Lafayette Journal & Courier

War protests nothing new to United States

By DAN SHAW
April 13, 2007

Protests have almost always accompanied wars in the history of the United States, say a couple of local academics.

So there's nothing unusual about the public opposition expressed by Cindy Sheehan and her followers to the war in Iraq, said Yvonne Pitts, an assistant professor of history at Wabash College. Sheehan, whose son was killed while serving in Iraq, spoke at Purdue University on Thursday.

"Going to the public and making known her grievances is drawing on a long history of vocal public protests and citizen speech," Pitts said. "You see this back to the Revolutionary War."

Sheehan drew national attention when she camped outside President Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas, for nearly five weeks in 2005. She asked to speak to the president but was not granted an audience.

Darren Dochuk, an assistant professor of history at Purdue, said Sheehan's protest was no more audacious than many others that have occurred in American history. For instance, a group of women once chained themselves to the fence of the White House to show opposition to the United States' fighting in World War I, he said.

"It's part of the media age of the 20th century," he said. "And it has proved effective."

World War I offers a good comparison to the current war, Dochuk said. As now, many Americans in the 1910s believed the United States had no interest in fighting a war overseas.

"Women and particularly mothers were taking the lead in voicing opposition to American involvement," he said. "After the war started, many ended up supporting the war movement, but there was still a vocal minority that opposed the war."

Pitts said that World War I also offers good examples of how the limits of free speech are often tested during wars. One famous case -- Schenck v. the United States -- arose when Charles Schenck, an avowed socialist, circulated a flier that encouraged men to resist the draft. He was arrested and found guilty of conspiracy under the Espionage Act of 1917, a ruling the Supreme Court eventually upheld.

Pitts said the outcome is evidence that the authorities took Schenck's protest seriously.

"It shows the effectiveness of speaking against wars and conflicts," she said.

Dochuck said the protests didn't even disappear during World War II, even though many more people supported America's entrance into that conflict.

"After Pearl Harbor, it was a clear-cut war of defense," he said. "But even in that context, there was always a group middle-class, conservative women who were isolationists."