Protests Against the Vietnam War

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James A. Baldwin once said, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” (BrainyQuote.com). In the 1960s, “the man” was youth across the country. The Vietnam war was in full force, and students across the country were in an outrage. Society needed an excuse to rebel against the boring and safe way of life they were used to; Vietnam gave them the excuse they needed. Teenagers from different universities came together and formed various organizations that protested the Vietnam war for many reasons. These reasons included protesting weapons and different tactics used in the war, and the reason the U.S. entered the war in the first place. These get-togethers had such a monumental impact on their way of life that it was famously named the Anti-War Movement. When the Vietnam War ended, The United States did not have a real concrete reason why; there were a bunch of theories about why the war ended. Through negative media attention and rebellious youth culture, the Anti-War Movement made a monumental impact in the ending of the Vietnam War.

Teenagers in the 1950s were restless creatures, tired of listening to parents and doing school work. When they went away to university, it gave them a taste of freedom and responsibility at the same time. Unfortunately, a war was going on for the U.S.: a war not all people thought we should have been involved with in the first place. As Mark Barringer stated in his article "The 1960s: Polarization, Cynicism, and the Youth Rebellion", student radicals Al Haber and Tom Hayden from the University of Michigan formed the Students for a Democratic Society in 1960 as a scholarly arm of an institution for Industrial Democracy. In June 1962, fifty-nine SDS members met ...

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