The Not So Silent Minority: Louisville's Antiwar Movement, 1966-1975

Abstract

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. 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 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. …