Decade of the 60’s
Amassing of
troops to Vietnam
Race Riots in the US
Presenter – Lucy Beam Hoffman
Learning.Hoffman@gmail.com

How the
Vietnam War
Ratcheted Up
Under 5 U.S.
Presidents
• Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all deepened U.S.
involvement in the decades-long conflict.
• The Truman Doctrine
• Fearing that Vietnam, too, would become a communist state, he sent over
jeeps, along with 35 military advisers, as part of a multimillion-dollar aid
• U.S. involvement in the conflict would only deepen from there. By the end
presidency, the United States was funding more than one-third of
France’s war costs, a number that would soon skyrocket to about 80
percent.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 2

PRESIDENT
DWIGHT
EISENHOWER
WITH JOHN
FOSTER DULLES
AND SOUTH
VIETNAM
PRESIDENT NGO
DINH DIEM IN
WASHINGTON,
1957.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 3

The American Soldier in Vietnam
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 4
More than 2.5 million American men served in Vietnam during the war. Some of
these men were career military officers. But many others were poor or working-class
teenagers who enlisted or were drafted into the military right out of high school.
A large proportion of the U.S. troops consisted of African American men from the
inner cities, the sons of immigrants from factory towns, and boys from rural farming
communities.
• During the Vietnam War, however, at least one-third of the American troops were
selected for military service through an involuntary process known as the draft. A
government agency called the Selective Service collected the names of all American
men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six.
• When a man's name was drawn, he was required to report to his local draft board for
evaluation. There, he would either qualify for a deferment (an official delay of military
service), or he would be inducted into the armed forces. In this way, many young men
ended up serving in Vietnam whether they wanted to or not.

Draft Card Notice
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 5

The Draft in Context
• Although only 25 percent of the military force in the combat zones
were draftees, the system of conscription caused many young
American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more
of a choice of which division in the military they would serve.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 6

11 ways people dodged the Vietnam
draft
• There were two kinds of methods to avoid being drafted when you number was called:
illegal and legal.
• 1. Be a Conscientious Objector
• 2. Make up a health condition
• 3. Have children who need you
• 4. Be a homosexual
• 5. Run away to Canada
• 6. Go to college
• 7. Have a high lottery number
• 8. Hold an “essential” civilian job
• 9. Get Married
• 10. Forge military ID or reserve papers
• 11. Enlist anytime
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 7

How many people died in Vietnam?
• In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed
during the Vietnam War:
• as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and
• some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters.
• The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South
Vietnamese soldiers died.
• The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300
names of members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went
missing in action.
• South Korea had more than 4,000 dead
• Thailand about 350
• Australia more than 500
• New Zealand some three dozen.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 8

US Fatalities
in Vietnam
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 9

Human Cost of the Vietnam War
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 10

Vietnam War Memorial
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 11

Vietnam War
Protests
• The antiwar movement began mostly on college campuses, as
members of the leftist organization Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) began organizing “teach-ins” to express their
opposition to the way in which it was being conducted.
12

Students for a Democratic Society
13

Anti-Vietnam
movements
• By November 1967, American troop
strength in Vietnam was approaching
500,000 and U.S. casualties had
reached 15,058 killed and 109,527
wounded. The Vietnam War was costing
the United States some $25 billion per
year, and disillusionment was beginning
to reach greater sections of the
taxpaying public.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 14

• After a brutal confrontation with the soldiers and
U.S. Marshals protecting the building,
hundreds of demonstrators were arrested.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 15

The Pentagon Protest
• The Pentagon protest was also a vivid
demonstration of division in America.
• It would be followed by years of unrest
including, in 1970, the deadly shooting of
unarmed students at Kent State
University in Ohio.
• The turmoil revealed a nation more
deeply split than at any time since the
civil war a century earlier, with protesters
castigated as traitors, veterans
returning to insults and the very
meaning of patriotism suddenly
uncertain.
• The rift has arguably never healed but
rather become a scab picked at by the
“culture wars.”
16

Vietnam War Protest Songs
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ai3uQVNv7A
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BugBwt2ESpo
• https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=%22Bring+Them+Home%22
+by+Pete+Seeger&docid=603542638550325432&mid=4821B479D80
C11BBD9AE4821B479D80C11BBD9AE&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 17

How the Vietnam War
Empowered the Hippie
Movement
• The hippie counterculture
reached its height during the
escalation of U.S.
involvement in Vietnam and
subsided as the conflict
drew to a close.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 18

