PEOPLE GET TIRED

Ties the Boston Tea Party (1774), the American Revolution, Charles Boycott, César Chåvez, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus protest (1955), the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the birth of the civil rights movement to the history of the boycott in America 

A century before British Captain Charles Boycott lent his name to the tactic, and an ocean away, the beleaguered American colonists were calling it by the PC term that preceded it: ‘nonimportation.’

An Emblem of the Effects of the
STAMP, Oct. 1765,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Beginning with the Stamp Act in 1765, His Majesty’s government, burdened by heavy debt after years of costly wars (most recently the French and Indian War), passed legislation that taxed the colonists’ pocketbooks and their patience.

The unpopular measures united the previously not-so-congenial colonists. Patrick Henry spoke out in Virginia, and rising star George Washington voiced his support. Up in Massachusetts, John’s much more interesting cousin Sam Adams, the coming revolution’s Godfather (of the Coppola variety), led the way with a little help from his friend James Otis (who did not quite say “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” though he, like Henry, Washington and Adams, believed it).

By the late l760’s, ‘nonimportation’ was all the rage in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Merchants, who sold British stock, such as gloves, scarves, black mourning dresses, glassware, paper products, printers’ colors, wine and tea, were deemed “enemies of the people,” and in case anyone wasn’t clear on who was who, hand-hewn, wooden signs saying IMPORTER pointing pointedly to their front doors soon appeared. Some colonists even stopped eating lamb so that sheep could produce more local wool.

The Boston Massacre, as engraved by
Henry Pelham and later Paul Revere,
http://en.wikipedia.org

“Joining them were the many women who played an increasingly visible role in mobilizing resistance to British policy, above all by vesting ordinary domestic decisions with political significance. As shoppers, retailers, and housewives, they refused to buy or sell British goods, made clothes of homespun, and served coffee instead of tea.”

The presence of British troops had transformed the city on the hill into the barracks on the hill, by March 5, 1770, a bitterly cold night. A handful of British soldiers, pelted with sticks, stones and snowballs, and provoked by harsh words, misheard or chose to ignore their superior’s order not to fire and killed five citizens—a tragedy that Adams and others immediately referred to as the Boston Massacre. Every war needs its martyrs, and now the colonists had five.

To make matters worse: Hoping to bail out the hopelessly mismanaged and rampantly corrupt (sound familiar?) East Indian Tea Company, whose stock was dropping at an alarming rate, the English government lowered the tax on East Indian tea and so secured a monopoly in the colonies, where the per-annum consumption of tea was 6.5 million pounds.

The tea was the last straw.

The Bostonians Paying the Excise-
Man, a 1774 British propaganda
print referring to the tarring and
feathering of the Commissioner
of Customs, http://en.wikipedia.org

The Sons of Liberty, formed nearly ten years earlier, just after the implementation of the Stamp Act, “…introduced mob rule in Boston which was stronger than any law courts. It was they who frightened the customs commissioners out of town, who bullied and threatened 'importers,’ who tarred and feathered ‘informers,’ who paralyzed all governments but their own.” (The name ‘Sons of Liberty’ was coined by Isaac Barré, a British colonel, who was sympathetic to the colonial cause.)

Loosely defined, expanding and contracting in numbers (at times the group had hundreds of members), the Sons of Liberty were artisans, mechanics, shopkeepers and the like. In December 1774, they boarded three tea-bearing ships docked in the harbor and took matters into their own hands. Disguised as Mohawk Indians and armed with axes and hatchets, they hauled all of the loose tea—stored in 342 huge chests—above deck, hacked open each chest and poured the contents out into the water below. No shots were fired, and no blood was shed. In the morning, mounds of tea piled up on the beach, and tea sand dunes formed in the harbor, blocking the sea-lanes.

The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, lithograph, by Nathaniel
Currier, http://en.wikipedia.org

His Majesty’s government, more self-entitled than ever—(“Considering how much the mother country had already done for the colonies, let alone the precarious state of her finances, surely the time had come for them to bear their fair share of imperial expenses. What were the colonists for, after all?”)—responded with more legislation, intended to punish Massachusetts citizens.

Paul Revere at Lexington, Courtesy
of the New York Public Library,
www.nypl.org

On April 19, 1775, a British force, seven hundred strong, left Boston to arrest the two most powerful patriot leaders, Sam Adams and John Hancock, and seize the weapons and ammunition known to be stored in the Lexington/Concord area. (The arms, the British found out, were to be used in an illegal rebellion against His Majesty George III’s government.) Once aware that “The British were coming,” the patriots dispatched William Dawes and Paul Revere to rouse the “minutemen” and warn Adams and Hancock—a mission that they accomplished. The “red coats” encountered the militia first in Lexington and later, in Concord, where more blood was shed.

The Battle of Lexington, April 19th, 1775,
Plate 1, cropped Dolittle engraving,
http://en.wikipedia.org

“The chief lesson of Lexington and Concord,” according to award-winning historian Theodore Draper, “is that the tension between the British and Americans had now become so great that any threatening British behavior could start a war.”

Which, indeed, it did, and the rest is history, or at least, American history.

George III released the following statement: “The die is now cast. The colonies must submit or triumph.”

The patriots, as they were now calling themselves, chose triumph.

*          *          *          *

Fifty years later (in the l830’s), British and American abolitionists found common ground in their insistence that their fellow citizens cease consuming the products of slave labor: sugar, coffee and cotton (introducing the concept of fair labeling along the way).

Sugar Bowl, Courtesy of the New York
Public Library, www.nypl.org

But, the act itself was still nameless.

Then, in l845, Phytophthora infestans, a fungus that first appeared in the United States three years earlier, sailed the ocean blue, landed in Ireland and attacked its staple crop.

“The potato, provided it did not fail, enabled great quantities of food to be produced at a trifling cost from a small plot of ground.”

