A Biography of America
The Sixties
Professor Scharff weaves the story of the Civil Rights movement with stories of the Vietnam War and Watergate to create a portrait of a decade. Lyndon Johnson emerges as a pivotal character, along with Stokely Carmichael, Fanny Lou Hamer, and other luminaries of the era.
Professor Scharff weaves the story of the Civil Rights movement with stories of the Vietnam War and Watergate to create a portrait of a decade. Lyndon Johnson emerges as a pivotal character, along with Stokely Carmichael, Fanny Lou Hamer, and other luminaries of the era.
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Program 24: The Sixties/Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement
Donald L. Miller with Waldo E. Martin, Jr., and Virginia Scharff
Introduction
Martin: What do you think separates the sixties?…
Scharff: The sixties is a period when the container bursts. Bursting out of all these incredible energies, the civil rights revolution…
Miller: And the Vietnam War.
Martin: When I think about the sixties, they sort of push into the seventies.
Miller: And to Watergate. A tumultuous decade. Today on A Biography of America, “The Sixties.”
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Events Leading to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
And in truth, the President, their most powerful ally, did have other things on his mind. Far from Atlantic City or Washington or Mississippi, in the divided Southeast Asian country of Vietnam, the United States was involved in a civil war. In 1964, few Americans could have located Vietnam on a map. But the roots of the conflict reached back to decisions made during and after World War II.
Presidents from Truman on saw Vietnam as a strategic battleground in the Cold War. The U.S. had been sending money and military supplies to Vietnam since the 1940s, to aid a French colonial government fighting against Communist nationalists, led by Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s most visible and popular leader. Ho wanted independence for Vietnam.
When Ho’s Communist troops decimated French forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French withdrew from Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh would not, however, be allowed to preside over the independent (and Communist) Vietnam he believed he’d won on the battlefield. Instead, the United States insisted that the country be partitioned, with Ho’s forces moving north, and a non-Communist government to be established in the south. The result was a civil war, as Ho fought ruthlessly to reunify the country he believed had been split in two and stolen by imperialists.
President Eisenhower had argued that the United States had to make a stand in Vietnam, or risk the fall of Asian countries to Communism like “a row of dominos.” Ike committed hundreds of millions of dollars each year in aid to the government of South Vietnam. And President Kennedy increased the aid and began to commit American “advisors” to assist the South Vietnamese army. By mid-1964, more than 20,000 of those supposedly noncombatant soldiers were in Vietnam.
But the American-backed government in South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, was weak, corrupt, and it never attracted the support of the majority of its people. South Vietnamese officials stole millions of dollars in American aid and military supplies, and they carried out campaigns of terror, instead of land reforms, in the countryside. When a Buddhist monk burned himself to death to protest the Diem government’s actions, the President’s powerful sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, joked that she’d be glad to “provide the mustard for the monks’ next barbecue.”
In the 1960s, most Americans did believe in the necessity of fighting Communism. The American mass media pounded home the message of a Communist threat on a daily basis. Johnson’s policy advisors all agreed that he couldn’t abandon South Vietnam to a Communist takeover. Indeed, they said, he should ratchet up the war against Ho Chi Minh and his supporters in the south, guerrilla fighters known as the Viet Cong, if Johnson hoped to win the war.
Well Lyndon Johnson wasn’t going to be the first American president to lose a war. But he wanted to proceed gradually, rather than to declare war against North Vietnam and commit enormous resources and huge numbers of American soldiers to fighting the war. And so Johnson’s Vietnam War began with a lie. In August of 1964, using a trumped-up attack against an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse, Johnson got Congress to pass a resolution giving him a free hand to do whatever he chose in Vietnam.
The War in Vietnam
By the time the United States finally admitted defeat in 1973, Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, had sent more than two million American troops, dropped 7 million tons of bombs (when only 2 million tons of bombs had fallen in all of World War II), and they’d sent transport planes to drop a million pounds of toxic chemicals, destroying half of Vietnam’s forests. Hundreds of Vietnamese hamlets and villages were destroyed, and millions of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers had died. Over 58,000 Americans were killed, and an untold number of American troops returned to the United States permanently scarred physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
Only two senators voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. But in time, millions of Americans came to see that measure as the fatal step into a war that made Americans wonder about the wisdom of trying to fight Communism everywhere. And that had been a fundamental tenet of the Cold War.
Vietnam devastated the hope and the idealism symbolized by the sit-ins, by King’s moving speeches, and by the Civil Rights Act. Government resources now went not into rebuilding cities, or fighting poverty, or ending discrimination, but instead, into the war. In the battle between guns and butter, guns won.
Nobody really knew what it would mean to win the war. The President said he meant to keep the promise of “self-determination” for Vietnam. But was that the same as keeping non-Communist officials in power? Did winning require wiping out the Viet Cong, or overthrowing Ho Chi Minh and reunifying Vietnam?
Without clear objectives, how could the U.S. even know how to win? The men around Johnson buried their doubts. They tried to take all intelligence reports at their most optimistic, and if the news from the front wasn’t good, well, they just made up some good news, like the notorious “body counts”, the aggregate figures of dead bodies found after battles, who might have been enemy troops or might have been friendly civilians, but who were always counted as enemy dead, either way.
