A Young People's History of the United States

For decades before the conflict known as “The Vietnam War” began in earnest, the US peripherally involved itself in colonial warfare there. The nation of Vietnam had a long history of resisting and ousting both Asian and European colonizers, and as Vietnamese revolutionaries battled the French in the 1940s, the US “gave a billion dollars in military aid, along with hundreds of thousands of weapons, to the French to use in Vietnam” (299). The US was interested in the small country because the people there preferred communist leadership, specifically Ho Chi Minh and the communist movement he led in Vietnam, called the Vietminh.

After the French relinquished colonial control of Vietnam in 1954, the US began intervening politically, installing a leader in South Vietnam (as the country had been partitioned and the Vietminh controlled the North). The US then orchestrated a coup in South Vietnam. In 1964, the US launched its first overt military attacks, although the impetus for war was contrived by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The US’s expressed motive for the war was the Cold War commitment to stop the global spread of communism. What ensued was a horrible war that involved fighting communists in both North and South Vietnam. A disorganized draft spurred a powerful anti-war movement at home, and the US bombed sites and raided villages in Vietnam as well as Laos and Cambodia, killing and disfiguring thousands of civilians. The war ended in defeat for the US and victory for the Vietminh. Ho Chi Minh united the country in 1975.

The Vietnam War was incredibly unpopular in the US for several reasons. Many Americans “were horrified by its cruelty,” especially as reports of mass pillaging and sexual violence reached US media outlets. In addition, tens of thousands of US soldiers died, many who were drafted and sent overseas with little to no training through a program that used military propaganda to dehumanize the Vietnamese. The rampant protests against the war often included veteran activists who had returned from duty (many of whom were injured). Americans distrusted and disapproved of the government—both Johnson’s government and the administration of his successor, Richard Nixon, who became involved in a political scandal to curtail exposure of US wrongdoing in the war effort. Anti-war sentiment intersected with the other spheres of activism at the time. Black commentators articulated the incongruence of fighting for a country that treated their community with the same hostility and dehumanization that it treated the Vietnamese. As the anti-war movement grew, “Famous voices and ordinary voices were raised against” it (309). In the US, the war fueled an era of cultural change, public criticism, and political engagement.

Zinn gives more background on the cultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. The Black freedom struggle was one of the era’s most radical and visible movements, but Zinn focuses on two additional major movements and references others.

The first movement he examines is the movement for gender equality, commonly known as Women’s Liberation or second-wave feminism. Long relegated to the home to care for children and keep house (at least in popular culture and in articulated social values), women fought their oppression in every area of society—including in other cultural movements for change, where activist men tended to assume leadership roles and ask women to do behind-the-scenes work. Demonstrators rejected beauty standards and pushed for an Equal Rights Amendment “to ensure full equality of the sexes” (321). It never passed. Poor women “wanted to eliminate hunger, suffering, and inequality right away” (322) and pushed radical demands like pay for housekeeping and raising children. Feminists were most concerned with who tended to oppress women—not just the government but the men in their households. Women’s Liberation required completely new home dynamics.

The other example Zinn highlights is the American Indian Movement for Native American rights. Like other ethnic minorities, Native people wanted equality in different areas of society, but Native communities had concerns—namely, about their rights to sovereignty and the observation of treaty promises that the US government made and broke generations earlier. Native people organized large-scale demonstrations, including armed occupations of Alcatraz Island in California’s San Francisco Bay and of the small town of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. They protested the continuing abuses they had faced since the end of the “Indian Wars” in the 19th century, which involved being forced onto designated reservations and into poverty. Some protests addressed broken treaties—legally binding documents that the US government had created and failed to uphold. Within those ignored documents were promises of land and resource rights that Native people hoped to reclaim. In addition, the American Indian Movement fueled a resurgence in cultural knowledge and practice. Non-Native people began seeing and sympathizing with Native people.

Zinn touches on other movements (without exploring them in depth), including those for Gay Liberation, disabled people’s rights, and the environmental protection. These often intersected, given that their advocates and aims overlapped, all calling for an end to the standing power structure. These movements made breakthroughs, although the national government did little to truly follow through on them as major societal demands.

This short chapter reiterates the loss of faith in the American political system among citizens in the 1960s and early 1970s. Polls confirmed that, increasingly, fewer Americans trusted the government or big businesses. As a 1975 poll indicated, “Only 13 percent of people said that they had confidence in the president and Congress” (345).

Much of the new attitude toward the system arose from issues related to the Vietnam War and the larger Cold War atmosphere of foreign meddling and heightened national security measures. Americans learned that the government had lied about military tactics and covered up atrocities and war crimes. President Nixon’s administration, as well as the FBI and CIA, broke laws, and investigation verified reports of their crimes. In 1974, Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment and a Senate trial. He had committed multiple crimes related to his re-election, including his involvement in the Watergate scandal, in which burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters. The book lists several of Nixon’s other crimes, such as forgery, misinformation campaigns, tax fraud, and illegal breaches of privacy. The CIA’s involvement in foreign governments and economies also became known—Zinn notes an assassination plot in Cuba and efforts to disrupt democracy in Chile. The FBI had targeted left-wing organizations, including the Black Panthers, which supported Black liberation, and “sent forged letters, […] opened mail illegally, […] performed more than ninety burglaries in just six years” (344), and likely played a role in murdering Black activist Fred Hampton.

As the election year 1976 loomed, the economy was languishing, unemployment was rising, and “the Establishment worried about the public’s faith in the system” (345). The previous decade had exposed the types of secret, shameful government operations that had long taken place. It was “a low time” (341) for the government’s image—but this didn’t mean that genuine power had transferred to the people.