Marching Grounds: Vietnam War Dissent and America's Activist Tradition

Abstract

Marching GroundsVietnam War Dissent and America's Activist Tradition Heather Stur (bio) Jessica M. Frazier. Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era. 8 halftones, notes, bibliography, index, 236 pp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Cloth $80.00, paper $29.95. David L. Parsons. Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era. Notes, bibliography, index, 176 pp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Cloth $29.95. Less than a year into World War I, women from twelve countries gathered at The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss their shared antiwar sentiment and establish an international women's peace movement. Delegates elected Jane Addams, founder of the U.S. Women's Peace Party, to be the first president of the resulting organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. U.S. entry into the war in 1917 and the subsequent military draft fueled antiwar activism among Americans of various stripes, including draft-eligible men. Ben Salmon, a Catholic from Denver, registered for the draft and applied for conscientious objector status on the same day. He was arrested, convicted in both civilian and military courts, and sentenced to death. The military reduced his sentence, and he served time in a military prison, where he staged a hunger strike for more than one hundred days.1 When the war ended, American veterans returning home expected the government to make good on its promise of bonus pay for overseas service. The Great Depression made the reward a necessity, and in 1932, tens of thousands of veterans from all over the country gathered in Washington, D.C. They set up shantytowns, where they vowed to live until federal officials heard their demands. Civilians like Lillie Linebarrier and the members of her "Friendly Bonus Expeditionary Force String Band" joined the Bonus Army in Washington and provided entertainment and moral support to the striking veterans. President Herbert Hoover sent in troops to evict the demonstrators, and with tanks and tear gas, the Army drove World War I veterans from their encampments. Despite its violent ending, the bonus march resulted in government payouts to veterans and established the foundation for the GI Bill.2 In the early [End Page 510] twentieth century, civilian and military Americans expressed their opinions about war, collaborated internationally, and wielded the power of protest to get the government's attention. In two engagingly written books, historians Jessica Frazier and David Parsons examine how these traditions played out during the Vietnam War era. Frazier recounts the experiences of antiwar American women who collaborated with North Vietnamese and NLF women in international networks to oppose the conflict in Vietnam. Cultural imperialism might have tainted a relationship between Western and Third World women, but Frazier argues that Vietnamese women had the upper hand as they showed their Western counterparts, seemingly with ease, how to negotiate the alleged contradictions between maternalism and feminism. While Frazier's women are out in the global political sphere, Parsons's subjects, antiwar male GIs and veterans, are back on the home front, finding an outlet for their frustrations about Vietnam in GI coffeehouses. The central message of Parsons's story is that coffeehouses provided the necessary physical space to bring antiwar GIs, veterans, and civilians together to transform their shared ideas about the war and the U.S. military into action. Both authors claim to challenge conventional wisdom—Frazier on the power balance in international women's networks, Parsons on the relationship between antiwar civilians and U.S. soldiers—about the Vietnam War era. Frazier's story follows the common chronological development of American women's Cold War-era activism. Maternalism was central to organizations such as Women Strike for Peace (WSP), which began in the early Sixties as an anti-nuclear movement. Arguing from their positions as mothers allowed WSP members to stare down the prying eye of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which saw communists in any group that questioned the Defense Department. It was a maternal responsibility to protect children, WSP representatives testified before Congress, and so mothers were only doing their duty by opposing weapons of mass destruction. By mid-decade, the war in Vietnam had...