The story of the 1968 “Fuck the Draft” poster

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_never_before_told_story_of_the_man_in_the_fuck_the_draft_poster

by smollett • 9 years ago

159 59 9 years ago

dangerousminds.net

smollett• 9 years ago

This is the second part of a series. The first part is about Kiyoshi Kuromiya who was kind of incredible: born in an internment camp, looked after Martin Luther King's children (apparently?), wrote a book with Buckminster Fuller, published a gay rights magazine in 1970:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/fuck_the_draft_the_amazin...

His NYT obituary omits the poster, but adds that he was a nationally ranked Scrabble player:

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/28/us/kiyoshi-kuromiya-57-fig...

bfuller• 9 years ago

wow didn't know that, cool.

616c• 9 years ago

Similar diversion: one of John Lithgow's childhood babysitters was Coretta Scott King. That shocked me.

https://reddit.com/comments/73fbct

AnimalMuppet3• 9 years ago

A hippie burning his draft card? That's a hippie?

Wow, how standards have slipped over the years...

gcbw2• 9 years ago

"The word hippie came from hipster and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district."

You mean, how the standards have been appropriated by the mass culture behemoths trying to simplify history into easily digestible ad ridden programs.

AnimalMuppet3• 9 years ago

The article is from 2017; one could assume the 2017 meaning of the word. Where the word came from is irrelevant. So is what it initially meant.

dang3• 9 years ago

It's quite the other way around. That's what the early hippies looked like. When older people yelled 'cut your hair', people who looked like the guy in the poster were who they were yelling at.

Somewhere on the web there's a collection of some artist's B&W photogaphs of San Francisco hippies during the early-to-mid 60s when young people began flocking there. This is pre-Jefferson-Airplane SF, when the cool band was the Charlatans and the aesthetic was 19th century retro. People dressed up in ornate Victorian and/or cowboy clothes and looked like what we now call hipsters. There were radical street theater groups like the Diggers and whatnot. (There's a good article about this period here: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-..., posted to zero effect by yours truly in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123525).

Anyhow, there are tons of pictures in that collection of kids in sleeping bags, or playing guitar, or sitting on the floor of apartments in the Haight. Everyone's hair is short by later standards, looking much like the guy in the poster. The apartments look the same as they do now, except with less furniture. It's a brilliant collection. I wish I could see it again, but it's lost in the sands of my memory, and of course Googling for hippie photos just brings up layers of dreck.

AnimalMuppet3• 9 years ago

OK, but the photo is from 1967, and the poster is from 1968. That was more into the really long hair version of the hippie, wasn't it? Or was that not until the 1970s?

I note that the musical Hair came out in 1967.

PhasmaFelis2• 9 years ago

If you think the definition of "hippie" is exclusively about hair, you've got some reading to do.

pavement• 9 years ago

No, AnimalMuppet, the article explains that he's a "yippie" very clearly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yippie

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

I'd like to read an interview with someone whose opinion of the draft was changed by this poster.

colanderman• 9 years ago

I think posters like this are less for changing minds and more for empowering the base. Seeing it could inspire an act of courage, or let you know that you are not alone, perhaps even in the majority.

vkou• 9 years ago

Have you ever had your opinion about anything be changed by a single utterance?

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes many utterances to change culture.

_jal• 9 years ago

Well, sure, but there's a different dynamic at play here.

There are different classes of things that are "known" in society. What class something is in depends on a lot of different things, and funny things happen when they change class. There's a fairy tale about it: The Emperor Wears No Clothes. In that one, a kid makes unavoidable what everyone is thinking but afraid to say. Before the utterance, it was unthinkable to say it. After, it was unthinkable not to.

You can see this in play right now - there's that dynamic about the Weinstein trash fire, for instance. I think that was part of what was going on with the poster. It was shocking enough to be an instant conversation topic ("went viral"), and greased the rails a bit for people to admit to their peer groups that they opposed the war, too.

jonjacky• 9 years ago

Nobody interviewed me, I was just a high school kid, but here's what I remember. A few years before this poster appeared, normal people wouldn't consider opposing the war or the draft. The effect of this poster (and many other things like it) was to show that wasn't unthinkable, lots of people did think it and even did it -- so maybe you could too. Many people don't hold strong opinions on most issues --- they just go along with the received opinion out of inertia or peer pressure. Something like this poster can help jog them out of that.

vanderZwan• 9 years ago

I don’t know how many people were there but it was a long line of them, and the first people there went to where the public entrance was, that large staircase, and they went up there and got stuck up there, surrounded by Federal Marshals, who were not very nice [laughs], with billy clubs and whatnot, and Federal troops, who were our age, and were very nice. They were armed, but you could talk with them.

I suppose most of them also were only there because they were forced into it, so that makes sense.

citizenkeen• 9 years ago

Rather appropriate for today.

criddell4• 9 years ago

I've been watching Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary and it made me think about the protestors and how the government reacted. The people that protested should be very proud of their actions because it feels like they were right.

