When I used to teach a course on the history of 1960s at my old job, I always asked students how many of them believed that anti-war protesters had spat upon Vietnam veterans when the latter returned home from tours of duty. The point was to introduce the idea that politics underlies collective memory and mythology.
Every time I did this, at least 75 of the 100 or so people taking the class would raise their hands, indicating that they had heard about activists spitting on vets. Then I would talk to them about Jerry Lembcke’s work, noting that Lembcke, a sociologist, had done extensive research and found that there’s no — as in zero — actual evidence supporting the spitting stories. I’d then talk to them about why and how this myth has nevertheless endured, what, in other words, nourishes a lie.
And, finally, I’d ask how many of them were ready to believe Lembcke. To their credit, my students were always honest with me; none of them tried to curry favor. Only a very few, 6 or 7, would allow that Lembcke’s research sounded convincing. After pulling my head out of the oven — I was, then as now, teaching home economics — I’d wonder why I couldn’t deflate such a an enduring canard, usually deciding that a single lecture from a history professor can’t stand up to hundreds of repetitions of a compelling story and a few frames in a Sly Stallone film.
Anyway, while tooling around on Tenured Radical’s site earlier today, I saw that she linked to this article, in which Lembcke updates his research, connecting it to the current climate of hyper-patriotism. Here’s a short excerpt from the short piece:
Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus. Born out of accusations made by the Nixon administration, they were enlivened in popular culture (recall Rambo saying he was spat on by those maggots at the airport) and enhanced in the imaginations of Vietnam-generation men — some veterans, some not. The stories besmirch the reputation of the anti-war movement and help construct an alibi for why we lost the war: had it not been for the betrayal by liberals in Washington and radicals in the street, we could have defeated the Vietnamese. The stories also erase from public memory the image, discomforting to some Americans, of Vietnam veterans who helped end the carnage they had been part of.
Tenured Radical also has a challenging post up about “supporting the troops.” I’m still deciding what I think about that piece, its specifics and broad contours. But it was nice to be reminded of Lembcke’s work and to see that he’s still at it. I wonder if he has more success convincing people than I did. Probably. Though, the fact that he’s still writing about this issue suggests otherwise, that the myth lives.
The Edge of the American West 
46 comments
February 14, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Vance Maverick
Googling “spitting veterans”, the first thing one finds is this editorial, which says in effect, “The story is false, but it expresses the truth.” Then a couple of iterations of Lembcke’s thesis, and then this story of a veteran spitting on Jane Fonda. There’s some powerful narrative magic going on here.
February 14, 2008 at 5:36 pm
urbino
I think you answered your question before you asked it, Ari. Your students aren’t convinced by Lembcke’s actual data because the trope has long-since attained status as Myth. Its truth, in the public mind, doesn’t depend on its facticity. (The editorial Vance quoted expresses this.)
I’m surprised you were surprised you couldn’t, by presentation of data, convince your students it was false.
February 14, 2008 at 5:45 pm
PorJ
Sorry, Ari, but you’re a little late to this particular game. Jack Shafer, Slate.com’s Editor at Large, has been following the Spat-on-Veteran story for about seven years. His conclusions are found here and here. Check them out for yourself: at least two contemporaneous accounts of Vietnam Veterans being spat on upon return to the USA.
Feel free to check out the work of Jim Lindgren (yes, that Jim Lindgren – the guy who spoiled Michael Bellesiles career) on this question as well-
A serious historian – I believe – is one willing to weigh the evidence before them fairly.
In this case, I personally believe (based on the above and other evidence) that soldiers were indeed spat upon, and that a very small number of incidents were later exaggerated for political effect. This isn’t what Lembke argues; he calls the stories “bogus.”
In fact, the trap we fall into is the either-or problem; they were either spat or not, and thus its either an urban legend or not. In fact, it can be both: some were spat on, but myths did emerge as well. Not mutually exclusive.
What say you, Ari? And if you are willing to look a bit more critically at Lembke’s thesis, what are you going to say to those students now?
February 14, 2008 at 6:11 pm
PorJ
Here’s Lembke’s response to Lindgren. Are you convinced? Remember: Lembke’s a Sociologist – and a Vietnam Veteran with an admitted political position on this question. Lindgren is a Law Professor. Many of us are historians. Who’s to judge? And how?
February 14, 2008 at 6:16 pm
urbino
Me. By fiat.
February 14, 2008 at 6:29 pm
CharleyCarp
Next time, ask them how many believe that some hippie got the shit beat out of him. Guess what — the balance of disrespect, incivility, and violence runs decisively the other way. can I prove it? No. But we all know the truth of it . . .
February 14, 2008 at 6:32 pm
New Kid on the Hallway
Lembcke’s response to Lindgren’s arguments above is interesting, though – it suggests that Lembcke is making a significant distinction between *reports* of spitting (happening to other people) circulating in the late 60s/early 70s, and actual documented incidents of spitting (“I was spat upon”), arguing that the latter is what doesn’t show up until later. I suppose one might disagree that the distinction is important, but Lembcke does seem to be drawing finer distinctions between accounts of conflicts with soldiers than Lindgren does (for instance, Lindren offers the story of two sailors who get beat up and spit on at a high-school football game without noting that the account seems to have nothing to do with the Vietnam war/anti-war sentiment, and Lembcke categorizes that as part of a different trope about conflict with soldiers). I suspect a legal scholar and a sociologist are likely to analyze the language of such accounts rather differently.
