The American South and the Vietnam War

In March 1968 Americans watched hours of grueling debate over the American role in the Vietnam War, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified in front of Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For many the televised confrontation symbolized the familiar narrative of Cold War containment, escalation, and eventual disillusionment, but for Joseph A. Fry, the author of The American South and the Vietnam War, the hearings on President Lyndon B. Johnson's and Gen. William Westmoreland's war reflected the clash of prominent southerners who viewed the conflict through a “distinctly regional lens” (p. 1). Using regionalism to place the South at the center of the narrative, Fry argues that southern perceptions of patriotism, honor, dissent, and the Cold War, combined with crucial congressional support for expanding and continuing the war, shaped much of the divisive American experience in Vietnam. Southern political figures such as the U.S. senators Fulbright, Al Gore, John C. Stennis, and Richard Russell Jr. dominate Fry's account of a nation that embraced and eventually reconsidered Cold War assumptions in Southeast Asia. Building on a long southern tradition of favoring a unilateral, interventionist, and anticommunist foreign policy, southern politicians and their constituents were the most consistent supporters of the war, regardless of who occupied the White House, from the 1950s through the fall of Saigon. The region provided a disproportionate number of American soldiers and military facilities, and the “Dixie-Pentagon alliance” meant that economic considerations were always part of foreign policy debates in the South (p. 69). Fry's comprehensive analysis of southern political debate, public opinion, social activism, and the often-poignant experiences of southern individuals and their families provides ample evidence that the nation's most belligerent region debated and agonized over the war and emerged, relative to the rest of the country, still deeply committed to older ideals of American exceptionalism

Ancient history · Archaeology · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Political science · Sociology · Vietnam War · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · History · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies