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Article Excerpt
I DON'T HAVE NO PERSONAL QUARREL WITH THOSE VIETCONGS," DECLARED heavyweight boxing champion and Louisville native Muhammad All. The fighter's 1966 statement against the Vietnam War, along with his refusal the next year to be inducted into the United States armed forces, reverberated throughout America. Boxing officials seized his title and banned him until 1970, when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling facilitated his return to the ring. Ali's opposition to the draft placed the well-known athlete in a different kind of limelight, making him a hero who personified the issues of race and class that divided the South and intersected over the Vietnam War. Ali's outlook contrasted sharply with that of Louie B. Nunn, who in 1967 became Kentucky's first Republican governor in twenty years and who embodied America's "silent majority," the "decent, law-abiding, constructive citizens who form the heart and conscience of our nation." Nunn claimed to have given Richard M. Nixon the famous phrase that identified Nixon's political base and helped bring him victory in the 1968 presidential election. Nixon won that close contest, in part, because Americans like Nunn wanted an honorable end to the Vietnam War and the social turmoil the conflict caused at home. (1)
Nunn, a World War II infantry veteran, viewed Vietnam through a martial, patriotic, southern lens. "Once we were in it," he asserted, "we had to finish it with honor." Nunn spoke for most Kentuckians and southerners, including Senators Herman E. Talmadge and Richard B. Russell of Georgia. Like Nunn, Russell stated that "national honor" was the issue and that America could "not shrink from defending it." This sense of honor permeated southern culture. Since the late nineteenth century, when the Lost Cause ideology began to glorify the Civil War record of both Union and Confederate soldiers, thus salving the sting of defeat for the South, fighting for America had been a means for southern men to assert their heritage and manhood. Not surprisingly, a Gallup poll in May 1967 revealed that southerners supported the Vietnam War in greater numbers than other Americans. Southerners accounted for almost one-third of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and about 28 percent of the American soldiers who died there. At the height of the Vietnam War, four out of five American army generals hailed from the South, including the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, South Carolinian William C. Westmoreland. Bardstown, Kentucky, produced one of the war's most famous officers, Lieutenant General Harold G. "Hal" Moore, coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Kentucky lost more than one thousand young people in the conflict and, along with five other southern states, voted in 1968 for Nixon, whose political strategy of stressing "law and order" and patriotism ended the longtime "Democratic stronghold" in Dixie. (2)
Despite the South's role in providing soldiers, leadership, and political support for the war, little has emerged in the voluminous Vietnam literature dealing specifically with the region's significance in that conflict. The early works on the topic--a handful of literary pieces and oral histories, including James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978), James R. Wilson's Landing Zones (1990), and Owen W. Gilman's Vietnam and the Southern Imagination (1992)--discuss the soldiers' experience and emphasize the southern warrior image, dominated by honor, patriotism, and redemption of the Lost Cause. A classic example is Webb's protagonist in Fields of Fire, aptly named Robert E. Lee Hodges Jr., a Marine lieutenant from Salt Lick, Kentucky, who embodies the Old South traditions. Like Webb, Wilson and Gilman highlight the importance of cultural lineage for southern soldiers, both fictional and real, who proudly took their place in line with their ancestors who fought in wars dating back to the American Revolution. Webb attributes much of the fighting spirit of southerners then and now to their common cultural heritage, claiming that the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working-class Americans, and even of their peculiarly populist form of democracy. (3)
Recent works of scholarship, however, such as Joseph A. Fry's Dixie Looks Abroad (2002) and Gregg L. Michel's Struggle for a Better South (2004), modify the image of the exclusively martial South. Their research indicates that a small, distinctly southern antiwar movement developed and was shaped by the region's pro-military and racist heritage. As Michel shows, the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), a group of college activists, took pride in the region's history and modified Confederate symbols and slogans to fit the organization's stance on civil rights and the Vietnam War. More work on the South's pacifists and their objectives is needed. (4)
Although the commonwealth is often characterized as a border rather than a southern state, Kentuckians in the 1960s and the 1970s often took pride in their southern heritage, and events in the state's then-largest city, Louisville, provide significant insight into the South's responses to the Vietnam War. Kentucky shares the South's rich military tradition and, like many southern states, embraced the Lost Cause view of the Civil War by creating a Confederate Home for veterans and awarding them a pension. Like other southerners, Kentuckians in significant numbers answered the call of arms throughout the twentieth century as well, and in the Vietnam era, many of them welcomed troops being trained at the state's two military installations, Fort Campbell and Fort Knox, where local residents clashed with war opponents residing only twenty-five miles away in Louisville. (5)
