- The War's Indirect Intrusions
- Facing The War Directly 1968-1969
- A Harsh Yet Enlightening Interloper
- Release From the War
It was 1961 when Charles Chatfield, professor emeritus of history, joined the faculty at Wittenberg. President John F. Kennedy had recently entered office. The race to space was intensifying between the Soviet Union and the United States.
The U.S. Peace Corps was established. Challenges to segregation were deepening, and women began to question their roles in society. And then there was Vietnam, a tumultuous time in American history and a time Chatfield remembers well.
An expert on the era, Chatfield now takes readers back to those years on campus — and off.
“So now it is 30 years since those experiences so deeply touched our hearts — our lives — our existence at Witt. Most of us went on to graduate in the Hollow, get jobs, marry, raise families, return for Witt reunions — and we stand at attention when The Star Spangled Banner is played — and we close our eyes and we see Mike — Chuck and Bernie — Phil [a friend and Seabee killed the day before his third tour of duty was over]. They are still our heroes — and we love them!”
— Marcia Balmut Ward ’68
Torch Editor Nancy Benco ’66 sorted through Associated Press reports of “massive demonstrations” at Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin and other universities in the fall of 1965.
“These campuses are so far away and what is happening there seems so hard to understand,” she remembers thinking; “it’s as if it were happening in another country.”
At Wittenberg, she recalls, the student body “was very isolated — geographically, emotionally, and intellectually — from those broader movements that were disrupting large universities.”
Still, Nancy published reports of war-related student activism on other campuses on the front page of an October Torch, along with an article on the draft and an announcement that a one-hour faculty panel on the war in Vietnam would be held in the chapel.
Close to six months would pass before student antiwar protest was visible in Springfield.
It began with a brief rally on the steps of Wittenberg’s Student Union (now Benham-Pence Student Center) on April 16, 1966, after which about 40 young people walked downtown accompanied by hecklers.
The demonstration, however, had been organized by Antioch students and included only about seven students from Wittenberg, a poignant reminder of the college’s continuing isolation from broader national movements.
A month later the Torch reported, “Riots cause damage!” In 1966, “riots” meant water fights between dorms at Wittenberg — and at Oberlin where there were water fights and panty raids that month.
Neither school seemed to have yet moved far from the isolation of traditional college life, whatever might be happening at Berkeley and Michigan — or in Vietnam.
The United States had sponsored an independent government in South Vietnam by 1955; on behalf of that regime, it became enmeshed in accelerating warfare until, early in 1965, it took the war to North Vietnam.
It waged warfare in the air and on the ground in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia until January 1973; and its client state fell in the spring of 1975.
The Vietnam War was half over when it engaged Wittenberg in any explicit way, and then only briefly.Wittenberg seemed like a “secure bubble” to Linda Gold Readey ’67 and her friends in the late ’60s.
It was a “comfort zone,” an extension of their “conservative homes and homogeneous high schools,” Linda recalls, and “national trends were outside the purview of most students.”
Not all trends: it is clear, racial and feminist issues surfaced on campus. Not all students: probably no more than 10 percent of them were consciously engaged in informed conversations about the war before 1968.
By then there was also a small core of activists struggling to rouse awareness and direct political action against the war (and other issues).
The hangouts of the activists were an off-campus and student-run coffeehouse, the Grill Room of the old Student Union and occasional forays to Antioch.
Neither the engaged nor the activist students were in the mainstream of student life.
But, ironically, more typical students looking back on the era came to feel, as Linda did, “the void of our experience and somewhat guilty for being out of the mainstream on war as well as civil rights and women’s issues.”
What in fact was the mainstream? Dominant motifs of the student generation of the ’60s were composed then by the media and have been reinforced by accounts of the era — an activist, rebellious, politicized counterculture.
The images supporting that stereotype were captured on the streets and in demonstrations at large universities. They may have represented as much as 2 percent of the student population, probably less.
But whereas 2 percent at Wittenberg would have been about 40 students, the same proportion at Berkeley or Columbia was several hundred — enough to create a dramatic media event and fix an image, but no more typical than the 2 percent at Wittenberg.
Nationally, the overwhelming majority of college students were conservative or moderately liberal and not well informed on international issues.
Students held opinions on the war and other national issues that roughly paralleled those of adults, even though they might adopt the outward appearance and behavior of a youth culture. They were the mainstream.
The “security bubble” was mainstream. If Wittenberg was not home to a stereotypic hippy counterculture, its students were not merely apathetic, either.
First, in the late ’60s campus leaders were heavily engaged in changing social regulations, race relations, the roles of Greeks, curriculum, governance and campus life. Those were the issues that affected them most directly.
That was where their activity could make the greatest difference. Back then, “apathy” was an epithet that often referred to lack of school spirit.
Carl Jensen ’68, a Torch columnist in 1966-67, correctly recalls that “the energy was more on campus life” than on national issues.
Second, the war in Vietnam did permeate the lives of even students for whom it was not consciously an issue. The war intruded in several guises. One was the face of friends serving in the military.
A second was the threat of the draft, and a third was the visage of veterans. For a few students and many faculty the war even briefly appeared in the possibility of a campus ROTC unit.