
The story of the 1968 “Fuck the Draft” poster - smollett
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_never_before_told_story_of_the_man_in_the_fuck_the_draft_poster
======
losteverything
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
> Google is my personal librarian

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

~~~
losteverything
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).

~~~
ams6110
In those days you actually learned the preamble to the Constitution in school.
I still remember it 35 years later.

~~~
daodedickinson
It's required in every classroom in AZ.

~~~
eat_veggies
I think it's part of the common core curriculum so it's likely required in
every public school in America now.

------
smollett
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...](http://dangerousminds.net/comments/fuck_the_draft_the_amazing_story_of_kiyoshi_kuromiya_creator_of_the_iconic)

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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/28/us/kiyoshi-
kuromiya-57-fighter-for-the-rights-of-aids-patients.html)

~~~
616c
Similar diversion: one of John Lithgow's childhood babysitters was Coretta
Scott King. That shocked me.

[https://reddit.com/comments/73fbct](https://reddit.com/comments/73fbct)

------
criddell
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.

~~~
fotbr
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.

~~~
criddell
> 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.

~~~
Feniks
Keep in mind the war was enacted by a democratically elected government.
There's no diminished responsibility.

Very few folks decided to return their passports and emigrate. People liked to
blame the Army but everything that happened was in the name of the American
people and by their leave.

"I didn't know" and "I thought it was a bakery" are poor excuses.

~~~
criddell
> the war was enacted by a democratically elected government

If Burns' documentary is correct, the government and military lied about
pretty much all aspects of the war. If that wasn't the case, I would agree
that the American people are to blame.

> Very few folks decided to return their passports and emigrate.

Thank goodness for that. The people that fought the most against the war may
very well be the best Americans.

In the first Gulf War when we (the US) were bombing Iraq to take out the
supposed weapons of mass destruction, I supported the action. I remember
arguing with my sister that even though it might be wrong for the US to invade
another country, removing Hussein's offensive capabilities was too important.
The ends will justify the means! Boy, was I wrong. Again though, it was lying
by the government, failures of the press, and failures of officials I trusted
(esp. Colin Powell) that was the basis of my support.

------
rmason
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC5)

~~~
gedy
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?"_

~~~
rmason
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.

~~~
dang
He lived with them for a bit too.

------
javiramos
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/](http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/)

~~~
switchbak
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.

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

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

~~~
vkou
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
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.

------
guelo
> 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.

------
vanderZwan
> 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.

------
throw2016
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
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.

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

[https://archive.is/NhCGv](https://archive.is/NhCGv)

------
citizenkeen
Rather appropriate for today.

------
AnimalMuppet
A _hippie_ burning his draft card? _That 's_ a hippie?

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

~~~
dang
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-...](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-of-
love-sixties), posted to zero effect by yours truly in 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123525](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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.

~~~
dang
The photo was taken fifty years ago tomorrow (!), at the event covered here:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/10/19...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/10/19/the-
day-anti-vietnam-war-protesters-tried-to-levitate-the-pentagon). Check out the
photos—everyone looks like the poster guy. More here:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=October+21,+1967+march+penta...](https://www.google.com/search?q=October+21,+1967+march+pentagon&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM943Mi4DXAhVKjlQKHaAcBs0Q_AUICigB&biw=1372&bih=949)

It's hard to fathom that what is now the normal-young-person look used to be
so radical. Or that it was forged in a handful of years, an astonishingly
short time. That's another thing about the photo collection I mentioned: to
our eye, the kids all look normal. Deviant social experiment is the last thing
that comes to mind.