I wonder how soldiers or police from that era feel about the documentary. The soldiers clearly were ordered into a terrible war. The police can't be proud of their role either.

rconti• 9 years ago

Seconded. I just finished it. PBS only had the first 4-6 episodes "free" on the AppleTV app (and I assume other streaming methods) but I had recorded all 10 on my DVR. I should have paid my local affiliate the $60 to get PBS Passport so I could watch the whole thing uncensored -- so if you want to see it and haven't yet, or don't have an antenna, or whatever, check to see if you can get PBS Passport access with a donation. The Blu-Ray is $130 so this is a much cheaper option.

In some ways the documentary made me feel better about today's America; they survived, so can we. The parallels between the Nixon administration (and, frankly, the pro-war coverup parts of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) and today's administration are just amazing. On the other hand, it makes me sad to realize how much of today's mindsets are unchanged knee-jerk leftovers from that era. My dad is a Vet, and was actually on a carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin during the incident; fortunately his active duty service was complete shortly thereafter. He later came to realize the war made no sense, but I'm sure that many of the things the anti-war folks said would still hurt to this day. He's also had friends he served with who he's lost friendships with because they can't accept that someone could go from being in the military to being skeptical of these kinds of foreign interventions, and that the government isn't always right.

One thing I found really interesting was how well-received Americans are in Vietnam. Maybe it helps that communism ultimately fell apart so it seemed like we were 'right' all along, and looking out for their best interests-- but of course it wasn't their interests we cared about, and communism would have fallen apart on its own, likely without millions of deaths, if we hadn't gotten involved.

thaumasiotes3• 9 years ago

communism would have fallen apart on its own, likely without millions of deaths, if we hadn't gotten involved

Communism caused more deaths where we weren't involved than where we were.

This is confounded; the areas where we had no influence had much larger populations. But it is indisputable that if we hadn't gotten involved at all, communism would still have caused many millions of deaths.

fotbr• 9 years ago

I have relatives that served in Vietnam (drafted, most served in the enlisted ranks), and worked with several other Vietnam veterans (all retired officers, all were career military, and nearly all had been commissioned before the Vietnam War had started).

I, perhaps oddly, do not know how my relatives feel about the war or the Ken Burns documentary. Most flat out refuse to talk about those years. Perhaps that's not so odd, given the times and situations they faced both abroad and on coming home.

The folks I worked with, on the other hand, were pretty uniformly proud of the job they and their men did. They did not all agree with the politics surrounding the war, both in recent years as well as at the time, but being professionals, they did as they were ordered. Several of them, now professors of U.S. History, thought the Ken Burns' documentary was very well done, and reflected reality in a way that Hollywood never did or desired to. A couple of those professors include the Burns' documentary as part of their courses' curriculum.

I don't know if any of that helps with your curiosity.

averagewall• 9 years ago

It seems common for soldiers to have such extreme deferrence to rank that they can proudly do things that they otherwise belive are wrong just because their boss told them to. I used to work with an Afganistan veteran and he was the same - fighting was somehow good but the politicians making the decisions were making wrong decisions. Why not quit if you're part of something you think is wrong?

criddell4• 9 years ago

were pretty uniformly proud of the job they and their men did

Individually, I'm sure there's plenty to be proud of. But as a group, they did a lot of terrible and evil things extremely well.

Since starting that documentary, when I've been thinking about large protests, I'm struck by how often the protestors are right. I know going forward it's going to change how I see big protests.

losteverything2• 9 years ago

Oh how the internet has changed things. We are so much better off now than we were back then. Information then was totally controlled by the network and newspapers. No such thing as mass optional news sources. Like blogs. Or videos. Or direct contact with author.

This poster time warped me. Recalling my father saying while at the wheel of our Impala, "Look at that girl," to upset my older sibling. The boy had long hair like in the picture.

Teens and young adults died in a war. The news machine was all citizens had. I suppose you could say it was all fake news to some point but we never new any different. The draft was a ticket to potential death.

Now, anyone with a keyboard can publish anything and anyone with a phone can read it. No more Walter Cronkite or NYTimes to dish out news in a manner they believed was fit.

Growing up in a midwestern university town life meant you believed your happily married parents; They were conservative. Voices that disagreed had to be sought out. And it was very hard to do so. Like if you really didn't believe in the war or wanted to learn more. Where could you get it? Look, Life, Time, Newsweek? The Library? All forces with editors.

Now, we don't need them. We have Facebook to get others' thoughts; we have email to direct connect; we have web pages of groups positions; we can meet virtually. Want to know history, Google is my personal librarian.

snerbles• 9 years ago

Google is my personal librarian

While certainly an improvement over legacy media, are you not trading one information curator for another?

losteverything2• 9 years ago

Yes.. but my thinking was not that that so much as the level of effort to research any topic.