Emigrants Leave Ireland, by
Henry Doyle, 1868,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Well suited to Ireland’s climate and its cattle—farmers could use potatoes for cow and pig feed—the potato was cheap to grow, simple to cook and highly nutritious (especially with added milk).

Yet, as all of us know, advantages come with disadvantages, or at least, “warning labels.” In the case of potatoes, the label could have been just one word: PERISHABLE. Since you couldn’t store potatoes from season to season, when “the blight,” as it came to be called, struck, the “great famine” began. By 1851, a million Irish citizens had starved to death, and another million had immigrated—half to America.

Landing at Ellis Island, the immigration inspection station that
opened its doors in 1892, Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-12595

Twenty-nine years later, in 1880, the famine was long gone but not soon forgotten: Poverty prevailed, and the English rulers were still a thorn in Ireland’s side.

Irish Land League Poster,
1880s, http://en.wikipedia.org

British absentee landlords owned all of the good land and charged poor tenant farmers disproportionate rent, even in years of bad harvests. The farmers were told to pay or to part with the land, and eviction notices were imminent.

The farmers struck back, sometimes with ultimatums like this one: “Sir. Take notice that if you do not abate your rents you will be shot, murdered or otherwise maltreated…and may God have mercy on your soul.”

They also organized, forming the Irish National Land League and beginning what would come to be called the “land wars.” The Land League launched its most effective campaign against Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a retired British army officer.

Michael Davitt, founder of the
Land League, 1880s,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Boycott’s refusal to lower his rents to a reasonable level, as the Land League had requested, gave way to County Mayo’s systematic and incessant retaliation. Shopkeepers refused to sell him food. (He had to purchase it outside the county’s borders.) His house servants were “convinced” to seek work elsewhere. The fences on the estate that he oversaw were destroyed. He had to call on scabs and soldiers to protect any crops that he intended to harvest. 

In sum, it was more than the good captain could stand. He gathered up his weary family and headed for the only safe haven he could think of: Mother England.

Which, at last, brings us to Father John O’Malley, parish priest by day and leader of the local rebellion by night, who coined the term ‘boycott.’

*          *          *          *

It wasn’t long before ‘boycott’ made an appearance in American newspapers and magazines. In the mid-l880’s, Harper’s called it a “new form of terrorism.”

A few years later “Unsentimental Reformer” Josephine Shaw Lowell (sister of Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw), working with the Consumers’ League of New York City, “argued that just as ‘most decent people object to buying stolen goods, even though they get them very cheap,’ so in the case of products of sweated labor, the ‘time and strength of the people who made them have been virtually stolen, even though under forms of law,’” which would have resonated with César Chávez (who named one of his dogs Boycott and the other Huelga, or Strike).

 

César Chávez at the Delano UFW
Rally, 1974, http://en.wikipedia.org

Chávez organized the grape and lettuce boycotts of the l960’s and l970’s and secured new contracts for workers that provided incidentals, like medical coverage and fresh water and toilets out in the fields, where they toiled.

Ku Klux Klan Members and a Burning
Cross, 1921, http://en.wikipedia.org

But, the boycott that would alter the course of American history forever began in the winter of l955 when a small, quiet, forty-two year old black woman boarded her usual bus so she could go home.

“Rosa Parks’ life was a lesson in perseverance. As a child, she grew up listening to the Ku Klux Klan ride by her house and lying in bed at night fearing that her house would be burnt down. In her small hometown in Alabama, she attended a one-room school for African-American children that only went through the sixth grade. When she moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to continue her schooling, she was forced to clean classrooms after school to pay her tuition. Although she attended Alabama State Teachers College, Rosa Parks would later make her living as a seamstress and housekeeper.”

Parks, who worked in a downtown department store as a tailor’s assistant and did some dressmaking work on the side, is sometimes portrayed as a simple, tired innocent, who stumbled onto the pages of history. Besides being tired, she was none of those things. Intelligent and serious, she was a long-time, active member of the local chapter of the NAACP, who had recently attended a ten-day integration workshop at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School.

Pete Seeger Arrives at Federal
Court with His Guitar Over His
Shoulder, Courtesy of the Prints
and Photographs Division, Library
of Congress, USZ62-130860

Founded in 1932 by Myles Horton, Highlander originally trained labor organizers. In 1947, as the school shifted its focus to the civil rights movement, Horton’s wife, Zilphia, taught Pete Seeger to sing “We Will Overcome.” (The hymn, which goes back at least to 1909, was revived during a 1946 South Carolina workers’ strike and adopted at Highlander as a protest song. Seeger “…eventually changed the Will to Shall… [since] ‘shall’ opens up the mouth better; the short ‘I’ is not as dramatic a sound as the ‘aah.’”) “At Highlander,” Parks explained, “I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society, that there was such a thing as people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops, and living together in peace and harmony. It was a place I was very reluctant to leave. I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people.”

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, just before 6 p.m. (not coincidentally, a little over six months after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision), Rosa Parks, eager to get home, boarded her usual Cleveland Ave. bus.

Rosa Parks's Booking Photo, 
http://en.wikipedia.org

She was seated in the fifth row—the first row blacks could sit in, according to the Jim Crow laws in effect throughout the South. After all of the seats in the first four rows were taken, the driver turned and asked Parks and the other three sitting nearby to move. The three agreed, but Parks just moved over to the window seat.

“I was thinking that the only way to let them know how I felt I was being mistreated was to do just what I did—resist the order. I had not thought about it and I had taken no previous resolution until it happened, and then I simply decided that I would not get up. I was tired, but I was usually tired at the end of the day…I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.”

The same driver had thrown Rosa Parks off a city bus ten years earlier. After paying her fare, she had refused to get down and reenter through the rear door.

