What an Awful Year
Steven B. Zwickel
September, 2024
I was going through some old photos from the 1969–1970 school year and had a rush of memories. I was a Junior at Harpur College (SUNY-Binghamton) and, looking back more than 50 years, it was an awful time to be a teenage college student.
I think many people have forgotten what it was like at the end of the ’60s.
On July 20, 1969, we were thrilled to learn that Americans had landed on the moon. We had fulfilled Pres. Kennedy's pledge to do it before the end of the decade and most of us were very proud.
Another event that affected young people that summer was the original Woodstock music festival—sex, drugs, and rock—in mid-August, 1969. Some 500,000 people showed up for that event and many more have since claimed to have been there. By the time students returned to college that fall the sounds and sights of that massive event had become part of the youth culture.
In 1969 the country was deeply divided: those opposed to the war were the “doves” and those who supported it were the “hawks.” Fashion denoted the divisions in American society. We young people—mostly, but certainly not all doves—wore bell bottom jeans, beads, colorful tie-dyed shirts, suede vests with fringes and beads, sandals. Coats and ties were for old people. We grew beards and let our hair grow long. Short haircuts—crewcuts and flattops—were for conservatives. We wore the peace symbol <https://www.britannica.com/story/where-did-the-peace-sign-come-from>.
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| 1970 Button Peace sign |
The ongoing war in Vietnam provided a constant background noise and vivid images. It was always there—on the radio and TV. A steady flow, a drum beat of death and fire and helicopters. Politicians and generals lying and predicting victory ”very soon”. The President claimed to have a “secret plan” for ending the war. Fifty-four years later, it’s still a secret.
We woke up each morning to more awful news from Vietnam—fictional numbers of the dead, wounded, missing—and “body counts”, issued by the US commanders to try to give the impression that our side was winning.
At noon we heard right-wing hawk Paul Harvey extolling the bravery of our boys on his radio show “Paul Harvey News and Comment”, followed by Harvey’s The Rest of the Story how-about-that? stories which may or may not have been true. In the evening, we watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. We had all heard his 1968 broadcast when he told the nation that the war in Vietnam was sure to end in a stalemate, not in the victory predicted by the US government.
Each week we saw the latest issue of Life magazine, filled with photos from the battlefields of southeast Asia and pictures of grieving families at cemeteries in the US. Our campus radio station WHRW-FM got news from a teletype machine connected to the AP wire service and students like me read the latest headlines on the air.
Can you imagine what it was like on campus that year? Students who’d been apolitical and turned off by the rhetoric of the “New Left” (= the old left but with long hair and no bra) started paying attention to the anti-war movement. Students started joining “The Movement” and organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC), and the anti-racist Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC or “Snick”). We started marching.
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| Harpur College - Thurs, March 19, 1970 Rennie Davis and Leonard Weinglass spoke in the Women's Gym – photo by Steven B. Zwickel |
In September, 1969, the men who were the leaders of anti-war protests during the Chicago Republican National Convention in 1968—the Chicago Seven—were put on trial. Attorney Leonard Weinglass (Leonard Irving Weinglass Aug 1933–March 2011) was the workhorse of the defense, putting in long hours preparing for each day of testimony.
Weinglass and defendant Rennie Davis (Rennard Cordon Davis May 1940–Feb 2021) <https://famous-trials.com/chicago8/1337-davisr>, the national coordinator for Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam came to Harpur College to talk about the trial in March, 1970. On February 20, 1970, Judge Hoffman sentenced five members of the Chicago Seven found guilty by the jury. (The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed all convictions on November 21, 1972.)
In October, 1969 a call went out for a Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam and there were demonstrations and teach-ins at Harpur College. {a moratorium was defined as a pause in regular activities—a break during which people could focus on the impact of the war. At a teach-in, professors and other “experts” would talk about what they believed was happening in southeast Asia.} After the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, we learned that a lot of what they said turned out to be true.
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| November 15, 1969 Button - Bring the troops home now |
The first Moratorium was on October 15, 1969 and a quarter of a million people marched in Washington. The President claimed that the anti-war movement was insignificant compared to the “Silent Majority” of Americans who supported the war. The first Moratorium followed by one week the “Days of Rage” protests in October, 1969 in Chicago, organized by the more radical and violent members of the SDS.
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| 1969 Button March on Washington |
On a cold day in November, 1969 several busloads of students traveled from Binghamton to attend a huge Moratorium March in Washington, D.C. More than 500,000 of us gathered on the Mall to hear speeches and to try to persuade the government to stop the war. Naively, we believed that Nixon and the Congress couldn’t possibly ignore the will of half-a-million people. (We were successful and it only took 5 more years for the US to pull out of Vietnam!)
