Tet Offensive

Jackson state

10 days after Kent State shooting, this black school in Mississippi had state troops enter dormitories and began shooting wildly. Killed 2 and wounded 12.

1968, "the pivotal year"

>Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy >Student stikes >Failed electoral politics >Military embarrassments: Tet Offensive, My Lai

Martin Luther King. Opposition to the Vietnam War

>Diversion of resources from antipoverty programs >U.S. government is the "real enemy" to the Vietnamese people >Use of violence to solve problems >U.S. government as colonizer

4 stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and reasons for growing credibility gap between administrations and public

>Global American interventionism (US support of French in war against anti colonial Vietminh) >Kennedy Administration which brought more violent involvement in South Vietnam >Deeper, more violent involvement in South Vietnam -Escalation; full-scale American war >Nixon Administration (Vietnamization - replace U.S. troops with Vietnamese troops)

Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential Nomination signaled the following changes in the Republican Party

>More conservative >power moves from northeast to west and south > Frustration, alienation of many Americans, e.g. working class whites, evangelical Christians, who could not relate to the New Left >a desire to return to more orderly, traditional values

Limitations of Counterculture

>Rejection of instrumental politics >Cooptation by market society >Retreat from society's central values and conventions >Extreme expression of values without balance

Characteristics & Contradictions of counter culture

Characteristics: >Youth >Middle class status >Self Expoartion >Rejecting 50's culture Contradictions: >Opposed violence vs Attracted Violence >Anti consumers vs Consumers >Innocent, spiritual, playful v. dark, hurtful, angry

Berkeley Free Speech Movement

Free Speech Movement began in 1964, when students at the University of California, Berkeley protested a ban on on-campus political activities. > a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main representations of the New Left.

Tonkin Gulf Resolution

President Johnson alleged that N Vietnam attacked US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and proposed a resolution for US counter-attacks. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was a functional (not actual) declaration of war. It was later uncovered that the attack never happened

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Student activist organization based on different college campuses; involved with SNCC during Freedom Summer; ; viewed the university as center of activism; Port Huron Statement articulated early goals and philosophy

Tet offensive

Surprise attack by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during the Vietnamese New Year of 1968; turned American public opinion strongly against the war in Vietnam. Despite U.S. claims of victory, television coverage of the bloodshed showed the staying power of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army and revealed a lack of credibility by the administration

Sharon Statement

The Sharon Statement summarized beliefs that had circulated among conservatives during the past decade—the free market underpinned "personal freedom," government must be strictly limited, and "international communism," the gravest threat to liberty, must be destroyed.

Geneva accords

U.S. violates by refusing to acknowledge Communist Vietnam north , and supporting Diem's refusal to hold elections; creating South Vietnam; dispatching military advisers to train South Vietnamese army; ordering CIA to conduct psychological warfare against N Vietnam

Peoples Park

Unsuccessful attempt by Berkeley residents to build a community park on land owned by University of California. Police fired into crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring others

Lyndon B. Johnson

"Our objective is the independence of South Viet-Nam and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves - only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way."

Stages of SDS

(Early Stage)-Idealized university, awakened student population. The members of this were elites, intellectual, east coast (Middle stage)-"Prairie Power" - Midwest membership, anti-intellectual, less political goals, no history of political activism, new to political scene Influenced by counterculture - appearance, more expressive (Final stage)-Withdrawal from electoral politics, internal strife Unraveled, violence

Poor People's Campaign

Led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC, a multiracial march on Washington for economic and human rights after the civil rights movement failed to change the material conditions of the black poor.

My Lai massacre

Mass murder of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers: the elderly, women, and children were killed; women were gang-raped

Port Hurton statement

proclaimed a "new left" and formed the "Students for a Democratic Society" envisioning a nonviolent youth movement transforming the US into a "participatory democracy" as an end to materialism, militarism, and racism;

Kent State shootings

the shootings of unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, by members of the national guard