...and more on the generation gap

A full page ad from the NY Times, Sunday, October 12, 1969, found among my papers from those years

October 15: Fathers and Sons Together Against the War

To be against the war in Vietnam and to do nothing about it is indefensible.

To see your son or your neighbor's son dragged off to the slaughter or to prison, and to do nothing about it is inexcusable.

To sit back passively month after month and wait for a Richard Nixon or a Melvin Laird to admit that our country was wrong, and that we are going to bring our men back home without delay is...naive to say the least.

It isn't going to happen until the American people make it happen.

That is why we must go to the people.

They are waiting for us.

They are sitting there behind closed doors, seething over Vietnam and what it has brought them: death, taxes, inflation, decay and disenchantment.

They are waiting for a spark, and that is what we intend to provide.

On October 15, students and faculty all over the country are declaring a one-day moratorium against the war in Vietnam. We are leaving our classes for the day so that we can go out to ring doorbells and help organize our fellow Americans against the war in Vietnam.

We will go wherever the people are - into the neighborhoods, to the factories, to the offices, to the shopping centers. And we think we will find them in a mood to move with us.

October 15 is not an end; it is a beginning.

If the war continues and there is no firm commitment to an immediate withdrawal of all  American troops, then we plan to have a 2-day moratorium in November. A three-day moratorium in December, if necessary. And so on.

What we are working toward is the largest and broadest anti-war movement ever seen in the United states. And we are getting there.

We will not be put off by gimmicks or token withdrawals. We will not be bought off at the expense of the 19-year-olds.

But we  need your support to make it happen.  We ask you to put aside "business as usual" on October 15th, and take part in the local anti-war observances on that day. We ask you to send in a contribution, whatever you can spare. If we had the money, we could run ads like this all over the country.

Let's get to work. There isn't a moment to lose.

Comments

[MB]

Wow. Times change, huh? Who paid for the ad?

[Peter]

I don't remember whether I had anything to do with that first moratorium. I was a very, very raw freshman at the time and still getting my feet on the ground barely a month after starting college. I remember a friend singing "mo-ra-tor-ium" to the "volga boatmen" tune in a stairwell of the freshman dorm; his deep voice resonated in the small space. It must have been during one that followed in the spring that I went into the suburbs of Utica to take around a petition with a woman freshman I didn't know.
Most of the houses had no one home, and a few turned us away.
But one old man took my clipboard and signed it boldly, then turned it to us and said, "See that name? That was my son's name.
"He was a quarterback, a star, everyone knows that name. He died over there."
By the time we had gotten to that house, I had worked up a line of patter I could deliver with confidence. But after that, we just stammered our thanks and carried on down the rest of the street to the car waiting for us. I don't even remember the woman's name.
I had always preferred to stand apart from politics and emotionalism -- I'm sure the feeling affected my choice of career -- but there were a few times like that when I felt I had a duty to get involved. But I've gotten more, not less passionate about public affairs over the years.

Sorry to ramble on..

[language hat]

Boy, does that bring back memories. Those were scary times, but somehow we didn't feel as despairing; it seemed we could change things by fighting back. Now everything is so locked in place that even with the administration's ratings in the basement, it looks like the same gang of corrupt thugs will probably keep on running the place, just with different front men. I've been reading about Russia in the years after 1905 (deeply unpopular war, stubbornly reactionary government, growing frustration among liberals), and the parallels are striking. (Speaking of striking, why aren't workers doing that any more?)

[Pica]

!

[Fred garber]

I really enjoyed that post. What a flashback! I was attending the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa at that time. We had maybe 10,000 people at each of the anti-war rallies. Heady times! Soldiers just coming back from the war were speaking out against it....When will we ever learn...to quote Pete Seeger

[dale]

Interesting, I was much more hopeless then than I am now, politically; back in those days I didn't expect the human race still to be extant in ten years. Since we've actually muddled through over thirty, with the second half of the 20th century turning out, on the balance, no worse than the first half, we're doing way better than I expected. I wonder if the difference is that I really don't remember the prelapsarian times. I came to political consciousness thinking that my government was evil, even more evil, in fact, than it turned out to have been. So it all looks like up to me.

[kasturi]

thank you so much for posting this, beth! wow, does it bring back the memories. back then there was a tacit understanding that we had the right to protest the war, to 'critique' it, and the media cooperated, or at least didn't stonewall us. let's see, in 1968 I was just starting at Temple U. in Philly and i remember going to the March on Washington in...was it 1969? I felt torn apart inside by that war, mostly because the people around me were suffering so much. One of my high school friends lost four of her five brothers to it, and she hated me for being against the war. (I was the poster-peacenik in our conservative, working-class neighborhood, full of soldier-sons.) sad times, hard times.

[kasturi]

ps - language hat asks a good question about why workers aren't striking any more.