And those body counts reflected the most fundamental American problem. In a strange country, in a time of civil war, defending an unstable regime in the name of democracy, Americans never knew who was friend and who was enemy. Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, however, were fighting on their home turf, with clear purposes: reunify the country and win independence. Undeniably, many were also fighting to establish a Communist government, and certainly their methods could be as terrible as those of their enemies.
But every bomb that dropped strengthened Ho’s resolve to keep fighting until American will failed. President Johnson and his generals kept telling the American public that the war was going well; it was almost won; there was “a light at the end of the tunnel.” But who was going to fight this foe?
The soldiers were young, and disproportionately they were nonwhite and poor. Black activists furiously denounced a war in which, they said, the nation’s most oppressed people were asked to make the greatest sacrifices. King: “The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burdens, both at the front and at home.”
As draft calls rose and rose, the more affluent draft-age men found ways to get out of serving. Poor boys were nearly twice as likely as their better-off peers to serve in the military, to go to Vietnam, and see combat. You could even break it down by neighborhoods. One study of Chicago found that young men from low-income neighborhoods were three times as likely to die in Vietnam as boys from high-income areas.
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You Decide: Did the Feminism Movement Improve American Women's Lives?
Since the 1960s, the role of women in America has changed dramatically. From politics to business to academics to sports, women have gained positions of prominence that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Much of this change can be attributed to the feminist movement, which detailed significant issues for women’s lives and encouraged women (and men) to rethink the role of women in our society.
While one major goal of the movement, an Equal Rights Amendment, was never realized, other legislation and an overall change in cultural attitudes have had substantial impact. Yet many objectives of the movement are still unfulfilled, and some in America believe that feminism has had a negative impact on the family and on our society.
Did the feminist movement improve American women’s lives?
Yes: What if you knew that American women were still politically under-represented at the end of the twentieth century?
No: What if you knew that American women had made huge strides in politics by the end of the twentieth century?
Before 1975, only two women had served as members of the president’s cabinet. By 1999, nineteen women had been cabinet members, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the highest-ranking woman ever to have served in American government. In the final Congress of the twentieth century, both senators from the nation’s largest state, California, were women.
As of 1999, women comprised 52 percent of the population of the United States, but only 9 percent of members of the United States Senate, 12.9 percent of members of the House of Representatives, 13 percent of federal judges, and 6 percent of governors. No woman had yet served as president or vice president of the United States.
Did the feminist movement improve American women’s lives?
Yes: What if you knew that 60 million American women worked for pay by 1997, but the average male worker still earned much more than the average female worker?
No: What if you knew that women had made great gains in business and the professions?
Business and the Professions
Women held professional and managerial jobs in unprecedented numbers at the end of the century. In some cases, they had risen to the top of major corporations. The sight of women doctors, lawyers, and college professors was no longer unusual. 10.6 percent of board seats in Fortune 500 companies were held by women. If a “glass ceiling” barring women from top management remained, women were knocking hard on it.
Although the gap between women’s and men’s wages narrowed considerably since 1964, women who worked full time at the end of the century still made only 76 cents for every dollar earned by male full-time workers. The situation was worse for working mothers, who earned an average of 60 cents for every dollar earned by working fathers. 25 percent of all women who worked held low-paying, traditionally female jobs: secretary, bookkeeper, elementary school teacher, waitress, sales clerk.
Did the feminist movement improve American women’s lives?
Yes: What if you knew that women who held down full-time jobs continued to do most of the housework and childcare?
No: What if you knew that employers were more and more willing to adjust to women’s family responsibilities?
The Family Claim
With 62 percent of mothers of children under age 6 in the workforce, more and more employers in the United States realized that they needed to accommodate the demands of family life to retain good workers. Flextime, job sharing, telecommuting, and family leave policies showed that companies were getting serious about helping women meet their long-standing responsibilities as unpaid caregivers.
Even women who worked full-time still carried the load at home. Women still did 80 per cent of all childcare and two-thirds of all housework. Accounting for home and childcare along with full-time employment, American women, on the average, worked 15 more hours per week than American men.
Did the feminist movement improve American women’s lives?
Yes: What if you knew that half of all marriages ended in divorce, and divorce can be disastrous for women, particularly if they have children?
No: What if you knew that women in the United States gained unprecedented access to education, job opportunities, and political rights?
Dependence and Independence
Although the vast majority of American women still married at some point in their lives, they were no longer as financially dependent upon their husbands as they were before the feminist movement. Marriage was no longer a woman’s best career option.
All studies indicate that, in general, fathers’ standards of living improved after divorce. Mothers, on the other hand, found themselves too often juggling jobs, childcare, and housework alone. Support from fathers was often too little, too late, and sometimes nonexistent. Nearly forty percent of divorced mothers lived in poverty.
With what you now know, did the feminist movement improve American women’s lives?
The Future of Women in America
How will American women’s lives change in the future? How will those changes affect those around them? American society in general? The course of American history?
You will write the next chapter!
Questions to Ponder
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination according to sex. At the time, few Americans understood the significance of that small provision of the landmark law or foresaw the ways in which a massive, grassroots women’s movement would transform women’s roles and rights in the last third of the twentieth century. |
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1. If women’s choices have expanded, have the pressures on them also grown greater? |
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2. What inequalities between women and men remain? |
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3. How does race affect women’s lives? |
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4. How has the women’s movement changed men’s lives? |
Bibliography
Hartmann, Susan. From Margin to Mainstream. New York: McGraw Hill, 1989.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.
Williams, Joan. Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict, and What to Do About It. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Webography
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