Rosa Parks's Fingerprint Card,
http://en.wikipedia.org

The divided black leadership of Montgomery (the first capital of the Confederacy) had been looking for a test case: one that they could bring to the courts to challenge the reign of Jim Crow on the city’s buses. They had only recently rejected two potential cases, one with a fifteen-year-old plaintiff, who was allegedly pregnant and another with an eighteen-year-old plaintiff, whose father was thought to be an alcoholic. (The two cases remain controversial on the grounds that the upper class black leadership may have rejected them based on nothing more than the socio-economic background of the girls.)

Jo Ann Robinson's Booking Photo,
civil rights activist and educator in
Montgomery, Alabama,
http://en.wikipedia.org

The Women’s Political Council (WPC) had made plans to stage a bus boycott earlier. Now, with Parks’ trial scheduled, they called for a boycott on that day. 35,000 leaflets surreptitiously mimeographed by WPC president Jo Ann Robinson spread the word:

“Another Negro woman had been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.... If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.”
 
The trial itself lasted five minutes: Parks was found guilty of violating an obscure state statute and fined ten dollars.

Bus Boycott Arrest Photo of
Edgar Daniel Nixon, American
civil rights leader and union
organizer, http://en.wikipedia.org

That same day, a new group—the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)—formed by the town’s black leadership (including and especially its black ministers) and now prodded into action by Robinson, the WPC and E.D. Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, held a mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church.

Twenty-six year old Minister Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been in town a little more than a year, assumed the leadership of the MIA, after much persuasion. (Aside from other concerns, his first child had been born only weeks earlier.)

A thousand people were packed inside the church and four thousand more outside (some listening at the windows) when King rose to address them.

The question of the hour was: Should the boycott continue?

Martin Luther King, Jr.,  delivering the
speech he would come to be known for....,
August 28, 1963, http://en.wikipedia.org

King spoke slowly, powerfully, thoughtfully, and the crowd murmured approval and offered ‘Amens’ from time to time. As he warmed to his task, the theological scholar in him came out and made room for the oratorical flourishes of the southern preacher. The crowd, moved and inspired, became more and more demonstrative: clapping, shouting, stomping—there were moments when it was difficult to hear him and moments when the building actually shook.

"Lady Justice...equipped with
three symbols: a sword, symbolizing
the court's coercive power, a human
scale weighing competing claims on
each hand, and a blindfold indicating
impartiality," http://en.wikipedia.org

“...you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.... There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation...we are here now because we are tired now.”

“...the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.... And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The Montgomery Improvement Association had its answer—the boycott would go on.

King, Robinson and the other black leaders believed that it would only last another two, maybe three days. But, the white power structure refused to consider their modest demands, and the boycott went on day after day, after day.

People continued to walk, and an elaborate carpool system was established. 150 car owners offered their vehicles up to boycotters, and a like number volunteered to drive that first day: There were 350 trips each day. Outside donations came in that could be put toward the purchase of station wagons, and the carpool widened.

Plantar Aspects of Foot, varying depths
(superficial to deep), http://en.wikipedia.org

The black citizens were well-organized, disciplined, persevering and faithful: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested” was how Mother Pollard put it, after someone kindly suggested that she needn’t participate because of her age.

The city fought back, ordering taxi drivers who were only charging ten cents—the same amount that buses charged—to stop lowering their fares. The police harassed carpool drivers, checking their headlights and windshield wipers and giving out tickets for minor and imaginary violations. Jo Ann Robinson (the head of the WPC) received seventeen tickets in less than three months.

King urged Montgomery’s merchants and fellow black citizens to donate some of the money that they had set aside for Christmas or a rainy day to a charity, such as the MIA.

It was raining now.

Domestic Servants Waiting for a
Street Car, Atlanta, Georgia, May
1939, Courtesy of the New York
Public Library, www.nypl.org

Some Montgomery whites, especially the women, sympathized and secretly donated money to blacks who had worked for them for years. Other households, whether behind the boycott or not, relied so heavily on their staff to clean and otherwise maintain their homes that they arranged for their black employees to be driven to and from work.

Tension mounted. Rotten eggs and fruit, water balloons and containers of urine were hurled at the carpoolers’ cars. Crosses were burned on lawns, and rocks were thrown through windows—reportedly by uniformed police officers. Churches and homes were bombed, including King’s. (No one was hurt.) Rev. King was arrested for going 30 in a 25 m.p.h. zone and taken on a frightening ride to what turned out to be the only slightly less frightening jail: the first time the emerging civil rights leader was locked up.

“Asked about the wider meaning of the boycott, King proclaimed: ‘It is part of a world-wide movement. Look at just about any place in the world and the exploited people are rising against their exploiters. This seems to be the outstanding characteristic of our generation.’”

Parks on a Montgomery Bus on
December 21, 1956, the day
Montgomery's public transportation
system was legally integrated,
http://en.wikipedia.org

The boycott became national news. The new network programs and the nation’s major newspapers began covering it. All eyes were on Montgomery.

At long last, on December 17, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated city and state buses were unconstitutional. The boycott had lasted 382 days.

“During the boycott, Parks had devoted herself to the cause, traveling, making speeches, raising money. She served on the MIA’s executive board, worked as a carpool dispatcher, handed out clothes and food to people who had been fired because of their civil rights involvement. After the boycott was over, she tried to get another job in Montgomery but no one would hire her.”

Her mother was ill, and her husband had suffered from a nervous breakdown, on account of all that they’d gone through. She hoped to get a job within the civil rights movement, but that didn’t happen. In 1957, financial constraints pushed her to move to Detroit, where her brother lived. She took a job as a seamstress and, later, as a receptionist.

The moral of the story?

“To be a heroine is fine, but it does not pay off.”

Or, it does?

In 2005, at the age of 92, Parks died. Four thousand people attended the funeral service, and thousands more silently paid tribute outside. Speakers included the only black senator in the United States, Barack Obama, whose election, three years later, and whose term have shown us how far America has come and how far America still has to go....

