties did not prove very responsive to sentiment for peace, and when a strong third party arose it drew strength from race hatred and sword-rattling. The Vietnam expenditures, which had possibly averted a recession in 1965, later contributed to a serious inflation. Moreover, critics felt that because of war expenditures, problems of conservation, traffic and pollution were neglected. Assassination haunted our public life, and contributed to the feeling of despair and frustration which affected many in the anti-war movement. Universities, the unofficial headquarters of the peace movement, were hampered by Federal research cutbacks and shaken by student protest which often focused on such war related activities as the development of biological warfare weapons.

The anguish of many protesters was summed up in Senator Fulbright's remark that we have become a “sick society." "Abroad we are engaged in a

savage and unsuccessful war against poor people in a small and backward nation," he told the American Bar Association. "At home-largely because of the neglect resulting from 25 years of preoccupation with foreign involvements—our cities are exploding in violent protest against generations of social injustice."62

These facts and these feelings, then, provide the basis for understanding how the anti-war movement emerged and grew-why there was great skepticism about the war and why this skepticism might yield to frustration, anguish and even desperation. The significance of such an alienation from the prevailing national policy is made even more apparent when one considers that the anti-war movement largely is composed of persons who-prior to Vietnamwould not have been thought to hold such feelings. Thus we turn now to an examination of the social bases of the anti-war movement.

THE SOCIAL BASES OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

Insofar as the anti-war movement has an ongoing membership, it can best be characterized along social as opposed to organizational lines. The most striking fact about the movement and its most obvious handicap is that it has had to rely largely on middle-class professionals and pre-professional students. The worker-student collaboration that surfaced in France in the spring of 1968 seems remote from the American scene. Labor officials such as George Meany and Jay Lovestone have taken more "hawkish" positions than the Johnson administration, and the AFL-CIO is known to be working closely with government agencies in such projects as the surreptitious combating of Leftism in affiliated Latin American unions. With notable exceptions, rank-and-file American workingmen have not supported the peace movement, either because they felt that the war was necessary and justified or because they disliked the style of the most colorful protesters or because they were outside the institutions where an anti-war consensus was allowed and encouraged, or because they had friends or relations in service whom they felt they had to "support" by supporting the war, or simply because they have in a fundamental way become the most conservative of political actors-they tend to follow the lead of government, especially if the government is supported by the unions. Workingmen, like businessmen, were made uneasy by such side effects of the war as inflation and high taxes, but they were largely indifferent to arguments couched in terms of disillusionment with the Cold War or violations in international law. To the degree that the peace movement emphasized disarmament, sympathy with foreign guerillas, and self-consciously anti-bourgeois styles of protest, it actually drove the labor movement away. The confusion of many workers was revealed by the finding that some of them who had supported Robert Kennedy in the 1968 primary elections intended to vote for George Wallace in November.63

Within its middle-class and relatively well-educated base of strength, the peace movement seems to have drawn most heavily from teachers, students, and clergy. It would be facile to call these categories the movement's mind, body, and conscience, respectively, but there is some truth to such a description. The teachers were instrumental in learning and making known the history of American involvement in Vietnam and in engaging government spokesmen in debate. Students performed this function, too, and in addition

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they provided the confrontational tactics and the sheer numbers of demonstrators that could keep up continual pressure on public opinion. And the clergy raised moral issues and often dramatized them with bold acts of individual protest. Each of these three groups deserves extra comment because of their distinctive contributions.

The role of teachers and of intellectuals generally has been prominent from the beginning of the movement. Although there was a good deal of scattered protest in 1964, many observers feel that the movement properly started with the spring, 1965, undertaking of college teach-ins-a tactic still in use, but which seems to have been especially appropriate to that period when less was known about the war and when more militant forms of protest were unpalatable to many dissenters. The teach-in was by nature a form of hesitation between respectful inquiry and protest, and its campus setting emphasized that objections to the war were still mostly on the intellectual plane. The failure of government "Truth Teams" to satisfy their college audiences, and sometimes their failure to appear at all, gave a strong impetus to the further evolution of campus protest. The enlistment of professors in rational dialogue about the war was an ideal way of introducing them into the movement's work.

Although intellectuals in America are not reputed to enjoy the popular influence possessed by counterparts in Europe, several factors favored their prominence in the Vietnam protest movement. The movement itself consisted largely of people who do pay attention to intellectuals, and the movement conceived its first task to be a scholarly one: to expose the contradictions and half-truths in the standard government account of the war. The absence of widely respected left-of-center political spokesmen made for a vacuum into which the intellectuals were drawn. Professors like Noam Chomsky, Staughton Lynd, Franz Schurmann, and Howard Zinn not only disseminated information but also helped define the movement's consciousness-as, for example, in Professor Chomsky's influential essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals."64 Other academics who had held high posts within the Kennedy administration made less sweeping critiques of the war but had a large impact on public opinion by virtue of their defection from the official view; the same was true of former policy advisers such as Marcus Raskin and Hans Morgenthau. And literary figures like Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Robert Lowell became increasingly conspicuous as they participated in significant acts of protest and shared their reflections with readers who had followed their earlier work.