Louisville was home not only to Ali, the nation's best-known dissident, but also to social justice proponents, civil rights advocates, and a growing peace community. Anne and Carl Braden, Dr. George Edwards, and Suzy Post, in particular, addressed the issues of race and class that Ali represented, and, through coalitions and networks that linked young radicals and middle-aged activists, they fashioned an antiwar movement in Louisville that adds depth to historians' understanding of the southern response to the Vietnam War. Middle aged, middle class, well educated, and white, like other southern activist leaders such as Tennessee minister Will Campbell, the dissenters in Louisville joined other teachers, clerics, homemakers, and lawyers to become a vocal minority in cities all across the South. In Atlanta, Austin, Chapel Hill, Columbia, El Paso, Houston, Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, and Tallahassee, they provided counsel and often afforded a degree of protection from the legal system that the younger generation of soldiers and protesters could have received nowhere else. More than sympathizers and boosters, the older men and women often set the agenda for reform as they mentored and sheltered soldiers, draft evaders, peaceniks, and other young people who opposed the American presence in Vietnam. (6)
The Bradens, who were journalists, and Edwards, a seminary professor, were veteran civil rights advocates who saw an immediate and crucial link between that movement and opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Motivated by conscience, they organized and marched in antiwar demonstrations alongside blacks and other whites. Post, the chair of the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union (KCLU) and the wife of a liberal lawyer, worked within the conventional legal framework to safeguard the rights of protesters. All three dissenters provided draft counseling and at times willfully broke the law by hiding draft resisters and soldiers from nearby Fort Knox in their basements. (7)
Governor Nunn pledged to rid the state of the Bradens, who directed the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an interracial civil rights organization. Both grew up in the segregated South. Carl spent his youth in Louisville and Anne in Alabama and Mississippi, amid the Deep South's rigid racial divide. The husband and wife team worked tirelessly for integration and social justice, risking alienation and even their lives to help an African American couple purchase a house in a white Louisville neighborhood in 1954. The SSOC evolved out of Anne's idea to politicize the southern white colleges and encourage cooperation among the races. The group relied on the Bradens for advice, and the SCEF and the SSOC, headquartered only hours apart in Louisville and Nashville, together shaped much of the southern antiwar movement. (8)
George Edwards actively opposed the Vietnam War. He counseled conscientious objectors (COs) and led antiwar demonstrations. Calling the conflict "the most obnoxious example of American Imperialism," Edwards believed U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia belied the nation's revolutionary heritage. A CO himself, Edwards knew firsthand the vicissitudes of that life choice. A college student when World War II broke out, he rejected a student deferment in favor of CO status. He spent the duration of the war engaged in public service. Afterward, he volunteered to go to Italy to help rebuild that country. When he entered a seminary in 1948, students sought him out because of his experience. "He must be on the side of whoever is being oppressed," said the Reverend Jim Flynn in a 1997 television documentary on Edwards. His wife, Jean, added, "When he speaks, people just listen." Speaking out against the war was not an easy thing to do, especially in the South, where many people were not favorably disposed toward demonstrations against the conflict. "I remember one time," said George Edwards, "we went out there and demonstrated and nearly got run over by a guy that was driving a bus of recruits [to an induction center in Louisville]. And I think he would have hit us if we hadn't jumped at the last minute. We were not in the roadway, and he turned his bus like that and was headed right into our small group." (9)
Southern hostility toward war resisters frequently provoked confrontations. In Tallahassee, for example, conservative Florida State University fraternity brothers and "jocks" pelted activists with rocks and tossed them in the student union fountain. In Texas the Ku Klux Klan harassed a woman after the local newspaper revealed that her son-in-law was an exile in Canada. Her complaints about a break-in, shattered windows, slashed tires, and crank calls failed to alarm local police, who advised her to move since the local "organization" did not "take kindly to draft dodgers." In 1967 Austin antiwar leader George Vizard died of gunshot wounds in what police termed a grocery holdup. Texas peace organizations disagreed and called his death a "political murder." Three years later a coalition of Houston activists, including the John Brown Revolutionary League, the Houston Committee to End the War, Communications for Peace, and the University of Houston Student Mobilization Committee, accused the city's police of "protecting" Klan members who perpetrated bombings, shootings, and arson. (10)