Bibliography

Bartlett, John; Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature, 17th ed.
Branch, Taylor; Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–1963.
Brinkley, Alan; The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People.
Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace; Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
Cook, Don; The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760–1785.
Draper, Theodore; A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution.
Forbes, Esther; Paul Revere and the World He Lived In.
Garrow, David J.; Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the South Christian Leadership Conference.
Hochschild, Adam; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves.
Horton, Myles; The Long Haul: An Autobiography.
Kee, Robert; The Laurel and the Ivy: The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism.
Langguth, A. J.; Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution.
Lancaster, Bruce; The American Revolution.
www.obamaspeeches.com.
Olson, Lynne; Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.
Waugh, Joan; Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell.
Wilkinson, Alec; The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger.
Wood, Gordon S.; The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
Woodham-Smith, Cecil; The Great Hunger: Ireland (1845–1849).

“Taxation without….”; Bartlett, 140
“Joining them were…”; Burrows and Wallace, 216
“…introduced mob…”; Forbes, 125
“Considering how…”; Burrows and Wallace, 195
“The chief….”; Draper, 499
“The die is now…”; Langguth, 30
“The potato….”; Woodham-Smith, 35
“Sir. Take notice…”; Kee, 211
“…new form of…”; Burrows and Wallace, 1098
“…argued that…”; Ibid, 1178
“Rosa Parks’ life…”; obamaspeeches.com
“…eventually changed…”; Wilkinson, 91
“At Highlander…”; Horton, 150
“I was thinking…”; Garrow, 12
“Another Negro…”; Olson, 121
“…you know…”; Branch, 130 and 140
“…the great glory…”; Ibid, 140-141
“My feets…”; Ibid, 149
“Asked about….”; Garrow, 54
“During the boycott…”; Olson, 129
“To be…”; Ibid

VIETNAM IS NOT OVER

“Since the dawn of the twentieth century, movies have been the most important and the most popular form of art and entertainment in the modern world.”

The Oscar, officially named The Academy Award of Merit and professedly named after no actual Oscar, is the most well known award worldwide (a fact that says God knows what about the Stanley Cup and the Nobel Peace Prize).

In 1929, two years after the formation of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the first awards ceremony took place. 

(The Jazz Singer won a special award. It was a talkie, sort of, and, therefore, ineligible.) The following year, radio stations broadcast the ceremony. The ball was rolling, so to speak.

Walt Disney was the first to say ‘Oscar’ aloud in his 1934 acceptance speech for The Three Little Pigs. Shortly after that, ‘Oscar’ appeared in print for the first time. In 1936, Price Waterhouse (hired by Academy prez. Frank Capra) began tabulating the results, and the sealed envelope routine was instituted within four years. But, the name Oscar wasn’t officially adopted until 1939, a bad year on almost all counts.

Due to a metal shortage during World War II, the statuettes (composed of various metals) were made of painted plaster that could be exchanged for gold (plated) ones après la guerre.

The first true Oscar campaign was engineered by Joan “Mommie Dearest” Crawford for Mildred Pierce (1945) “…when she shamelessly hired a savvy PR man to do shameless tub-thumping for her.”

The producers of Marty (1956), who shot the entire film in sixteen days, were the first “to spend more on a film’s award campaign ($400,000) than…on making the movie ($343,000).”

Earlier, in 1953, the Academy Awards hit television. (Hollywood moguls viewed TV as the enemy and put that off as best they could, for as long as they could.) Color came in 1966, and three years later, the ceremony went global.

The awards ceremony failed to take place as scheduled only three times: in 1938, due to a flood; in 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; and in 1981, when Ronald Reagan wasn’t. During the Iraq War, red carpet activities were taken down a notch.

From the outset, as a matter of fact, war has played a leading role in the Academy Awards. In 1929, Wings, a silent film, was voted Best Picture. The WWI anti-war movie All Quiet on the Western Front followed in its footsteps in 1939, and the year after that, Hollywood thrust its take on the Civil War into the spotlight. 

Gone with the Wind corralled a record thirteen nominations and six wins. (The Academy ignored Confessions of a Nazi Spy, another war film in the running that year, but the House Un-American Activities Committee made no such mistake. It investigated the film for being “prematurely anti-fascist.”) Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind’s Best Supporting Actress (a category that had been added in 1937), became the first black American to win an Oscar and as the first nominated, to attend the awards ceremony.

In 1942, Gary Cooper won for Sergeant York, and the next year, William Wyler’s pre-Pearl Harbor Mrs. Miniver—a film that Winston Churchill called “propaganda worth a hundred battleships”—won six Oscars.

1944 was the year of Casablanca but not the year of Humphrey Bogart; the Academy gave Paul Lukas Best Performance by a Leading Actor for Watch on the Rhine.

By 1947, the Allies had won the war, and it was time to reflect, something The Best Years of Our Lives did better than any war film before or since, earning an Oscar for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Writing, Editing and Music.

In the ensuing years, many other representations of the Good War made it to the big screen: From Here to Eternity and Stalag 17 (1954), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1958), The Diary of Anne Frank (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1962), Patton (1971), Schindler’s List (1994) and Saving Private Ryan (1999).

Which brings us to my generation’s war—not the Great War, the Good War or the Forgotten War, but the Flawed War.

As an author of a book on Vietnam (Voices from Vietnam), as a historian drawn to his own lived past and as a believer in the power of art to communicate reality with more eloquence, at times, than reality itself, I’ve long wondered how Oscar-winning Vietnam movies have fared artistically and historically.

