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Ironies of Protest: Interpreting the American Anti-Vietnam War Movement

Author: Charles Chatfield

In: Grünewald, Guido ; Van den Dungen, Peter , Twentieth-century peace movements: Successes and failures Lewiston NY, Edwin Mellen Press, , 1995, pp. 198-208

Argues radical left never had a cohesive centre and that when movement most confrontational, its liberal wing was working most effectively with the political system. Suggests the movement became associated with social and cultural iconoclasm, which appeal to sections of middle classes, but that the broader public eventually opposed both the war and the antiwar protest, because ‘both seemed to threaten the established social order’.