The centrality of college students to the growth of anti-war sentiment is generally recognized, and much effort has been put into the task of explaining why this should be so. Revealing investigations have been made into the rearing, family attitudes, and social background of the student generation which first entered American political life in the civil rights movement of the early 60's and then turned to agitation against the war and the universities.65 But such an emphasis should not be used to undervalue the determinative influence of the war itself. While justice for blacks has been a deeply held theme of conscience for a vanguard of middle-class white students, it has been outside the normal scope of their lives; they have had to seek out battlefields in the Deep South or in unfamiliar ghettos. The Vietnam war, by contrast, has directly affected them in several respects. Most obviously,

students have been subject to the draft; their academic studies have been haunted by the prospect of conscription and possible death for a cause in which few of them believe. When the manpower needs of the war eventuated in the cancellation of many graduate deferments in early 1968, the anti-war movement was naturally strengthened. From the beginning, however, the war had been an on-campus reality by virtue of the presence of military and war-industry recruiters, the extensive cooperation of university institutes and departments with Pentagon-sponsored research, the tendency of universities to award honorary degrees to public officials who are also official spokesmen for the war, and of course the normal campus atmosphere of controversy and debate. By 1968, as for example in the Columbia rebellion, it was becoming difficult to distinguish the anti-war effort from the effort to remake the internal structure of the universities.

Clergymen have been especially prominent in the peace movement in contrast to their relative silence during former wars. Partly as a result of the decline of abstract theology and the humanizing influence of figures like Pope John, partly because of their experience with nonviolent protest in the civil rights movement, but above all because they found difficulty in reconciling the claims of religious doctrine with the demands of the Vietnam war, religious leaders have increasingly placed themselves in the opposition. As the most active group, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, declared in a position paper of early 1967,

"Each day we find allegiance to our nation's policy more difficult to reconcile with allegiance to our God. . . . We add our voice to those who protest a war in which civilian casualties are greater than military; in which whole populations are deported against their will; in which the widespread use of napalm and other explosives is killing and maiming women, children, and the aged...."

Such well-known clerics as William Sloane Coffin, Robert McAfee Brown, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and even Martin Luther King associated themselves with the cause of draft resistance,66 while Cardinal Spellman was picketed by fellow Catholics for his enthusiastic support for U. S. policy in Vietnam.67 Even President Johnson could not attend church without risking exposure to an anti-Vietnam sermon-a new vicissitude among the many burdens of the Presidency.

Another component of the peace movement deserves special consideration, not so much for its decisive role as for its future potential. The effort of white radicals to enlist black Americans in their ideological ranks is a longstanding feature of American Leftism, and has become a subject of general concern in the wake of the serious urban uprisings of the past few years. People both within and outside the anti-war movement would like to assess the degree to which black political consciousness has been altered by participation in the movement and by exposure to the war. This interest often has to do with the long-range prospect of black insurrection rather than with any immediate hope of bringing the Vietnam war to an end. The question is not whether blacks will turn out in large numbers to demonstrate and march, but whether the issues of war protest will feed naturally into the so-called black liberation movement, as the issue of racial integration (insofar as it concerned white activists) to some degree laid the groundwork for the anti-war movement itself.

There are two opposite and perhaps equally plausible interpretations. If attention is restricted to the overt involvement of blacks in the anti-war issues as defined by white radicals and pacifists, little evidence can be found to indicate real coalition. Insofar as they are militant, black Americans are unsympathetic to the nonviolent ethic of the pacifists; insofar as they are economically deprived, they desire the material goods which the radicals despise as tokens of an unjust economic system; and insofar as movement tactics court exposure to police billy clubs, blacks cannot work up the requisite enthusiasm. Unlike the alienated middle-class whites, they already know what it means to be dealing with antagonistic police on a daily basis, and they find it difficult to appreciate the value of getting publicly clubbed so as to expose the system's latent violence. Nor, by and large, have blacks rushed willingly into open and principled draft resistance. Many of them have been willing to risk death in Vietnam in exchange for the squalor and indignity of American ghetto life, and others who have preferred not to serve have not cared to pass two to five years in Federal prison for this reason. Those who are oppressed from birth onwards do not seek out occasions to prove their oppression.

Many instances could be shown of the white movement's failure to enlist blacks on a mass basis. In Oakland, California, to take one example, Stop the Draft Week (October 16-20, 1967) was planned to involve the ghetto community in "white" confrontation tactics, but the blacks ended by having their own separate rally and by largely avoiding the planned showdown with the Oakland police, with whom they were already well acquainted. One should not be misled by the fact that CORE and SNCC were among the earliest organizations to oppose the war; positions taken in those days were usually representative of a consensus reached among black and white activists.68 As blacks developed their own themes of protest and began disaffiliating themselves from the white movement, it became clear that Vietnam was a relatively minor issue, distant from the emergency of the American cities although of course related to it in numerous intangible ways.

There is, however, another side to this question. The abstention of black masses from white-sponsored rallies seems less noteworthy when one considers that the white working class has also been poorly represented; it could well be that the movement, with its dominant strain of moral outrage and intellectuality, has neglected issues that would touch deprived Americans generally. Certainly there have been numerous signs from prominent blacks that Vietnam could become a major focus for ghetto discontent. Consider the fact that the most beloved black man of modern times, Martin Luther King, found that in order to sustain his self-respect and the momentum of his organization (SCLC) he had to denounce the war and its racist aspects.69 Consider also that one of the most prominent black athletes of the 1960's, Muhammad Ali, having been denied the status of a conscientious objector, has chosen draft resistance and faces a long prison term. And Malcolm X whose influence was not stilled by assassination any more than Dr. King's was, spoke out forthrightly against the Vietnam war in 1965 and drew lessons from it about the guerilla's strategic advantages over the colonizer.

There have been several highly significant instances of black anti-Vietnam protest, but their significance seams largely to have been appreciated by "movement” whites rather than by great numbers of blacks. A typical ex