Peace in the Mountains: Northern Appalachian Students Protest the Vietnam War

Abstract

Speaking in the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four Kent State students at an antiwar protest in May 1970, historian Leo Marx told an Amherst campus convocation, “You are part of the largest, most comprehensive and militant act by American students . . . in the history of the Republic.” Marx was not exaggerating. The Cambodia and Kent State tragedies generated the most widespread campus protests ever seen in the US, involving millions of students on more than half of the nation’s colleges and universities. Though most of the protesters were nonviolent, some thirty ROTC buildings were burned or bombed that first week of May, and the demonstrations were sufficiently disruptive to convince 135 colleges and universities to close, leading Americans to tell Gallup pollsters they regarded student unrest as the nation’s number one problem.The scale of student protest in the Long 1960s was so immense that no historian has taken on the task of writing a comprehensive national history of it, and so to this day when I teach the student movement’s history, for the national picture I still find the best sources on campus protest are journalist Kirkpatrick Sale’s chronicle SDS (1973) and the Carnegie Commission’s report May 1970: The Campus Aftermath of Cambodia and Kent State (1971). If historians are ever to produce a nationwide history of student protest and the antiwar movement on campus, we are going to need campus case studies that take us beyond the famed hotbeds of student activism—Berkeley, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin—to probe the rise and fall of such activism from coast to coast. Fortunately, during the past three decades historians have been publishing case studies of the antiwar movement on individual campuses, adding to our understanding of the movement’s grassroots activists in the Midwest, South, and Southwest. Thomas Weyant contributes to this regional diversity in his new account of student protest and the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era in northern Appalachia. He offers an informative history of the peace movement at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), West Virginia University (WVU), and Ohio University (OU), campuses that previously had been neglected by historians.Weyant’s study shows that by the mid-1960s Pitt, OU, and WVU all had vibrant antiwar movements. Protests against the Vietnam War, ROTC, and other military-related agencies surged on all these campuses as the war escalated. Peace in the Mountains draws on impressive research in student newspapers and campus administration files of these three campuses to narrate the dramatic stories of these protests and the opposition they faced from conservative students, university officials, and state legislatures.But the study is less successful in contextualizing the history of these antiwar protests. This is partially a problem with the author’s research strategy. Peace in the Mountains was written without the benefit of oral history interviews with movement veterans so one never gets their perspective on how the campus organizing they did related to the strategy and tactics of the antiwar movement nationally. One suspects that since the antiwar protests at WVU, OU, and Pitt tended to come later and be less confrontational than at more militant campuses such as Berkeley or Columbia, this was a conscious choice by activists who were wisely tailoring and modulating their tactics so as not to alienate students on their more moderate campuses. It would have been useful to get not only this interior story of movement strategy but also the give-and-take between Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)’s national leadership and the SDS chapters on the campuses Weyant studied. The SDS papers ought to have been consulted, and would likely have been useful in tracing the ways ideas about student power and university democracy that SDS championed nationally influenced student activists at Pitt, WVU, and OU. Oral history interviews would also have been helpful in assessing the ways that gender played out on these mountain campuses. One wonders, for example, whether the smaller size of the movement here made the antiwar movement less sexist and male-dominated than was the case on campuses with much larger antiwar movements. It would have been useful, too, for the FBI files to have been consulted to see whether here, as Gregg L. Michel found for the South, the Bureau was spying on student antiwar activists even on campuses whose protests tended to be smaller and less militant.While illuminating on the issue of war, when Peace in the Mountain deals with related aspects of 1960s student activism at Pitt, WVU, and OU, most notably on race, there are some problems. Weyant argues that “until recently . . . scholarly understanding of Sixties student activism . . . centered . . . on white middle class men at elite universities” (2). This is true only if one ignores the history of the sit-in movement of 1960 led by Black students and of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which that movement helped to create. Both inspired SDS, a history told in great detail by Howard Zinn and Clayborne Carson decades ago, and more recently, by Wesley Hogan. Missing this part of the New Left’s origins leads Weyant to leave out the early 1960s and the question of whether the sit-in movement, SNCC, and the Freedom Rides played a role in the initial rise of student activism on his mountain campuses. SNCC’s early opposition to the Vietnam War is also missed, leaving it unclear whether Black students at Pitt, WVU, and OU echoed its critique of the Vietnam War. There are unresolved contradictions in the book’s treatment of student civil rights activism, as when we are told that “by late 1967” student “civil rights activism largely faded” (87), but then we see students battling both racial discrimination in campus area housing (89) and the racist climate on campus (96–98), which is more in sync with the national upsurge of Black student activism in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.Weyant does a fine job of showing that some the most confrontational protests on these mountain campuses came quite late, in the wake of the Cambodia invasion and Kent State tragedy, when emotions were at fever pitch. At OU a cafeteria was set ablaze and at WVU tear gas deployed against angry protesters. But his argument that student protest was “waning” after these confrontations in 1970 is contradicted by the fact that OU’s largest act of antiwar civil disobedience—a mass sit-in at the campus ROTC building—occurred in May 1972, resulting in the arrest of 77 protesters under Ohio’s new anti-riot law (173). The timing and causes of the demise of mass student protest at OU clearly needs further exploration.Although Weyant makes a reasonable case for dubbing and linking these three universities as “northern Appalachian” campuses, we never find the students in his narrative identifying themselves that way (nor do we ever learn how many of the activists were from out of state). What we see instead is Pitt’s antiwar students in coalition with their counterparts on other campuses in their city. Similarly, we see WVU students in coalitions with students from other campuses in their state. It may be best for historians following up on Weyant’s pioneering study to opt for more institutional than geographic diversity, probing how student activists and the antiwar movement at these state universities compared with activists in their state or city on campuses that were different from them, either private, smaller, religious, or historically Black—so that we get to assess the antiwar movement in a richer variety of campus settings.