Say, for example, you wanted to know how your representative voted. Or, you wanted to see how other universities planned for the March on DC January 20? Or, you simply wanted to know the preamble to the Constitution (which we now have on our phone but I know my family didn't have that at home).

criddell4• 9 years ago

While there is a point of view encoded in the algorithms that Google runs, I see it as more of an indexer than a curator. It's not the same thing, is it? Especially when the index is somewhat tailored to my preferences (when I'm logged in).

jv22222• 9 years ago

That said, in some ways, there is perhaps even less opportunity to to be a free thinker, with so many people getting deeper into their selected schism on facebook and other selected media outlets.

It's just so easy to get deeper and deeper into an echo chamber of ones own choosing.

b0blee• 9 years ago

I was a teen in the 60's, in a small town in Pennsylvania. I had no problem getting information about the anti-war movement - it was everywhere. I migrated to San Francisco in 1967 to be a hippie. That movement and the protests were all over the news. The nation was polarized on the issue. Both sides were represented in the media. It was hard not to be affected by the films of atrocities on the nightly news.

pimlottc• 9 years ago

Good points.

On the other, these days the subject would be identified nearly right away and left vulnerable to retribution and abuse (both from authorities and "cyber bullies").

sotojuan• 9 years ago

If anyone is around or in NYC, the Whitney has a great "protest" art exhibition with this kind of stuff.

guelo• 9 years ago

discretion is the better part of valor here, so I decided to get out of Detroit, hitchhike out west and keep moving around

Ah the days before everybody voluntarily carried a tracking beacon in their pockets. The FBI would have no problem tracking him down these days.

throw2016• 9 years ago

I think we need more dissenters and the disaffected. Some people work, some people create businesses and wealth, others study, research, families have to be raised and life gets over but we always need a section of the population that is in a constant state of dissatisfaction to challenge the status quo.

bsenftner• 9 years ago

My internal cynic is thinking that creating a mountain of education debt does a good job of squelching agitators. I wish education funding were not so tied to politics. It's a right, just like healthcare, in my mind.

thaumasiotes3• 9 years ago

we always need a section of the population that is in a constant state of dissatisfaction to challenge the status quo

For its own sake? If everyone was satisfied, what would be wrong with the status quo?

javiramos• 9 years ago

For a well-documented summary of the Vietnam War, I recommend Ken Burns's PBS documentary which came out a few weeks ago [1] It is a total of 18 hours of video but very well worth it.

To me, it is striking how history has repeated itself with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A war with: (1) no clear goal or victory criteria, (2) endless spending and major profiteering by the war industrial-complex and (3) low levels of support from the American people. It was very sad to, very clearly, draw the parallels between the two wars as the documentary progressed.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/

thearn4• 9 years ago

I really want to watch it, but man 18 hours is a deep dive, especially for such a serious topic. I need to set aside some time.

switchbak• 9 years ago

It's easily the best documentary I've yet seen on the war.

Also highly recommended after watching that is "Fog of War" - direct interviews with a Robert McNamara who tells all prior to his death. Very interesting to have such a candid retrospective with such a vital figure during the war.

aaron695• 9 years ago

I have not watched it but my understanding is that it doesn't even look at Laos or Cambodia which for 18 hours I really don't understand?

rmason2• 9 years ago

I remember that poster. Growing up in Michigan we felt like we were in the center of everything happening in the sixties. The radical group, Students for a Democratic Society, whose off shoot became the Weatherman Underground was formed on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The entire fabric of the nation frayed back then but luckily did not break.

I saw the band, the MC5 or Motor City Five, in concert many times in the sixties. They were the only band that were proceeded by a hype man before they came on stage. A guy did a long angry soliloquy that was designed to amp up the crowd and get them fighting mad. Not the same thing as defined in today's rap, but I believe they just adopted the term.

You'd have an entire auditorium of screaming angry kids and then the band would start playing fast and amp everyone even higher. The MC5 as a band kind of supernova'd, they had a few hits in a short amount of time and then just folded. But to fully understand their impact you had to see them live.

Lots of later artists cited them as an influence. I personally think that it is sad that they never got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC5

gedy2• 9 years ago

I wasn't around then, but MC5 and The Stooges blow me away at how new and unique their sound and act were for their time. They are still so modern that a lot of folks shrug with _"what's so special about them?"_

rmason2• 9 years ago

I've got younger friends who swear to me that MC5 was the first real punk band. Read an interview with one of the Ramones who said they were one of his top influences.

Course Iggy Pop of The Stooges was from Muskegon, Michigan and if I remember correctly while living in Ann Arbor shared the stage with members of the MC5.

verylittlemeat• 9 years ago

I believe there is a long tradition in live performance to have someone "warm up" the audience for the main event.

I'm sure your example got the audience way more than "warm" but I don't think it's something stand up comedians, MC5 or rap can take credit for.

jwilk• 9 years ago

If CloudFlare hates you, here's an archived copy:

https://archive.is/NhCGv