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April 6, 2003
Anti-war protests rest on shoulders of history
By THAD RUETER | News-Journal Staff Writer
DAYTONA BEACH — For Meyer Sussman, the ongoing anti-war demonstrations don't seem so different from those during the Vietnam War. Or the civil rights movement that came before.
Sussman, an 83-year-old Daytona Beach Shores man who said he's been involved in street politics since New Deal days, went to Washington, D.C., in January for demonstrations against war with Iraq. He saw a familiar mix of young and old faces, political and nonpolitical types.
"The population of people I saw was very similar to what I've seen before," he said.
Measured by aims and outcomes, the current anti-war movement resembles some earlier eruptions of American protests, including not only those that took place about 35 years ago, but also demonstrations that happened prior to World War II and also in the midst of the Civil War.
The most obvious comparison is to those during the Vietnam War. In fact, many of the idealistic students who marched and shut down college campuses during the '60s and early '70s now are middle-aged but still carrying signs and banners against the war in Iraq.
During Vietnam, though, protests didn't grow to a significant size until a couple of years after Americans started advising the South Vietnamese and fighting with them.
"It took four or five years before the protests (against that war) became as aggressive" as the protests against the Iraq war have become, said Peter Ripley, a Florida State University history professor who teaches a class on the '60s.
He also said current protests are "larger in size, and more geographically spread throughout the country" than during the Vietnam War.
Some observers have said the Internet is one reason current protesters have been quickly mobilized. Anti-war activists furiously sent e-mail messages and posted Web petitions, gaining hundreds of thousands of supporters within a few months.
Thirty years before the Vietnam protests, another anti-war movement gained energy as the Great Depression dragged on during the 1930s.
Haunted by memories of World War I – the so-called "war to end all wars" claimed hundreds of thousands of lives – some Americans demonstrated against getting involved in another European bloodbath.
Like the current anti-war movement, this movement took place before any war started – people were protesting as war loomed larger. Some protesters were isolationists, those who thought America was best served by minding its own business. Others, shaken by the economic ruin of the Depression, admired the apparent prosperity of the German and Italian dictatorships.
The '30s anti-war movement was "enormously effective," said Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian and former National Security Council member, during a recent PBS interview. The movement "paralyzed American diplomacy" virtually until the attack of Pearl Harbor.
Yet anti-war movements rarely stop or prevent wars. Americans protested during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and subsequent occupation of the Philippines, the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. But the fighting continued; sometimes the fighting escalated.
Anti-war protests provoke other unforeseen and often counterproductive responses. During Vietnam, it was people spitting on soldiers, the memories of which are sometimes held against current protesters, and a growing paranoia within the government.
The government resisted the release of true estimates of troop and budget needs during Vietnam partly because it didn't want to further provoke demonstrators, said Lucy Barber, who wrote "Marching on Washington," a book about American protest movements published in January by the University of California Press.
Still, those protests had long-term benefits, she said. "They made leaders more concerned about the potential for sustained criticism," Barber said.
She thought some reasons given by the Bush Administration – liberation, for instance – to justify war against Iraq war were, at least in part, a response to that potential.
It's impossible to predict what effects the ongoing protests will have.
Barber wondered if "the international coalition" born during the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and strengthened during worldwide anti-war protests can "hold together."
Sussman, the longtime local activist, has more immediate goals. Protesting, he said, "is a cumulative thing that builds on itself. Protests permit people to see there are others of like mind." He said he hoped that continued protests "will stop the war before there's more killing."