The Counterculture Movement
• On March 8, 1965, two battalions of U.S. Marines landed on beaches of Da Nang,
marking the first official engagement of American troops in the Vietnam War.
• Over the next several years, as the United States escalated its ill-fated involvement
in that conflict, hundreds of thousands of Americans joined in mass protests across
the country, repulsed and outraged by the terrible bloodshed taking place in
Southeast Asia.
• Though the anti-war movement had begun on college campuses at the dawn
campuses at the dawn of the 1960s, more and more people joined in
joined in opposition to the war in the latter half of the decade, as television
as television brought images of its atrocities into American homes in a new
homes in a new level of excruciating detail.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 19

Hippies
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 20

Long hair and beards, colorful style,
psychedelic drug use, love of rock music
and eco-conscious lifestyle
• The hippie counterculture, which emerged in the late 1960s
and grew to include hundreds of thousands of young Americans
across the country, reached its height during this period of
escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and
subsided as that conflict drew to a close.
• But hippies’ rejection of mainstream American culture, and
their distinctive brand of rebellion—including their long hair
and beards, colorful style, psychedelic drug use, love of rock
music and eco-conscious lifestyle—would leave a lasting impact
on the nation in the decades to come.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 21

Counterculture
Prior to the Vietnam
War
• In many ways, the hippies of the 1960s
descended from an earlier American
counterculture: the Beat Generation.
• This group of young bohemians, most famously
including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and
William S. Burroughs, made a name for
themselves in the 1940s and ‘50s with their
rejection of prevailing social norms, including
capitalism, consumerism and materialism.
• Centered in bohemian havens like San Francisco
and the East Village of New York City, Beats
embraced Eastern religions, experimented with
drugs and a looser form of sexuality; their
followers became known by the diminutive term
“beatniks.”
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 22

Beatniks – 1950’s
20XX
23

Bob Dylan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Kv0vF41Bc
• As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the Beats and beatniks gradually gave way to a new kind of counterculture: the hippies,
who actually preferred to call themselves “freaks” or “love children.”
• The hippies were much younger than the beatniks (they could even have been the Beats’ children) and had a much different
style.
• They listened to folk and rock music, not jazz; they dressed flamboyantly, in bright colors, where the Beats and
where the Beats and beatniks had favored shades of black and grey.
• Ripped jeans, bell bottoms, tie-dyed clothing and flowers worn in the hair were all big parts of the typical hippie style.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 24

Where were the Hippies?
• Though the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and New York City’s East
Village were famous hippie meccas, the movement thrived all over the country.
• In a cover story published in July 1967, during the “Summer of Love,” Time
magazine reported that the hippie movement was “blooming in every major U.S. city from
Boston to Seattle, from Detroit to New Orleans,” encompassing some 300,000 people.
• Many hippies eventually chose to move outside the city, where the cost of living was lower.
(Hippies were perennially broke.)
• On a growing number of rural communes, hippies joined disaffected political
disaffected political radicals and Vietnam draft dodgers in embracing back-to-the-
embracing back-to-the-land living, including free love, organic farming,
farming, vegetarianism, holistic medicine and a lot of marijuana use.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 25

Hippie
Communes
• They came from the mountains and kept to themselves. If you
were lucky, you might have seen them frolicking in the hills
under the glow of the buttery, golden hour sunshine that
California does so well. Collectively, they were known as “The
Brotherhood of the Sun,” and in the 1970s, they emerged as
one of the most successful communes in US history. In a
manner of speaking, that is, because if we’ve learned
anything from our past investigations into communes and
cults, it’s that these sort of things have an expiration date.
26
“The Brotherhood of the Sun”

Decline and Lasting Effects of the Hippie
Movement
• In some ways, the Summer of Love also marked the beginning of the end for
the hippie movement, as drugs, homelessness and crime had infested
Haight-Ashbury, pushing out many of the neighborhood’s original residents.
original residents.
• In October 1967, the Diggers held a “Death of the Hippie March” in San
Francisco to decry the commercialization of hippie culture.
• The march ended at the famed Psychedelic Shop, an early hippie hangout that
was closing.
• Marchers buried the shop’s signs, marking a symbolic death for the hippie
heyday.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 27

The Diggers
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 28
• The San Francisco Diggers became one of the
legendary groups in the Haight-Ashbury during the
years 1966 to 1968.
• Shrouded in a mystique of anonymity, they took their name
from the original English Diggers of the 1640s.
• The San Francisco Diggers combined street theater,
anarchic direct action, and art happenings in their social
agenda.
• Their most famous activities revolved around Free
Food (every day in the Panhandle), and the Free
Store (where everything was free for the taking).
• They produced a series of events that mark the evolution of
the hippie phenomenon from a homegrown face-to-face
community to the mass-media circus that splashed its face
across the world's front pages and TV screens.

