First of two parts
By CONNIE ZEIGLER / Contributing editor
For the decade from 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson put the first American troops on the ground in Vietnam, to 1975 when President Gerald R. Ford withdrew them, Americans protested the Vietnam War.
By the end of the decade of war, millions had participated in the anti-war movement at the nation’s capital, state capitals, universities and elsewhere. But in Indianapolis, anti-war activism was met with a meh for many years. Protests were small or nonexistent and stayed that way, with a few notable exceptions, to the end of the war.
One of the first large protests in the nation was in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 1965. More than 20,000 people were reported to have participated, according to an Associated Press story that appeared in The Indianapolis Star on April 18, 1965. In Indianapolis on that day no local anti-war activities were reported in the city newspapers.
Two years of war later, in 1967, The Indianapolis News reported that Associated Press members voted the Vietnam War and the anti-war protests the top stories of the year. Protests were being held across the nation in 1967. But no significant anti-war actions were reported in Indianapolis that year.
One possible reason for the lack of reported protests was that the city’s two major newspapers, The Indianapolis News and The Indianapolis Star, were both owned by Eugene C. Pulliam. Pulliam is noted in the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis entry on the Vietnam War as “one of the city’s most vocal hawks” and in 1967 the Student Committee for Victory in Vietnam honored The Star’s editor, Jameson G. Campaigne, with a chairmanship in their pro-war movement for his support of the war.
Pulliam and Campaigne could have simply put the kibosh on any reports about local anti-war activity, and without the competing Indianapolis Times, which ceased publication in 1965, only one other major print media outlet – the Black-owned newspaper the Indianapolis Recorder – was reporting local news. The Recorder also did not report any local protests in the early years of the war, though, strongly suggesting that news of antiwar activity was not being suppressed, but rather, that Indianapolis was basically a no-show on the war protest front.
When in 1969, a half-million people reportedly showed up in Washington, D.C., to express their outrage over the draft and the war, some Indianapolis residents emerged from their dormancy toward the anti-war movement, and began to make news for their involvement protesting.
The Indianapolis Draft Project was a loosely organized anti-draft/anti-war group led by Donald Steed and headquartered at 222 E. 16th Street (now a parking lot). The project began to push a small local movement into the news. On Jan. 19, The Star reported that “a handful of Arsenal Technical High School students handed out anti-draft leaflets” produced by the Indianapolis Draft Project. The leaflets included 13 ways to try to avoid the draft, including refusing to register, “balking at induction,” and fleeing to Canada.
So upsetting to the status quo was this minor act that The Star contacted U. S. Attorney Kevin S. Applegate to ask if it violated the law. Applegate said no, but the school newspaper, the Arsenal Cannon, condemned the students for showing “poor taste, a lack of responsibility concerning their high positions, and a disregard for authority.”
In March, a group of about 50 students in city schools began publishing the Free Press, an anti-war, anti-Nixon vehicle supported by both Ronald W. Haldeman, publisher of An Indiana Liberal, “an underground newspaper,” and the Indianapolis Draft project, according to The Indianapolis Star in a March 30 article. Haldeman would go on to establish the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center with his wife, Jane, in the 1980s.
The Free Press’s editor (unnamed in the Star article), was expelled from school over the fourth issue’s sketch of a nude Richard Nixon. The Star also noted that law enforcement was keeping an eye on the publication and its staff.
On July 4, 1969, 20 members of the Indianapolis Draft Project gathered on the steps of the Federal Building and read the name of each U.S. fatality in the war, according to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, as a testimony to “all the men of many nations who have had their lives taken from them in the Vietnam conflict.” By that year, the count of those from the U.S. killed in the war was 34,000, including more than 100 from Marion County.
Connie Zeigler holds a master’s degree in history. She enjoys digging up a surprising, forgotten story and sharing her pirate’s booty with Urban Times readers.