Does Vietnam have its own Schindler’s List (a brilliantly directed film adapted from an equally well-crafted book that illuminates a small part of the war and casts a new light on the whole)? Has the heroic nature of wartime life on the home front been portrayed with as much poignancy since Mrs. Miniver? Do films on Vietnam expose the dark side of coming home as well as The Best Years of Our Lives (or Bad Day at Black Rock, virtually ignored by the Academy)?

And, what of the performances: Has any actor or actress come close to
Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver; Frederic March, Dana Andrews and Myrna Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives; or Ralph Fiennes (who didn’t win) in Schindler’s List?

Above all, what have these films—and the people who conceived, wrote, directed and starred in them—told us about the war?

Pioneer independent filmmaker Joseph Strick’s Interviews with My Lai Veterans (1970) was the first film on the Vietnam War to win an Oscar: Best Documentary, Short Subject. (The long subject was Woodstock.)

My Lai was a small (population: 700), rural South Vietnamese hamlet, believed to be a Vietcong stronghold. On March 16, 1968, the men of Charlie Company conducted a “search and destroy” operation there. The night before the mission, their commanding officers ordered them to kill the entire village. An estimated 400 to 500 civilians, including the elderly and many women and children, perished. Charlie Company encountered no enemy fire during the mission; the only American casualty was a soldier who shot himself in the foot.

In Strick’s straightforward, twenty-two minute film, five enlisted men, who participated in the assault on the village, talk about the pressure they were under: the continuous attacks instigated by an unseen enemy, the land mines and booby traps, their inability to distinguish combatants from civilians, their comrades who had been lost in recent days due to snipers, their agitation, their fear and their desire for revenge.

Some of them talked about the pointlessness of the war and opined that the only way to stop another My Lai from happening would be to get out of Vietnam. Asked to define “war crimes,” one of the soldiers replied, in words that encapsulate the core message of the growing anti-war movement, that being in Vietnam was a war crime.

The U.S. military made no attempt to investigate the activities at My Lai until Ronald Ridenhour, a twenty-two-year-old infantryman learned of the incident and felt morally compelled to take action. In April 1969, he sent a three-page, registered letter to President Nixon and twenty-nine other political leaders. The letter led to a military inquiry, which Seymour Hersh, anti-war presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy’s former press secretary learned of.

Ridenhour hadn’t been able to get the media to pay attention to the investigation, but Hersh, a freelance journalist who would go on to become one of America’s most intrepid investigative reporters, persuaded the D.C. based Dispatch News Service to take a look at the story. In the end, Dispatch News Service convinced thirty-five newspapers across the nation to break the story. (Hersh’s book “...on My Lai [was] published two years before Woodward and Bernstein [made] investigative journalism fashionable.”)

In March 1971, Lieutenant William Calley, who led an advance patrol unit into the area, was found guilty of murdering 122 civilians, dismissed from the army and sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict and sentence were highly controversial and provoked an outpouring of support for Calley. “On the political left those against the war saw Calley as a victim caught up in an immoral war. They wanted the generals and politicians put on trial for war crimes. Those on the right thought the verdict insulted all American troops fighting in Vietnam and were appalled at what their government was doing.” After spending three days in the Ft. Benning stockade, Commander-in-Chief Richard Nixon ordered that he be released and put under house arrest there. While Calley’s appeal worked its way through the judicial process, his sentence was reviewed and reduced to twenty years and then ten. After serving four and half months, he was paroled.

*          *          *          *

By 1971, the war was “must-see TV” on the nightly networks. (Indeed, the best documentary would eventually be Vietnam: A Television History for a variety of reasons, telling in themselves: one, the war seemed to naturally “exist” in real time on TV; two, the thirteen-part documentary’s length allowed for in-depth and at-length treatment of areas that that warranted thorough attention; three, the WGBH, PBS team [at a time when WGBH and PBS meant something: “60 consultants and four production units...hundreds of interviews...70 film archives (accessed) and travel(ing) the length of Vietnam to create perhaps the most exhaustive historical documentary series in television history”]; and lastly (and most importantly from a subjective, literary viewpoint), Chief Correspondent Stanley Karnow, whose companion book Vietnam: A History is, along with Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, one of the two best non-fiction books on the war. Fiction’s another story.)

Americans had been rocked by the events leading up to 1971: the Tet Offensive; President Johnson’s decision not to seek a second term; the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the violence on Chicago’s streets during the Democratic Convention; nationwide protests that shut down over four hundred American colleges; and now, the revelations prompted by My Lai and the controversial, highly publicized trial of Lieutenant Calley.

It would be three more years before another Vietnam film would win an Oscar. During that time the New York Times would publish the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate break-in would occur, the Paris Peace Talks would break down, President Nixon would order the “Christmas Bombing” of North Vietnam, a peace agreement would be signed, U.S. ground troops would be withdrawn and Richard Nixon would resign.

Peter Davis, who had already made the award-winning TV documentary The Selling of the Pentagon, won a Best Documentary Oscar in 1975 for Hearts & Minds. (The documentary’s title comes from a 1965 LBJ speech. Johnson paraphrased John Adams, who said: “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”) At first, Davis intended to focus on the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard educated economist and former Marine who worked for the appropriately middle named Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara. Indeed, McNamara, one of the primary architects of the war, did any number of strange things during his years in office (1961–1968), none stranger than recommending that an electronic barrier be built to separate North and South Vietnam, so that no communists could infiltrate South Vietnam without being detected.

But, by 1967, McNamara, like so many Americans post-1968, began to have grave doubts about the war. He commissioned a secret history of Vietnamese-American relations with Ellsberg, another early supporter of the war who had changed his mind (and heart), as one of its co-authors. Ellsberg began to surreptitiously photocopy the report and in March 1971 (coincidentally, at the same time as the Calley verdict), gave a copy to the New York Times.

The Times published it as “The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War” in June, and by late July, Ellsberg was indicted for illegal possession of government documents and violating the espionage act, which would have pleased Adams, the father of the infamous Alien and Sedition Act, itself the father of the Patriot Act.