Haight Ashbury in San
Francisco
20XX
29

Origin of 420
in San
Francisco
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 30

Haight Ashbury
• Walking along the
streets of Haight-
Ashbury, lined
with colorful Victorian
houses and lots of music
stores and head shops, it
was not unusual to run
into locals like Janis
Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,
Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick,
or even Sid Vicious (who
lived in California for a
while before his untimely
death).
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 31

What changed in Haight Ashbury?
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 32
• Named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets (very original indeed, we
know), the neighborhood was definitely not a cool place to hang out before the
Summer of Love.
• Quite the contrary, it was boring, lifeless, and mostly underpopulated, but that was to
change dramatically soon enough.
• It all started in the late 1950s when the Beats (which included the likes of Jack Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg, or William S. Burroughs) started to hang out in San Francisco’s North
Beach neighborhood.
• The high density of talented writers and poets that flocked to the area kickstarted
what is known as the San Francisco Renaissance, the precursor to the Summer of
Love.
• The only problem was that North Beach was getting expensive, especially for beatnik
poets, so many artists of the Beat Generation started moving West towards Haight-
Ashbury, which was cheap and mostly vacant.

The Summer of
Love
• In the summer of 1967, a
hundred thousand young
people descended upon the
Haight-Ashbury district of San
Francisco.
• These utopian-seeking artists,
musicians, drifters, and hippies
were there to take part in the
cultural phenomenon known as
the “Summer of Love.”
• New forms of rock 'n' roll
pulsed through the airwaves,
psychedelic drugs were
plentiful, and free love was
embraced.
• These counterculture dreamers
were challenging society's
expectations while wearing
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 33

Concerts during
the Summer of
Love
• America had seen a couple
of post-WWII counter-culture
movements that later
became mainstreamed:
Jazz, and the Bohemians,
the Beat Generation, or
what were called beatniks.
The first focused on music,
the second on literature. The
Summer of Love saw this
and more personified
in “hippies.”
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 34

Give Peace a Chance
• On Nov. 15, 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee staged
what is believed to be the largest antiwar protest in
United States history when as many as half a million
people attended a mostly peaceful demonstration in
Washington. Smaller demonstrations were held in a number
of cities and towns across the country.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 35
John Lennon Give Peace A Chance 1969 - YouTube

1968
Democratic
Convention
• Though the 1968 protest at the Democratic
National Convention were largely against
the Vietnam War, the country was undergoing
unrest on many fronts.
• The months leading up to the infamous 1968
Democratic Convention were turbulent: The
brutal assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr. in April had left the country reeling, and
although segregation had officially ended,
racism and poverty continued to make life
difficult for many blacks.
• But Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley had no
intention of letting his city or the convention
be overrun by protestors. The stage was set
for an explosive face-off.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 36

Pigasus
• Pigasus
• Fed up with Democratic leadership’s penchant for
war, yippies protesting at the 1968 Democratic
National Convention conceived their own solution:
nominate a pig for president.
• Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman came up with the
idea, named their candidate “Pigasus the
Immortal” and pledged, “They nominate a
president and he eats the people. We nominate a
president and the people eat him.”
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 37

Mayor Richard J. Daley, in full Richard Joseph Daley, (born
May 15, 1902, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 20, 1976,
Chicago), mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976; he
was reelected every fourth year through 1975. Daley was called “the
last of the big-city bosses” because of his tight control of Chicago
politics through widespread job patronage. He attained great
power in national DemocraticParty politics.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 38
https://youtu.be/Pswvi3QN_tI

Black Supporters
of Mayor Daley
• Blacks were a major component of
the Daley coalition, providing him
with his winning margin in his
two closest mayoral elections.
• But his relationship with them
in the turbulent hours after Dr.
King’s assassination when Daley
issued a shoot-to-kill order in the
wake of riots and looting on the
Side.
• He later resented the challenge to
authority as party chairman by
Democratic politicians.
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 39

Shoot to Kill
• Mayor Richard J Daley's "shoot to kill" comment to reporters
• After the Chicago riots following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr,
Mayor Daley told reporters that he had ordered police "to shoot to
kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand . . .
. to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city."
• https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/after-the-chicago-riots-
following-the-murder-of-martin-news-
footage/665646748#:~:text=After%20the%20Chicago%20riots%20foll
owing%20the%20murder%20of,cripple%20anyone%20looting%20any
%20stores%20in%20our%20city.%22
20XX PRESENTATION TITLE 40