Yale University EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale MSSA Kaplan Prize for Use of MSSA Collections Library Prizes 5-2019 Young Americans for Freedom and the Anti-War Movement: Pro-War Encounters with the New Left at the Height of the Vietnam War Ethan Swift Yale University Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.edu/mssa_collections Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Swift, Ethan, "Young Americans for Freedom and the Anti-War Movement: Pro-War Encounters with the New Left at the Height of the Vietnam War" (2019). MSSA Kaplan Prize for Use of MSSA Collections.edu/mssa_collections/19 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Library Prizes at EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in MSSA Kaplan Prize for Use of MSSA Collections by an authorized administrator of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact elischolar@yale.
Young Americans for Freedom and the Anti-War Movement: Pro-War Encounters with the New Left at the Height of the Vietnam War Ethan Swift Pierson College, Class of 2019 Advised by Professor Beverly Gage Yale University Department of History April 1, 2019 Abstract While a vast amount of contemporary scholarship has been dedicated to student activism during the late 1960s and early 1970s, very little of it has focused on those who supported the war in Vietnam. The few authors who have written on the topic tend to present pro-war activists as a mild-mannered force that used conventional and congenial tactics to advocate for victory in southeast Asia. This paper will upend this characterization by examining how members of the conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) saw themselves as a besieged minority at American universities and responded to the radicalism of the anti-war movement with inflammatory satire and physical confrontation. As their peers in the New Left burnt draft cards and occupied campus buildings, these young conservatives employed aggressive strategies of their own to advocate for the war.
During this process, YAF members revealed an affinity for appropriating the rhetoric and tactics of their adversaries, exposing an intertwined relationship between two seemingly opposed political movements that most historians study in isolation Young Americans for Freedom helped to forge a distinct strain of conservative backlash politics that catapulted Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. This paper sheds light on radical undercurrents within the organization and its relationship to the New Left, complicating our understanding of both student activism in the 1960s and 1970s as well as the emergence of modern conservatism. Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………….……………1 Early Years and the Vietnam Crisis………………………………………….10 “An Unconservative Age”: YAF and the New Left on Campus……………….………………17 “Berkeley of the Right”: Language of the Left in Right-Wing Rhetoric………………………22 “Community of the Right”: Satire and Disruption…………….………………………………29 “Guerrillas of the Right”: Bringing the War Home……………………………………………35 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….…44 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………48 Swift 1 Introduction “We could not then, and cannot now, see lowering our flag for four persons at Kent State whom no one at Yale had ever met, known or even heard of, before the notable slaying. Band, Chairman of Yale Young Americans for Freedom.1 On May 5, 1970, more 500 young men and women gathered on Yale University’s Beinecke Plaza.
2 They met to mourn the deaths of four anti-war student protesters at the hands of National Guardsmen at Kent State University the day before. What had begun as a vigil to honor the murdered students soon turned into a rally decrying the war and the presence of more than 300,000 American soldiers in southeast Asia.3 Their anger reflected the frustration experienced by many young people across the country; the military draft, alleged war crimes in Vietnam, and the assassinations of icons like Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy defined liberal unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s As the anti-war demonstration escalated, another group arrived on the plaza with a very different agenda. Band and several dozen other Yale students gathered to picket the vigil and express their support for the war.
They were members of the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a conservative, pro-Vietnam War organization with branches nationwide. When tensions grew on the plaza and the anti-war group attempted to lower the American flag and replace it with a black one, Band and his “boys” physically intervened.4 To the pro-war students, honoring those killed at Kent State was akin to celebrating the deaths of 1 Richard E. Band, “Report to All Supporters of the Conservative Movement at Yale,” 30 June 1970, Box 284, Folder 2493, 6, William F. Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
2 Stuart Rosow and Lewis Schwartz, “Demonstrators Hurl Protests at ROTC,” Yale Daily News, 6 May 1970, accessed March 23, 2019, http://digital.edu/utils/getarticleclippings/collection/yale-ydn/ id/11303/articleId/DIVL16/compObjId/11307/lang/en_US/dmtext/'. 3 Andrew Wiest, The Vietnam War, 1956-1975 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002), 11. 4 Band, “Report to All Supporters of the Conservative Movement at Yale,” 6, William F. Swift 2 American soldiers abroad, and lowering the flag was an insult to the war effort.
“We held off the rock throwing, obscenity-chanting mob,” Band later wrote, as anti-war protesters tried to grab the flagpole at the center of the plaza.5 Finally, anti-war students armed with knives threatened those guarding the pole and succeeded in cutting the flag down, after which YAFers snatched the fallen American flag and delivered it to the campus ROTC building. When asked to imagine the prototypical college campus in 1970, many Americans today might picture a student body united in opposition to the Vietnam War. “New Left equals the Sixties Generation,” historian John Campbell McMillian writes in summarizing this fallacy.6 Yet, the idea of "higher education in America as a bastion of liberal secularity,” as sociologist James Davison Hunter puts it, is far from the truth.7 As young voices denouncing the war in Vietnam seemed to dominate campuses across the country, thousands of young conservatives sought to counter their peers on the Left and advance a pro-war agenda. The brawl on Beinecke Plaza — and others like it — demonstrate a right-wing desire for a well-defined, political youth culture at the height of the Vietnam War.