Since the case against Ellsberg was eventually dismissed, Davis, determined to continue what he’d begun, took a step back, broadened his documentary’s concentration and turned it into an investigation of the war as a whole. Two years of filming resulted in over two hundred hours of footage.

The war was portrayed in a chronological context: the post World War II division of Vietnam into North and South; the growing communist movement in the North; the defeat of the French; the arrival of American advisors and, eventually, ground troops; and the innumerable ways that presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon deceived the public about the purpose of the war and its progress.

Walt Rostow, an unrepentant hawk and a chief presidential advisor during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, lectures the camera, and therefore, the viewer, with equal amounts of condescension and annoyance on the necessity of the war. General William Westmoreland, the U.S. military commander in Vietnam (1964­–1968), earnestly explains that Orientals do not value human life the way Caucasians do, as the doc.’s editor cross-cuts to the funeral of a South Vietnamese soldier and his inconsolable young son.

Ellsberg himself appears throughout the documentary and is always serious, intense, focused and articulate. He says, at one point, that it wasn’t a question of if we were on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.

Two of the many American soldiers whose stories are weaved into the narrative are shot from the waist up until, toward the end of the film, their words reveal that they were seriously injured. Only then does the camera pull back and show that one of them has lost a leg and that the other is paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.

*          *          *          *

Coming home after the traumatic and life-changing experience of fighting in Vietnam is the focus of the first two Oscar-winning feature-length films and the last one.

In 1979, The Deer Hunter—described by Roger Ebert as “a three-hour movie in three major movements…a progression from a wedding to a funeral…”—won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actor. It focuses on how combat, prison camp, Russian roulette (one of its many historical inaccuracies) and Saigon affect three friends from a small Pennsylvania steel town, who go off to fight in Southeast Asia’s jungles.

The Deer Hunter’s success with the critics, the Academy and moviegoers was partly the result of its boldly conceived marketing strategy, which included not only an early release date to qualify for the Oscars, but also a limited number of reserved seat engagements in New York City and even more limited “by-invitation-only” screenings in LA. “We’re showing it to publishers, editors, disk jockeys—anyone who attends parties and is likely to talk about the film,” one of the studio suits boasted.

According to movie maven David Thomson, it became “… the subject of bitter controversy, being deemed fascist, racist, historically inaccurate and small minded despite its epic canvas.”

“Epic canvas” (read directorial ego) aside, it does manage to convey, at tedious length, how the unquestioned values of a working class town—the value of one gun shot, the value of patriotism, the value of marriage, the value of anything—were cast into doubt. But, The Deer Hunter has nothing valid to tell us about the actual war—a war that it represents unrealistically as a contest between innocent, or heroic, Americans and an insidious, evil enemy.

Vincent Canby, reviewing the movie in the New York Times (in an otherwise laudatory article) pointed out that the director, who also wrote the original story “… has described his treatment of the three friends’ war experience as surreal, which is another way of saying a lot of recent history is… shaped to fit the needs of the film.”

Like The Deer Hunter, Coming Home (released that same year) focuses on the physical and psychological effects of the war on the American soldiers who fought there. Actual wounded vets appear in the opening sequence, which was filmed in a VA hospital. The vets debate the war and their need to believe that it had some purpose, for if it had no purpose, they’d sacrificed themselves for nothing.

Canby, in his New York Times review, got it right:

“The trouble seems to be that Coming Home wants to be all things to as wide an audience as possible. It wants to condemn war. It wants to be a love story. It wants to record the kind of polarization that Vietnam prompted in people.”

Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar for Best Actress, was the creative force behind the film, hiring the director, writer and co-star. She told reporters: “This movie means more to me than any other movie I’ve done so far.”

A former model (she appeared on the cover of Vogue twice) turned actress and social activist, Jane Fonda spoke out on behalf of many left wing causes including the anti-war movement (earning herself an FBI file and a spot on Nixon’s Enemies List). Fonda went to her first anti-war rally in l968, the same year that she read Jonathan Schell’s eye-opening book The Village of Ben Suc.

In 1971, she supported (financially and otherwise) the Winter Soldier Hearings (a riff on Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense”: “The winter soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”) Over 100 vets testified in a Detroit motel that My Lai was not an isolated incident. Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) Founder John Barry wrote in the New York Times, “One cannot participate in the Viet Nam War without being at least in complicity in committing war crimes.”

Fonda had already been thinking seriously about doing a feature film on the war, and meeting VVAW member Ron Kovic at a 1972 anti-war demonstration was further inspiration. 

In July 1972, she visited North Vietnam for two weeks as the guest of The Vietnam Committee of Solidarity with the American People. She went to factories, agricultural co-ops, schools, theaters (where she watched ballet and the second act of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons) and villages that had been struck by American bombs.  Her ten anti-American pro-North Vietnamese propaganda speeches were broadcast over Radio Hanoi and loudspeakers at the camps that held American POWs. Some of the POWs were forced to appear with her. One of them refused, and North Vietnamese prison guards broke his arms and confined him to a 6’ x 3’ box for five months. His name was John McCain.

A Japanese news agency photographed her astride one of the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns used to shoot down American planes and their pilots. Fonda is seen singing an anti-war song as the N.V. soldiers, who seem to be amused but bewildered, watch and a soundman holds out a mike. These photographs were picked up by the Associated Press and provoked a furor when they appeared in newspapers back in the States. In 1988, she appeared on ABC TV’s “20/20” program and apologized for her actions:

“I would like to say something… to [the] men who were in Vietnam who I hurt or whose pain I caused to deepen because of the things that I said or did. I feel that I owe them an apology. My intentions were never to hurt them or make their situations worse.... I was trying to help end the killing, end the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I am very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families." (Fonda, recently back-pedaling, in a May 2011 interview with The New Yorker, referred to the infamous photo of her astride the anti-aircraft gun as “...the biggest lapse of judgment in my life. I don’t regret going to North Vietnam. I’m glad I went. I’m glad I did everything I did, except that.”)

