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This text explores the class-based factors that determined which Americans fought in the Vietnam War, including the Selective Service System's biased channeling and the military's admission standards. It also discusses the consequences of Project 100,000 and medical exemptions. The text provides statistical profiles and personal accounts to highlight the class disparities during the war.
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[T]hose who fought and died in Vietnam were overwhelmingly drawn from the bottom half of the American social structure. (Appy, 12) • Class, not geography, was the crucial factor in determining which Americans fought in Vietnam (Appy, 13)
Institutional Factors • Selective Service System’s class-biased channeling • Military’s wartime slashing of admission standards • Project 100,000 • Medical exemptions that favored the well-informed and privileged • Student deferments • Safe haven of National Guard and the Reserves
“Channeling” “[T]he Selective Service did not even profess the ideal of a socially and economically balanced military.” • Devoted to a form of "human resource planning” • sent some men into the military • encouraged others to stay in school and seek occupational deferments. Basic idea: Use the threat of the draft and the lure of educational and professional deferments to channel men into nonmilitary occupations that the Selective Service believed vital to the "national health, safety and interest.”
Military as social uplift Had the potential to: • train the unskilled • put unemployed youth to work • instill confidence and pride in the psychologically defeated Military could help solve problem Moynihan claimed was at the heart of black poverty—”broken, fatherless families.” "Given the strains of disorganized and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth come of age, the armed forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change; a world away from women, a world run by strong men and unquestioned authority.”
Project 100,000 had dire consequences. • Promised training never carried out. • 40% trained for combat, compared with 25% for all enlisted men. • Black soldiers overrepresented: • 40% of Project 100,000 (only 10% of the entire military) • Roughly half of almost 400,000 men who entered Project 100,000 went to Vietnam. • Death rate twice as high as for US forces as a whole. • Appy: “This was a Great Society program that was quite literally shot down in the battlefields of Vietnam.
Draft boards controlled by conservative, white, prosperous men in the fifties and sixties. In 1966, only 9% of draft board members had blue-collar occupations Only 1.3% were black.
The student deferment was the most overtly class-biased feature of the Vietnam era draft system In October of 1971, Richard Nixon wrote a new draft bill for Vietnam that revoked the automatic deferment policy for men while they were in college
I'm bitter. You bet your goddamn dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country. The business people, they run the country and make money from it. The college types, the professors, they go to Washington and tell the government what to do. . . . But their sons, they don't end up in the swamps over there, in Vietnam. No sir. They're deferred, because they're in school. Or they get sent to safe places. Or they get out with all those letters they have from their doctors. Ralph told me. He told me what went on at his physical. He said most of the kids were from average homes; and the few rich kids there were, they all had bigdeal letters saying they weren't eligible. . . . Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line in the jungle over there, not unless you want to. Ralph had no choice. He didn't want to die. He wanted to live. They just took him—to "defend democracy," that's what they keep on saying. Hell, I wonder. -A firefighter who lost his son Ralph in Vietnam, Appy, 42
I told him I thought they want the war to end, so no more Ralphs will die, but he says no, they never stop and think about Ralph and his kind of people, and I'm inclined to agree. They say they do, but I listen to them, I watch them; since Ralph died I listen and I watch as carefully as I can. Their hearts are with other people, not their own American people, the ordinary kind of person in this country . . . Those people, a lot of them are rich women from the suburbs, the rich suburbs. Those kids, they are in college . . . I'm against this war, too—the way a mother is, whose sons are in the army, who has lost a son fighting in it. The world hears those demonstrators making their noise. The world doesn't hear me, and it doesn't hear a single person I know. -Ralph’s mother
I didn’t want to be like my Dad, coming home from the A&P every night. He was a strong man, a good man, but it made him so tired, It took all the energy out of him. I didn't want to be like that, working in that stinking A&P, six days a week, twelve hours a day. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to make something out of my life. 73
Every Saturday afternoon we’d all go down to the movies in the shopping center and watch gigantic prehistoric birds breathe fire, and war movies with John Wayne and Audie Murphy. (54)
Castiglia and I saw The Sands of Iwo Jima together. The Marine Corps hymn was playing in the background as we sat glued to our seats, humming the hymn together and watching Sergeant Strycker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed just before he reached the top. (55)
And as I shook their hands and stared up into their eyes, I couldn’t help but feel I was shaking hands with John Wayne and Audie Murphy. They told us that day the the Marine Corps built men—body, mind, and spirit. And that we could serve our country like the young president had asked us to do. (74)
I stayed up most of the night before I left, watching the late movie. Then “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. I remember standing up and feeling very patriotic chills, running up and down my spine. I put my hand over my heart and stood rigid at attention until the screen went blank. 75
Hard Hat Riot and Blue-Collar Politics in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s
And I'm proud to be an Okie from MuskogeeA place where even squares can have a ballWe still wave Old Glory down at the courthouseAnd white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all Leather boots are still in style for manly footwearBeads and Roman sandals won't be seenAnd football's still the roughest thing on campusAnd the kids here still respect the college dean Gretchen Wilson and Merle Haggard, “Politically Uncorrect” (2005)
"FLAGS, at full staff, were carried by the marching construction workers,” New York Times, May 9, 1970.
"IN FINANCIAL AREA: Hard-hatted construction workers breaking up an antiwar rally at the Subtreasury Building," New York Times, May 9, 1970
Approximately 2,000 construction workers and others supporting American war policy in Vietnam and attacking New York City mayor John Lindsay demonstrate on May 12, 1970. New York Times photograph.
Nixon wearing hardhat given to him by labor leaders on May 26, 1970. National Archives photograph.
AP photo of May 11, 1970 demonstration. Note sign:”Impeach the Red Mayor.” NYC Mayor John Lindsay
Peter J. Brennan, President if the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater NY.
Joe Kelly in front of his new, $40,000 two-family home on Staten Island with his wife Karen and their three small children...He is beginning to earn $15,000- 18,000 a year and says: "No one's more Establishmentthan I am."
Political Legacy • Left/Right divide in U.S. political culture • Working-class political realignment • The American Flag as political symbol • Current events?
At Donald Trump rallies, like this one in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on Jan. 12, his campaign distributes signs heralding support from the "silent majority." Joe Raedle/Getty Images