Spearheading this cause were the vibrant and fiery members of Young Americans for Freedom. Founded in 1960 as an alliance between libertarians and traditional conservatives, YAF was one of the most prominent conservative organizations in the country by the time Yale students clashed on Beinecke Plaza.8 YAFers, as the organization's members were known, opposed the expansion of Great Society programs, trade unions and the encroachments on states’ 5 Ibid, 6. 6 John McMillan, "You Didn't Have to Be There," in The New Left Revisited, eds. Paul Buhle, John McMillan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 1.
7 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: BasicBooks, 2001), 211. 8 Sandra Scanlon, The Pro-War Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 246.9 They vociferously condemned liberalism in the Democratic and Republican Parties alike and were instrumental in Barry Goldwater’s GOP presidential nomination in 1964.10 During the early years of the decade, YAFers challenged their liberal peers on an intellectual level with debates, pamphlets and publicized reading lists.11 But, as the war in Vietnam escalated, their opponents on the Left moved away from abstract advocacy and towards direct political action. The New Left seemed to engulf the university, and young conservatives were forced to reckon with a new form of popular politics never before seen on American campuses.
In response, they built on the bottom-up spirit of the Goldwater campaign to construct a new style of political organizing. Soon, “action took precedence over ideology” as YAFers created a grassroots network of students committed to winning the war in Vietnam and confronting the anti-war movement.12 By the end of the decade, YAF had grown into a political behemoth. With only 100 students present at its founding in 1960, the organization boasted over 50,000 members by 1970. This made YAF the largest non-party political action organization in the country following the collapse of the anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in 1969.13 YAF contributed to a “complex and still neglected social movement,” as historian Rick Perlstein describes it, that energized young conservatives and ultimately paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s rout of President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
14 “Although conservative 9 Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 17. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right, (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 57.
11 Scanlon, The Pro-War Movement, 246. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford Univ. 13 Ronald Dear, “Young America’s Freedom Offensive: a 1969 Report,” The New Guard, January 1970, 21, Microfilm. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 531.
14 Rick Perlstein, "Thunder on the Right: The Roots of Conservative Victory in the 1960s," OAH Magazine of History 20, no. Swift 4 ideology was not created during he 1960s,” writes historian Jonathan M. Schoenwald, “its political components were, and the conservatism of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is its direct descendant.” 15 This paper will recount how Young Americans for Freedom helped develop a pro-war movement on the nation’s campuses and illuminate how its members co-opted the tools and tactics of their liberal peers to generate broad support. YAFers reconfigured the toolbox of the Left to preserve their idealized version of a college campus and appeal to the American public.
This strategy reflected a fundamental principle at the heart of conservative politics, according to political theorist Corey Robins in his book, The Reactionary Mind. Through an “absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes,” a conservative attempts “to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses.”16 This paper will also trace the escalation in YAF’s borrowing from the Left through its rhetoric, satirization and, ultimately confrontation, to expose a more radical strain of politics within the organization. While some historians have written on YAF, few have acknowledged the extent to which those on the Right appropriated ideas and strategies from the Left, and others significantly downplay YAF’s embrace of physical engagement. Some liberal students wore pins to protest the Vietnam War; YAFers adorned themselves with blue buttons to condemn “campus fascism.” 17 Some young men burnt draft cards; YAFers ignited their Social Security cards in response.18 And when members of the New Left resorted to 15 Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 8.
16 Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 42. 17 “Blue Button,” Pamphlet, n., Box 284, Folder 2491, William F. Papers, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 18 “YAF Around the Nation,” The New Guard, January 1969, 24, Microfilm.
Swift 5 violence, YAFers were right there with them, ready to engage in “hand-to-hand combat,” as they they did on Beinecke Plaza. 19 Before continuing, however, it is necessary to clarify how terminology will be used in this paper. Conservatism will be broadly characterized using historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s definition as an ideology typified by “anti-Communism, a laissez-faire approach to economics, opposition to the civil rights movement, and commitment to traditional sexual norms.” 20 While not every conservative supported the Vietnam War, this paper will use the terms “conservative” and “pro-war" synonymously to capture fervent anti-communist sentiment expressed as support for the war on the Right. Looking to the other side of the political spectrum, this paper will define the New Left using historian John McMillan’s description of “a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that promoted participatory democracy, crusaded for civil rights and various types of university reforms, and protested against the Vietnam War.