Two Sources of Antiwar Sentiment in America

Abstract

Opposition to the Vietnam war has been manifested both in university protest actions and in cross-section public opinion surveys. But the college-related protests and the wider public disechantment have sharply different characteristics: they have peaked at different points in the war; they are discontinous in educational and age basis; and a substantial part of the antiwar public is also extremely hostile toward college protesters. Together these findings suggest a distinction between moral criticisms of the goals and nature of the war and pragmatic disillusionment over failure to win it. This hypothesized distinction is investigated using thematic analysis of open-ended responses from a cross-section sample of 1,263 Detroit adults who had indicated opposition to American intervention in Vietnam. A small classroom sample of University of Michigan students is also used for comparison purposes. The themes emphasized by the Detroit sample as a whole, and by most subcategories defined in terms of race, sex, age, and education, are generally consistent with the moral-pragmatic distinction. Other related factors (such as traditional isolationism) are also shown to contribute to broader public disenchantment with the war. The moral-pragmatic distinction, while somewhat oversimplified, is useful in considering public reactions to future wars of the same general type.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.