Outsiders Locking In Essay, Research Paper

Outsiders Looking In

In the United States something very odd happened during the period of time from the middle of the 1950’s up to the impact of the crisis of the 1960’s. For once in the storied history of the United States a majority of Americans accepted the same system of assumptions. This shared system of assumptions is known as the liberal consensus. The main reason there was such a thing as liberal consensus was because of the extreme economic growth we experienced in the U.S. during the post World War II era. However, the consensus didn’t apply to one important group of people. These were the combat soldiers it the Vietnam War. Their experiences at home and abroad suggest that they were outsiders to the ideology that Godfrey Hodgson outlines in his book America In Our Time and that they were not motivated by the promises and values of the liberal consensus.

To understand what makes these soldiers outsiders we must first understand what the liberal consensus was. Hogson argues that the social and intellectual world view of the 1950’s and early 1960’s was based on the ideology that “capitalism was a revolutionary force for social change, that economic growth was supremely good because it obviated the need for redistribution and social conflict, that class had no place in American politics.” This is the reason for such a liberal consensus, but what is it really? First, the liberals consisted of the Democratic Party, middle class college students, the civil rights movement, and some members of the labor community. Also known as the Left, these groups of people shared a common belief in anti-communism, the rights of minorities, the willingness to accept the existence of the labor unions, and that the federal government had to play some role in the economic life of the U.S. capitalist system. “Since the consensus had made converts on the Right as well as on the Left, only a handful dissidents were excluded from the Big Tent: southern diehards, rural reactionaries, the more farouche and paranoid fringes of the radical Right, and the divided remnants of the old, Marxist, Left.”(Hodgson 116) Not many people were left out of the “Big Tent”.

Hodgson argues that the consensus can be summarized in a set of six interrelated maxims. First, old capitalism is different from the new American free-enterprise system. This system creates abundance and is very democratic. In terms of social justice this system has revolutionary potential. Next, he feels that the key to this potential is production and economic growth. This economic growth creates incremental resources, therefore eliminating social conflict between classes. Thirdly, this causes a natural harmony of interests in society almost eliminating classes. Workers were now becoming middle class members of society. He also believed that social problems could be solved in an industrial sort of way. First, by identifying the problem and creating programs to solve them. Next, by government enlightened in social sciences they can apply inputs to the problem solving, such as money and resources. The fifth of the maxims is that the main threat to this system comes from Marxism, and that the U.S. and its Free World allies could expect a prolonged struggle against communism. Lastly, he feels that the U.S. needs to bring the free enterprise system to the rest of the world.

To further understand the situation of Vietnam soldiers we must look at the U.S. foreign policy of the times. Between 1959 and 1961 the Gallup poll asked Americans what they felt was the “the most important problem” facing this great nation of ours. A majority of the respondents answered that the major problem was “keeping the peace,” or many times referred to as “dealing with Russia.” Nothing troubled our nation more than an outstanding concern with communism. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was of utmost concern to our government. The U.S. government had a policy of containment at the time. This policy was not to invade the Soviet Union and push them back, but just to contain them where they were and not allow any expansion of communism. This is what led us into what is known as the Cold War.

At this time Vietnam was a pawn in geopolitical strategy for growth for many countries including France, Great Britain, China, and the U.S. The nationalist leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, wanted to break of the Vietnamese relationship with the French. However, the only problem was that the only ones who wanted to talk about liberation were the communists. This is essentially what lead to the Vietnam War. The war was supposed to be about Vietnamese independence, however, many people felt that it was about the control communism and the Soviet Union.

While this time of liberal consensus was a prosperous time for America, the question now becomes: Was this growth and prosperity shared by all? “Vietnam, more than any other American war in the twentieth century, perhaps in our history, was a working-class war. The institutions most responsible for channeling men into the military-the draft, the schools, and the job market-directed working class children to the armed forces and their wealthier peers toward college.”(Appy 6) With the creation of the Selective Service and draft boards it became evident that the liberal consensus belief that class no longer existed in American politics was not true. There was virtually no escape from the war for the working class and poor. Their options were limited to either fleeing or enlisting. On the other hand the middle-class and rich had many options and could avoid being drafted by using loopholes in the system. The most popular way for the rich to avoid the draft was going to college. This option most working-class families could not afford. Of the few working-class people who did attend college, most were working their way through and were not able to be full times students.