Apocalypse Now, released a year after Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, won two Academy Awards (Best Sound and Best Cinematography) and received four nominations. It was shot in the Philippines during a period of violent civil war (the helicopters had to leave from time to time to go do some real killing); subjected to severe weather, including a typhoon; encumbered by nearly insurmountable logistical problems; and haunted by medical and psychological issues, not the least of which was rampant megalomania. All of which conspired to cause serious schedule and budget ($12 million became $30) overages.

“…attacked long before it opened, as a model of Hollywood excess and vanity. When it did open there was amazing spectacle (the two Oscars were cinematography and sound), but it was not always clear what the film believed it was about…it is finally a movie in which you choose your own meaning.”

Apocalypse Now’s heart of darkness resides within its deeply talented but tormented director. In his struggle to define good, evil and the nature of man, Francis Ford Coppola, blinded by Machiavellian, or Godfatherean, ambition, lost sight of the forest, the trees and mostly, the Vietnam War.

*          *          *          *

The Killing Fields (1984), directed by Roland Joffé, focuses on the expansion of the war into Cambodia.

On April 30, 1970, Richard “I will not be the first president of the United States to lose a war” Nixon announced his decision to send American and South Vietnamese ground troops into Cambodia on network television. The objective was to destroy the so-called “sanctuaries” used by the North Vietnamese communists to send men and supplies into South Vietnam. (The Nixon government already had been bombing Cambodia under “Operation Menu”—Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Supper and Dessert—a covert United States Strategic Air Command campaign. B-52 bombing missions would eventually kill half a million Cambodian civilians.)

Nixon’s decision doomed Cambodia, which became “… a nation pushed into war by other powers, not in control of its destiny, being used callously as battle fodder, its agonies largely ignored as the world focused its attention on neighboring Vietnam.”

More than any film discussed so far The Killing Fields instructs by placing complex, agonizing emotional portraits within an unerringly accurate political and historical framework. Unlike the one-dimensional adversary shown in The Deer Hunter, Joffé’s film reveals the multi-layered, troubled dynamics of a war that included a demented genocidal enemy and an arrogant, imperialist American war machine. This veracity is a function of the director’s TV documentary background and his decision to base the film (closely) on Sidney Schanberg’s memoir. Schanberg was the New York Times correspondent in Cambodia from 1972 to 1975 (and being there, clearly matters, as we shall see).

At the heart of The Killing Fields is Cambodia’s tragic fate and the relationship between Schanberg and Dith Pran, his Cambodian translator. Schanberg decided to remain in Cambodia to report on the U.S. supported Cambodian government’s fall to the communists in April 1975—two weeks before the war in Vietnam officially ended.

“…most journalists were sickened by the killing and their disgust tended to reflect the war-weariness of the country. Sidney Schanberg filled the New York Times with powerful accounts of the effect of Washington’s policies” (and won a Pulitzer for his work in Cambodia in 76).

Haing Ngor, who played Dith Pran, had been a doctor practicing in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. During their civil war, the communists killed his wife, and he was captured and tortured. To survive, Ngor kept his education and his profession a secret. After four years, he escaped to Thailand and eventually, made his way to the United States, where he was unable to practice medicine. American authorities didn’t recognize his French credentials. 

By chance, Ngor met a casting director at a party and after talking with the filmmakers accepted the role. He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor—the second time in the history of the Academy that someone who wasn’t an actor won. (Appropriately enough the first winner, recognized for his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, was Harold Russell, a WWII amputee who lost both arms when a grenade exploded.)

At the ceremonies Ngor dedicated his Oscar to his wife. Variety said that Ngor’s victory: “…played out as one of the most dramatic in Academy Award history. The underdog—courtesy of the American dream—could indeed come up a winner.”

The “American dream,” however, is often more complex than that.

Haing Ngor wrote an autobiography (A Cambodian Odyssey, 1988); appeared in subsequent films (including, in 1993 director Oliver Stone’s movie of Le Ly Hayslip’s autobiographical book—she was twelve when the war came to her village—When Heaven and Earth Changed Places); founded two societies that aided Cambodian refugees; spoke out against the communist regime; and worked as an interpreter. He kept his Oscar beside his statuette of Buddha.

In early l996, he was shot and killed while standing by his car in LA’s Chinatown, where he lived. The LA police concluded that he had resisted a robbery attempt by members of an Oriental street gang (and possibly refused to give them his gold watch with his wife’s picture inside). Three members of the gang were eventually tried and convicted of the murder. 

Doubts surround the case, however. Some contend that agents of the Cambodian communists, who wanted Ngor silenced, were behind his murder.

*          *          *          *

“Platoon…is possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr’s vigorous and hallucinatory book Dispatches…. It is not like any other Vietnam film that’s yet been made,” said Vincent Canby in his December 1986 New York Times review. (Herr, incidentally, is responsible for much of Willard’s narrative voice—one of the more authentic voices in Apocalypse Now.)

Oliver Stone, who wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, which would win an Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director, was the first filmmaker who fought in Vietnam.

After teaching English and History to Chinese/Vietnamese children in Saigon, Stone, eighteen, dropped out of Yale and enlisted in the army, specifically requesting combat duty in Vietnam—a wish that was promptly granted. He was wounded in 1967, earning himself a Bronze Star, Purple Heart and a trip back to “the world.” 

Four years later, he graduated from NYU and began to write screenplays. One became Platoon. (It took him ten years to get the movie made.) 

In Platoon, as Canby’s review goes on to say:

“Sanity is not a state of mind but a pair of socks. Objects don’t have names. They’re numbered coordinates, drawn on a very small map from which the rest of the world has vanished.”

