Opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States developed immediately after the beginning of the war, chiefly among traditional pacifists, such as theAmerican Friends ServiceCommittee and antinuclear activists.Early protests were organized around questions about the morality of U. S. military involvement in Vietnam. Virtually every key event of the war, including the Tet Offensive and the invasion ofCambodia, contributed to a steady rise in antiwar sentiment. The revelation of the My Lai Massacre in 1969 caused a dramatic turn against the war in national polls.
Students and professors began to organize"teach-ins"on the war in early 1965 at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and the University ofCalifornia atBerkeley. The teach-ins were large forums for discussion of the war between students and faculty members.Eventually, virtually no college or university was without an organized student movement, often spearheaded by Students for aDemocratic Society(SDS). SDS organized the first major stu- dent-led demonstration against the war inApril 1963.Another important organization was the Student Non-ViolentCoordinatingCommittee(SNCC、, which denounced the war as racist as early as 1963. Students also joined"The Resis- tance", an organization that urged its student members to refuse to register for the draft, or if drafted to refuse to serve. While law enforcement authorities usually blamed student radicals for the violence that took place on campuses, often it was police themselves who initiated bloodshed as they cleared out students occupying campus buildings during "sit-ins"or street demonstrations.As antiwar sentiment mounted in intensity from 1965 to 1970 so did violence, culmi- nating in the killings of four students at Kent State in Ohio and of two at Jackson StateCollege in Mississippi. StokelyCarmichael, Malcolm X, and other black leaders denounced the U. S. presence in Vietnam as evidence ofAmerican imperialism. Martin Luther King, Jr. , had grown increasingly concerned about the racist nature of the war, toward both the Vietnamese and the large numbers of young blacks who were sent to fight for the United States in Vietnam. In 1967 King delivered a major address at New York’s RiversideChurch in which he condemned the war, calling the United States"the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. " On October 15, 1969, citizens across the United States participated in"The Moratorium", the largest one-day dem- onstration against the war. Millions of people stayed home from work to mark their opposition to the war;college and high school students demonstrated on hundreds of campuses. A、Baltimore judge even interrupted court proceedings for a moment of reflection on the war. In Vietnam, troops wore black armbands in honor of the home-front protest. Nixon claimed there was a"great silent majority"who supported the war and he called on them to back his policies. Polls showed, however, that at that time half of allAmericans felt that the war was"morally indefensible, "while 2 percent admitted that it was a mistake. In November 1969 students from all over the country headed for Washington,D、C、, for the MobilizationAgainst the War. Over 40, 000 participated in a MarchAgainstDeath fromArlington NationalCemetery to the White House, each carrying a notice with the name of a young person killed in Vietnam. Opposition existed even among conservatives and business leaders, for primarily economic reasons. The government was spending more than $2 billion per month on the war by 1971. Some U. S. corporations, ranging from beer distributors to manufacturers of jet aircraft, benefited greatly from this money initially, but the high expense of the war began to cause serious inflation and rising tax rates. Some corporate critics warned of future costs to care for the woundeD、Labor unions were also becoming increasingly active in opposition to the war, as they were