George Edwards did not allow local sentiment to deter him. His pacifist ideas were firmly grounded in the Christian tradition, and he felt morally and ethically bound to speak out. A biblical scholar and a soft-spoken but forceful orator, he warned students in Kentucky and the Southeast that they were "sheep being led to the slaughter" by draft boards that neither knew nor understood the laws. One member of a Louisville draft board actually telephoned Edwards to ask if it was true that "you don't have to be a member of the church or a practicing attender of any church to be a conscientious objector." Edwards replied, "If you have a moral conviction in your character, you qualify, under the law, as a conscientious objector. That was the law at the time, and he didn't even know it, and he was a member of the draft board!" (11)
Edwards understood the law and knew he was breaking it by assisting deserters. More than thirty years after his involvement with young deserters and draft evaders, Edwards feared putting on tape "anything I did that might be construed as grounds for my indictment." "George was so funny," recalled Anne Braden. "I don't know why he didn't get put in jail. It's against the law to help people desert the army and George was doing it all over the place." Although Braden, Suzy Post, and Edwards all believed the government had bugged their homes and thus usually avoided discussing anything incriminating on the telephone, Edwards would "forget about the surveillance and blurt out that he was down at the bus station waiting to help a guy from Ft. Knox." He was, says Braden, "the most militant pacifist you ever saw." (12)
Edwards, Post, and the Bradens risked criminal prosecution for operating a kind of Underground Railroad that assisted young Kentuckians as they sought to avoid military service in the jungles of Vietnam. Throughout the South, like-minded "conductors" did the same. Kevin Vrieze, a draft evader from Texas, found help from "Houston to Austin to Tulsa to St. Louis to Detroit, and finally to Windsor in Canada." Clerics, teachers, homemakers, and pacifists formed the core of the network. As Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop noted, "the more middle-class and middle-aged the better," because such individuals did not draw the attention of federal and local authorities with the same regularity as did their younger, more radical counterparts. (13)
Individuals and organizations throughout the South assisted, to varying degrees, dissident soldiers. For example, the Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, hosted weekly meetings for a Fort Bragg organization named GIs United Against the War in Vietnam. The Bradens went a step further. They had a printing press in the basement that soldiers used for an underground GI newspaper called FTA and subtitled Fun, Travel, Adventure, drawing from a military recruitment slogan. One of the first newspapers edited exclusively by GIs, "It was called FTA," noted Anne, and "What it really stood for was 'Fuck the Army." Despite nearly constant federal surveillance, the Bradens' home in the city's West End served as SCEF headquarters and became a "second home" for some of the soldiers from Fort Knox. (14)
In addition to providing a meeting place and access to printing machines, the Bradens, Edwards, and Post at times opened their homes to desperate Fort Knox soldiers like Steve Gilbert and Frank Snow, who were weighing their options. Gilbert, an editor of FTA, hid at the Bradens' home after going AWOL (absent without leave) from his unit at Fort Knox. On one occasion, Anne warned him that the authorities were parked in front of her house. Steve was so "calm," Braden observed. All "he said was 'oh shit,' as he went out the back door." Several months later, Gilbert turned himself in to the army. Snow, in contrast, was one of a number of deserters who actually made it to Toronto with help from the Louisville-Toronto Underground Railroad. (15)
The railroad's first stop was a coffeehouse operating almost adjacent to Fort Knox in the small town of Muldraugh, Kentucky. Coffeehouses played a crucial role in the antiwar movement. The UFO, the first of eight high-profile coffeehouses frequented by opponents of the war, opened in late 1967 near Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, and set the tone for subsequent ones. Northern recruits viewed as oases the UFO and other southern coffeehouses such as the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas, the GI Coffee House in El Paso, near Fort Bliss, and the Apple House in Fayetteville. The UFO, frequented by University of South Carolina (USC) students and soldiers, "is the only place in the South that reminds me of home," observed a GI from Brooklyn, New York. Inside the coffeehouses, young soldiers enjoyed "entertainment, food, and stereo music," while learning another version of American history and the Vietnam conflict from returning veterans and civilian antiwar activists, who also provided especially desperate draftees with information about relocating to Canada and Europe. (16)
In August 1969 a handful of Louisville peace advocates known as the Youth Development Corp. [sic] (YDC) joined dissident Fort Knox soldiers to start Muldraugh's GI coffeehouse in a weathered, two-story, white frame building on Main Street. In Muldraugh, as in many base towns in the late sixties, coffeehouses were the place to be if one opposed...
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