This snapshot was gathered in conjunction with the Museum on Main Street program at the Smithsonian Institution and its "Stories from Main Street" initiative. The project is intended to capture Americans' impressions and stories about their small-town and rural neighborhoods, waterways, personal memories, cultural traditions, work histories, and thoughts about American democracy. This story is from a group of narratives inspired by the Smithsonian traveling exhibition, "Voices and Votes: Democracy in America."
Jim Metzger (00:00): I'm Jim Metzger, and I am an economist and currently on the board of the Arkansas Humanities Council. I've lived in Little Rock for more than 30 years now. Moved here from Arizona. And before that, spent a lot of time in the Midwest and on the East Coast. So I moved around a little bit.
(00:17): During that time when I was a student in northern Indiana, it was the time of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. And what I've thought about many times relative to being a citizen in the United States and voicing my opinion about things, political and cultural and social, and of course, voting. Once you go through the experience I'm going to talk about today, you are a confirmed voter for the rest of your life because you can't miss one opportunity to have that voice heard.
(00:48): But I noticed less targeted protest around key issues like the Vietnam War currently in our society. And I've thought about it and wondered why. My experience was somehow maybe different than the experience that young people are having today. I noticed, of course, protests that occurred, for example, right after the recent election in many cities across the country. People marched one day.
(01:19): But when the Vietnam War was going on in the late 1960s and early 70s, I mean, student protest was ongoing at many, many campuses throughout the country. My campus at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana was just one of many where we had opportunities to voice our concern and, quite frankly, our opposition to what was going on in Southeast Asia.
(01:46): The reason I'm talking about that today or now is that a particular episode occurred just about 50 years ago to the day of when we're doing this interview, and this was a situation where recruiters had come to campus, these were recruiters for the CIA, which of course, is a government agency, very involved in intelligence gathering in Southeast Asia to support the war. And the Dow Chemical Company, which at that time was the main manufacturer of a chemical called napalm, which was used for widespread aerial bombing in Southeast Asia and was causing a lot of collateral damage they call it these days, a lot of civilians being killed and really women and children dying in a horrible fashion. It was just something that many of us couldn't countenance.
(02:37): So in this particular episode, we thought these people are recruiting on campus, we're going to stop them from doing that. Okay, this was our protest. Well, some of us hadn't taken seriously the fact that the university president at that time, Father Theodore Hesburgh, had issued a very careful statement about how we're only going to allow certain kinds of protests to occur on the campus.
(03:00): Other campuses had had some fairly, I don't know if I would necessarily call them violent, but disruptive of demonstrations and protests, furniture being broken and things being thrown out windows, et cetera, offices being taken over. Okay, I don't think anybody was actually killed in those episodes, but you could I guess say that was a violent form of demonstration.
Asset ID: 2023.02.07.b
Find a complete transcript at www.museumonmainstreet.org
