As the war grew more unpopular, President Johnson tried to end it by winning it. Just as generals described having to destroy villages in order to pacify them, Johnson would bring the end of the war by escalating it. In some way that only his administration understood, more would bring less. In July of 1965 he raised the number of men to be drafted each month to 35,000, more than doubling the already high previous number of 17,000.1 In a move designed to hamper criticism of his method of conducting war he pushed Congress into passing a law criminalizing the burning of draft cards.2 Rather than calming the movement, these moves drove more young people into the streets. The National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam immediately broke the law by holding a mass public draft card burning, at which Phil Ochs played.
The rise in the draft numbers created a dramatic rise in the number of songs about avoiding the draft. Phil Ochs wrote and recorded his classic, “Draft Dodger Rag,” while the Flying Burrito Brothers wrote in “My Uncle” about heading for the nearest foreign border after receiving a draft notice. The Byrds released “Draft Morning,” which used martial drumming, distorted guitars, and overdubbed sounds of war as a motif to describe the terror in a young man’s heart when faced with conscription. Tom Paxton contributed “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation,” a song about the difference between Johnson’s words and his actions. In it, a young draftee sits in a rice paddy in Vietnam remembering the time just a few months before when he’d been in the States and feeling secure in Johnson’s declaration that he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam.
The most masterful and powerful of the anti-draft songs, though, proved that humor is one of the strongest weapons that can be brought to bear. Arlo Guthrie’s eighteen minute “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” describes the day Arlo and a friend went to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their mutual friends, Ray and Alice. Arlo and his friend decide to take the family’s accumulated trash to the dump but when they discover the dump is closed, they drop the trash into a gully and return to Alice’s, where they are promptly arrested by Officer Obie for littering and taken to court, where a blind judge fines the pair and orders them to clean up the trash. The scene then changes to the draft board at Whitehall Street in New York City after Arlo receives his draft notice. He is able to beat the draft because of his police record for littering and disturbing the peace. The song has become a classic and, although it was originally recorded in 1966, it still reaches a nationwide audience by being played on the radio, especially on NPR and the alternative stations of Pacifica Radio, every Thanksgiving.3 In 2016 Guthrie did a year-long national tour celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. It is a song that has lasted far longer then the war it describes. “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” serves as evidence that art outlasts destruction.
At this point, the transition from acoustic to electric music accelerated. Disillusionment, a sense of nothingness, and helplessness had all led to attempts to create a prefigurative society. And, as folk music is a force that continues to reflect the lives of the people, it became what those lives had become: loud, forceful, direct and chaotic, young, wild, sometimes stupid, sometimes raucous. It became what was played on the radio as rock & roll. Still, it was folk music. Almost everyone who played what was becoming known as folk-rock came from folk backgrounds. They had all been coffeehouse acoustic veterans who, just as Muddy Waters had back in the forties, went electric in order to be heard by their audiences.
Even if the delivery of the music was more technologically sophisticated than it had been just a few years earlier, its purpose was the same. As Mary Travers said, “Folk music has always contained a concern for the human condition. And since it brings people into it from different points of view, that can help illuminate what a consensus might be to important issues.”4 If that music was electric, as Peter, Paul and Mary’s later music quietly was, then it could work on several additional levels that were important to the young radicals. Still, electric or acoustic, it was folk music. It became folk rock when the media decided a new term was needed to describe the amplified folk music of the Byrds.
When the Byrds hit the top of the charts with their amplified cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Dylan himself began releasing albums recorded with electric instruments, folk-rock exploded commercially and artistically. What common denominators existed in songs that qualified them as folk-rock instead of just rock? Folk rock was, of course, drawn from folk sources. The Byrds covered Dylan’s material and wrote their own, but they also recorded electric versions of traditional songs. In the terminology of musicians, guitars were played “clean,” which meant musicians played without much distortion or the use of effects pedals and the vocals generally used three- and four-part harmonies. Often acoustic guitars were strummed in the mix, providing the rhythm while electric guitars took the lead. The music was clean, clear, often idealistic, and designed to get people to move politically as well as socially. It combined the best qualities of both worlds: the messages of folk music and the energy of rock. Today, because it draws from many influences and many genres, this music is called Americana.5 It was the music of rebellion, just as rock was, but of unified rebellion, a prefigurative music that claimed its listeners had something to say that the guardians of the old postfigurative culture should listen to.
Yet even as the music and the movement advocated peace, the demonstrations often turned violent. The turning point was June 23, 1967, when Lyndon Johnson went to Los Angeles for a fundraiser and was greeted by a protest led by the Progressive Labor Party and SDS. Fifty-one protesters were arrested, but that did not end things. Without warning and without provocation, the Los Angeles Police Department waded into the crowd and began beating the protestors for no discernible reason. The American Civil Liberties Union reported, “Unresisting demonstrators were beaten—some in front of literally thousands of witnesses—without even the pretext of and attempt to make an arrest.”6
By 1967 some 40,000 men a month were being called for the draft. A national Stop the Draft week was called by an ad hoc group called The Resistance. It took place in thirty American cities, with simultaneous demonstrations happening in which demonstrators blocked the entrances to induction centers, urging young draftees to refuse to go inside and to join them on the line. In Oakland, California, Joan Baez sang for the protestors and the draftees and then joined the protestors who sat blocking the doors, forcing the inductees to climb over them to enter the building. When the police arrived to break it up, Baez was, along with the other demonstrators, arrested. She spent ten days in jail.7
By this time, the majority of Americans had turned against the war. Polling revealed that most of them thought the nation’s involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. This was bad news for the government, which reacted by increasing their efforts to win both the war and the hearts and minds of those who opposed it. Neither of those goals was ever attained. At first a movement consisting of a few Old Left intellectuals and then by New Left students, the Vietnam opposition grew quickly to include the clergy, educators from preschool teachers to university professors, young mothers, artists and performers, and journalists. Indeed, a prefigurative culture bloomed; the young leaders of the anti-war movements taught the adults that the war was morally, politically and practically wrong.
The unfair draft system was probably the major reason young men opposed the war. College and university students were entitled to deferments and could escape the draft as long as they remained in school, which meant a period of incredible growth for colleges and graduate schools. (This situation also led to the college reform movement, as we shall see later.) Given the ease with which privileged people could escape the draft through deferments, it is easy to see that someone had to take their places—and those people turned out to be the poor and the minorities. Individual local draft boards had the authority to pick and choose their draftees from the general population of registered young men. This fact, in practice, meant that a larger percentage of African-American men would be called.
In 1967 there were 29 percent of black men eligible for the draft as opposed to 63 percent of white men, but 69 percent of black men were called and only 31 percent of the eligible white men.8 As the perception of the draft became more and more unfair, more people turned against it and acted in opposition to it. In October of 1967 resisters turned in their draft cards across the country; more than one thousand cards were returned to the Justice Department. Attorney General Ramsey Clark chose to prosecute only the ringleaders, Dr. Spock and William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain of Yale University. The strategy of taking only the organizers to court, though, did not last. Within just a couple of years, one-fourth of all court cases in federal courts were draft related. Over 200,000 young men were accused of draft dodging and 25,000 of them were prosecuted.9 Among the ones sent to prison was Joan Baez’s husband, David Harris.