The Strange Popularity of an Unpopular War

Abstract

In early 1965, as President Lyndon Johnson initiated sustained bombing of North Vietnam and contemplated dispatching several hundred thousand troops to southeast Asia, rural Tennessee resident Mrs. Yarboro E. Salley wrote to Senator Albert Gore to voice her support for Johnson’s decision to escalate the conflict. The reasons for her pro-war stance were unambiguous. She wrote, “I feel that the world situation boils down to the fact that communism is fighting Christianity” (120). As they contemplated United States' role in world affairs, Salley and her fellow southerners—from presidents and secretaries of state to foot soldiers and housewives—drew on a range of shared cultural values (including a conservative, evangelical Protestantism) particular to the American South. In this provocative new study of the enduring impact of place, historian Joseph A. Fry places region and regionalism at the center of an understanding of U.S. foreign policy generally, and the nation’s involvement in Vietnam specifically. He argues that the American South—the most staunchly and consistently pro-war region in the country—has exerted a profound influence on U.S. foreign policy since its founding, and that southerners “habitually viewed U.S. foreign relations through a distinctly regional lens grounded in a variety of shared values, historical assumptions, and perceived regional interests” (1).