The worst, for many of us, came on December 1, 1969, when the United States held its first draft lottery. Men were given a random number that corresponded to their birthdays—the lower the number, the more likely a man was to be called up to military service. I remember the deathly quiet on the Harpur campus that night as the numbers were drawn. Everyone was tuned to the radio. It was a cold night, and most windows were shut, but when a birthday got a lower number, you could hear cries and groans from the dorms. A senior in my dorm put his hand through the wallboard. Others got drunk or stoned.
Over the next few days, I heard people asking, “What’s your plan?” Some talked about going to Canada. A few were going to be conscientious objectors and do alternative service. Others came up with ideas for how they were going to fool the draft board or flunk the physical examination. {Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 song “Alice’s Restaurant” took on a new meaning.}
We knew we were safe until we graduated from college, when we would lose our 2-S deferment and we’d be eligible for the draft. My draft number was #43, which meant I would almost certainly be called up if the war went on until I graduated in May, 1971. While I truly hoped that the war would be over by then, I also knew that I would be in trouble if it were not. Several categories of jobs could lead to deferment, such as farming, the ministry, teaching, skilled labor, or working or doing research in the defense industry.
I had no interest in teaching, but it could save me from being drafted, so I registered for my college’s Intro to Education course. Since Harpur College didn’t have a qualified prof for the class, they flew a professor in to Binghamton once a week to lead a 4-hour lecture. I’m sure she was a competent instructor, but I was so bored and disengaged that I dropped the course after 2 weeks. I had no idea what I would do when the draft came for me.
Meanwhile, the national anti-war movement was continuing to gain momentum. According to CBS News Gallup Polls in 1967 32% of Americans thought sending US troops to Vietnam was a mistake. By 1970, it was 57%, and by 1971 60% of Americans thought the war was a mistake. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-u-s-involvement-in-vietnam>
At the same time, supporters of the war were also becoming more active and more vocal. There were clashes between anti-war and pro-war demonstrators and the spring of 1970 became one of the most violent in history. Families were torn apart: the older WWII/Korean War generation believed American men had a patriotic duty to serve, whereas young Baby Boomers rejected the idea that they had to fight in a war they didn’t believe in.
A part of the SDS became The Weather Underground and engaged in domestic terrorism, according to the FBI. They built and detonated bombs. Buildings were destroyed and people were wounded and killed.
In the middle of all this chaos, we learned in April, 1970 that the Beatles—the most popular band in the world—were breaking up. We were moved that year by Paul McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road” which we took to be a song of loss and change. The very first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. There were a few activities on campus and I still have a button commemorating that event.
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| 1970 Button from the first Earth Day |
By late spring in 1970, there were calls for a nationwide student anti-war strike in response to the expansion of the war into Cambodia. The communist North Vietnamese army had conquered nearly one-third of Cambodia and were supposedly using it as a route to supply their forces in Vietnam. President Nixon gave a nationally televised speech on April 30, 1970 in which he announced he was going to attack the communists in Cambodia. {We later learned that, in March 1969, Nixon had secretly ordered Operation Breakfast—the US Air Force was sent to bomb Cambodia. It came back to bite him n 1974, when Rep. John Conyers introduced a motion of impeachment against Nixon for the bombing of Cambodia. The motion was not taken up because the House was busy dealing with the Watergate scandal. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu>}
The strike began May 1 with students walking out of classrooms at some 900 college and high school campuses.
After the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970 the number and size of protests increased dramatically. A few violent incidents occurred during the protests but, for the most part, they were peaceful. In June, 1970, a song by Neil Young—"Ohio"—written in response to the Kent State shootings was released. “Young’s song became an anthem for anti-war sentiment and a powerful reminder of the consequences of political conflict and violence. The lyrics reflect both personal grief and a broader societal critique, resonating deeply with the feelings of many during that era.”
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| Harpur College - 1970 Dickinson College Council meeting [Josh Karan in glasses, Master Carrol Coates sitting in back] discussing end-of-semester planning – photo by Steven B. Zwickel |
College life, however, did not return to normal. The violence at Kent State seemed to be a tipping point, after which we could not go back to our normal routines. Students and faculty at Harpur College were in a state of shock. After days of talking, it was agreed to end the spring semester early. Students were given the option of taking whatever grade they had already earned or a grade of PASS.
And so that awful year on campus came to an end.
I remember when we left campus, how mixed up my emotions were—sad, scared, and angry. Mostly, I think, it was the helplessness; the inability of so many hundreds of thousands of people to have any influence on the political system.