There were many other options the rich had at their disposal to avoid the draft. Another widely utilized excuse was having a mental or physical disability. The laws were created with best intentions in mind but they soon became to be abuse by the rich who could afford to pay doctors to write notes saying that they had a physical or mental disability. There were people drafted who were legitimately disabled but could not afford to see a doctor. Another very popular way the rich had for avoiding the draft was to get braces, which made one, ineligible.

Even though this was a time of shared beliefs and assumptions, this was not at all true when one looks at the way the different classes of people perceived being drafted. A more well off member of society who managed to dodge the draft could safely assume that some unknown person would fill their spot. The wealthier members of society really believed that the army didn’t want them that the army just wanted a body to fill a position. On the other hand the working class had to worry that the body that may be filling their spot could be a friend or a family member. This is the reason many working class people became what were known as “draft motivated volunteers”. With an absence of realistic alternatives, they believed that by volunteering that would be able to have more control over their assignments. However, this belief was unfortunately untrue because all of the good assignments were either placed out of reach for most members of the working class or given out earlier to more educated, well off members of society. The only decent option the working class had was to enlist in the Navy or Airforce, which required a three or four year commitment, unlike the Army which required two, but could greatly reduce the chances that they would end up on the battle field. It was beginning to become quite obvious that the liberal consensus was not a “Big Tent” in which most members of society were under.

Vietnam was not just a white working-class war, many minorities, mainly blacks, also fought in the war. They viewed their situation considerably different then the whites, who were basically force to be there, the minorities saw the war as a chance for upward mobility in the social ranks. Around 10 percent of the soldiers who served in the Vietnam War were blacks. Even though the Civil Rights movement was strong at the time, the blacks and whites fighting along side one another did little to end discrimination. While 10 percent of the soldiers were black, only 2 percent were officers. However, race was not even close to class was in determining the overall social composition of the American forces. Surveys done at the time showed that more than 75 percent of the soldiers came from the working class, while only 20 percent of the soldiers came from white-collar families. This fact proves that the war was essentially a class war and that the working class was not winning.

In Illinois, for example, men who lived in towns with a median salary above $15,000 were four times less likely to die in the Vietnam war than those men who lived in towns were the salary was $5,000. Even though the U.S. had all these policies that were supposed to fair and undiscriminitory “those who fought and died in Vietnam were overwhelmingly drawn from the bottom half of the American social structure.”(Appy 24) According to Appy eighty percent of the men who went to fight, for what they believed to be Vietnamese liberation, had no more than high school education.

Now that the war was in full swing, things on the home front were not much better for working class members of society. They began to experience hard times especially when it came to finding employment. Because they were known as “draft-bait” employers were reluctant to hire these men who could be called off to anytime. This situation further complicated things for members of the working class, at home they couldn’t find employment and they had to worry about when they would be called off to fight what has started to become a meaningless war.

The situation for the soldiers fighting the war was much worse than for those at home though. “Some Americans arrived in Vietnam convinced that no Vietnamese were to be trusted, that all were potential enemies, and that all of them were “gooks”.”(Appy 132) The soldiers were fighting against two enemies in the jungles. They were fighting the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh’s communist North Vietnamese forces. The Viet Cong consisted of many of the South Vietnamese that the soldiers had once thought they were brought in to protect. The strength of the anti-communism movement created by the liberal consensus began to dwindle and so did the spirits of the men fighting the war. It began to be clear to them that we were fighting a war we could not win. The main goal for the soldiers simply became survival, while the U.S. policy makers still felt they could not lose Vietnam because they saw it as a crucial aspect in the long-term effort to contain communism. When the U.S. finally decided to withdraw its troops the men came home to a somewhat startling display of affection. Instead of being hailed as heroes, as veterans of the previous wars were, most soldiers made it home only to be harassed by anti-war protesters. It was now very apparent that the liberal consensus had become unraveled.

The class free principles of the liberal consensus had long since been forgotten in the draft. The American working class ultimately shouldered the burden of what was known by the soldiers as “the war for nothing”. The anti-communism fervor of the liberal consensus was no longer present in the soldiers or back home in the U.S. It has now become evident that the values and promises of the liberal consensus neither motivated nor even applied to the working class soldiers of Vietnam. When one takes a further look into the experiences of the soldiers at home and abroad it becomes very clear that, while the liberal consensus was the shared system of views at the time that, the argument presented by Hodgson did not apply to the combat soldiers of the Vietnam War.