Sanity and chaos. Boredom and intensity. Fear, rage, bonding and brotherhood. The American soldier in the forbidding and unfamiliar jungles of Vietnam is seen through the eyes of a single platoon out on patrol. 

The film shows clearly that My Lai was still with us and provoked not only heated debate, but also a revival of interest in the war. Precisely Stone’s intention, as his acceptance speech shows:

“I really think that through this award you’re acknowledging the Vietnam veteran. And I think what you’re saying is that you now understand what happened over there and that it shouldn’t happen again. This award really does belong to the Vietnam veterans, both living and dead.”

But, Stone wasn’t sure that everyone understood, so he teamed up with Ron Kovic and created Platoon: Part Two.

Four years after Ron Kovic met Jane Fonda at that anti-war demonstration, he wrote Born on the Fourth of July, a bestseller. Oliver Stone was interested in making a movie of the book and after numerous trials and tribulations (financial, creative and otherwise) contacted Kovic (a recent LA transplant), who agreed to write the screenplay with him.

Their script faithfully follows Kovic’s 1950s Long Island boyhood: watching Howdy Doody, The Cisco Kid and American Bandstand; collecting Topp’s baseball cards; rooting for Mickey Mantle and the Yankees; playing sports; fighting fake battles with his “It’s swell; it’s Mattel” toy machine gun; thinking about girls; going to church; believing that communism had to be fought at all costs; and being inspired by JFK’s inaugural speech, “…ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

After two Marine recruiters addressed his senior class at graduation, Kovic enlisted, did two tours in Nam, got wounded, became permanently paralyzed from the chest down and returned home, only to be greeted by a conflicted family and a community he no longer recognized. What he couldn’t see, quite yet, was that he too was changing.

His six months of rehab in a VA hospital were a nightmare.

Kovic not only struggled with his psychological and physical adjustment to his altered state, but also embarked on an equally arduous journey to a new political perspective. A journey provoked by many conversations with fellow vets and the black orderlies at the VA hospital—and one in particular: “‘I’m a Vietnam veteran,’ I tell him. ‘I fought in Vietnam and I got a right to be treated decently.’ ‘Vietnam,’ the aide says loudly. ‘Vietnam don’t mean nothin’ to me or any of these other people. You can take your Vietnam and shove it up your ass.’”

He read the books other vets recommended and went to an anti-war demonstration, where the police roughed him up even though he was in a wheelchair. After seeing a photo in the paper of vets throwing their medals and ribbons onto the steps of the Capitol, he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Formed in 1967 by three vets, the VVAW eventually grew to 30,000 members. The organization worked to end the war, bring the troops home, focus attention on the neglect of wounded vets and the shameful condition of the VA hospitals, increase health and education benefits, educate people about the dangers of chemicals like Agent Orange used in the war and achieve amnesty for draft resisters.

Kovic became one of their most ardent and articulate speakers. He and other vets demonstrated on the floor of the 1972 Republican National Convention.

“This was the movement I had come three thousand miles for, this was it, all the pain and the rage, all the trials and the death of the war and what had been done to me and a generation of Americans by all the men who had lied to us and tricked us, by the man who stood before us in the convention hall that night, [President Nixon], while men who had fought for their country were being gassed and beaten in the street outside the hall… President Nixon began to speak and all three of us took a deep breath and shouted at the top of our lungs, ‘Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war,’ as loud and as hard as we could, looking directly at Nixon. The security agents immediately threw up their arms, trying to hide us from the cameras and the President… For an instant [Walter] Cronkite [of CBS] looked down, then turned his head away. They’re not going to show it, I thought. They’re going to try and hide us like they did in the hospitals…”

Four years later, with the war over and nearly 60,000 American boys dead, Kovic addressed the Democratic National Convention, asking amnesty for draft resisters, which was granted early the next year by President Carter.

Today the VVAW’s mission is:

“…to oppose senseless military adventures and to teach the real lessons for the Vietnam War. We will do all we can to prevent another generation from being put through a similar tragedy and we will continue to demand dignity and respect for veterans of all eras. Through ongoing actions and grassroots organization, VVAW exposed the ugly truth about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and our first-hand experiences helped many other Americans to see the unjust nature of that war. Today our government is still financing and arming undemocratic and repressive regimes around the world.”

Ron Kovic has continued to work within the peace movement for, as Oliver Stone put it, while accepting his Oscar for Best Director in 1990:

“…Vietnam is not over, although some say it is.”

Apocalypse Now Opening Sequence.

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Andersen, Christopher; Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda.

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“Since the....”; Pells, 201

“...when she....”; O’Neil, 8

“…to spend…”; Ibid,180

“…prematurely anti-facist...”; Ibid, 62

“...on My Lai…”; Bilton, 252

“On the political…”; Ibid, 340

“…a three-hour movie…”; Ebert, 1

“We’re showing....”; O’Neil, 407

“...the subject...”; Thomson (The New), 178

“...has described...”; Canby, 212

“The trouble....”; Ibid, 161

“This movie....”; O’Neil, 408

“The winter soldier....”; Zaroulis, 354

“One cannot....”; Ibid, 355

“I would like...”; Anderson, 11

“...the biggest lapse of…”; Als, 61

“...attacked long....”; Thomson (Have you), 44

“I will not....”; Karnow, 577

“...a nation...”; Canby, 447

“...most journalists....”; Shawcross, 324

“...played out...”; O’Neil, 483

“Platoon is...”; Canby, 663

“Sanity is...”; Ibid, 669

“I really...”; O’Neil, 506

“…ask not...”; Kovic, i

“I’m a…”; Ibid, 116

“This was...”; Zaroulis, 392

“...to oppose...”;www.vvaw.org/about/

“...Vietnam is.”; O’Neil, 552