February 14, 2008 at 6:33 pm
New Kid on the Hallway
(Okay, PorJ kind of just said that – so I type slow…)
February 14, 2008 at 7:21 pm
PorJ
Charley Carp: Last I checked, they don’t award Ph.D.s for things we can’t prove but “all know the truth of.” Facts can be stubborn.
NKotH: Did you click on the first or second link? On December 27, 1971, Delmar Picket Jr. told Morton Dean that he had been spat on by two people walking through the airport when he came back from Vietnam. It aired on the “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite, and something in the neighborhood of 20+ million viewers would have seen it (you can see it to – Slate.com posted it at that link). Lembke has not addressed this example. And you can’t really read his response without reading Lindgren first – for instance: Lindgren offers two Pulitzer-prize winners (Neil Shehan and Carl Bernstein) writing articles in which they witnessed either spitting or troops getting spat on in preparation for what might happen to them. Lembke’s response: one article could be an FBI plant, and in the other case, I don’t remember hearing about it this when I went through basic training so I doubt it happened. That just doesn’t cut it for me, and it actually hurts his overall argument. In fact, if you read Lindgren first, then Lembke’s response, I think its obvious why Lindgren did not feel the need to respond further.
In general, Lembke kills his own arguments when he argues: 1. I didn’t say the incidents did not occur (he did), and 2. I stand by my claim that the first-person reports start showing up around 1980 (they did not – see Picket example, and Minarik example that Lembke concedes “could be true,” and Pomona college example, etc.), and 3. Women don’t spit (plenty of evidence from Lindgren to conclude otherwise).
February 14, 2008 at 7:26 pm
SEK
Its truth, in the public mind, doesn’t depend on its facticity.
You know, I just spent the afternoon convincing undergraduates that this is a viable mode of exposition (vis-a-vis Herr’s Dispatches and Full Metal Jacket). Now I just don’t know …
February 14, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Walt
PorJ, are you seriously arguing in response to CharleyCarp that there was no anti-hippie violence?
February 14, 2008 at 7:45 pm
New Kid on the Hallway
Yeah, I looked at both links. I’m not saying that Lembcke’s responses are necessarily going to convince Lindgren/others, but I still think that Lembcke and Lindgren are trying to do two slightly different things. For instance, I think that Lembcke would argue that changes in the way that first-person accounts/accounts of spitting get framed are significant even if there were isolated incidents in the early 70s. Even if Lembcke needs to dial back on saying that such incidents never happened, I don’t think that negates the idea that vet-spitting has become a myth. (Also, my understanding of Lembcke’s work is that he’s never said he can prove that the spitting incidents never happened.)
I agree that Lembcke’s “I was in basic training and never heard of this happening” about the spit-training is kind of bogus, but I wish Lindgren had given a little more info about some of the cases he finds – he tends to summarize/paraphrase, and I think Lembcke’s concerned with finer distinctions in the language than Lindgren is, and perhaps has different ideas/criteria for documentation (for instance, Lembcke’s point about a 2007 account of a vet getting spit on – he called the reporter and asked if the reporter had seen it personally, and the reporter said his(?) assistant had seen it, and Lembcke called the assistant who’s never confirmed the story. To Lindgren, that’s an example of a vet-spitting account, but to Lembcke, it’s not confirmed).
February 14, 2008 at 8:10 pm
rootlesscosmo
Say the evidence for the spitting isn’t zero, as Lembcke originally asserted; say it’s Delmar PIcket’s personal experience, and the eyewitness accounts by Neil Sheehan and Carl Bernstein (though I’m not sure what the spit-training would prove, except that the people doing the training wanted to keep the spitting story alive.)
But was this (as Stallone’s script and many other accounts claim) typical of how antiwar civilians treated service members? Is that experience–which by all accounts seems to have been very rare–somehow closer to the truth than the GI coffeehouse movement, the organized civilian assistance to GIs who wanted a way to resist, the antiwar slogan “Support the Troops, Bring Them Home”? A recent film, “Sir! No Sir!” uses contemporaneous footage to show, not that no GI ever got spat on, but that the organized antiwar movement, inside and outside the military, expressed support and solidarity for the troops, not hostility. The politics of the spitting stories–that the antiwar movement was anti-soldier–is what’s fundamentally false, even if a handful of spitting stories turn out to be true.
February 14, 2008 at 8:25 pm
ari
PorJ: Thanks for the links. I had no idea that Shafer had delved into this. So, in no particular order, let’s start with the Lindgren-Lembcke spat (I slay myself, I really do). My view is that Lembcke comes off looking careless and a bit small — though, on the substance of whether the spitting happened, I’m by no means convinced that he’s wrong. The Picket story strikes me as a classic example of how unreliable memory can be, even first-hand accounts. Not that we didn’t already know that.
In sum, were I to teach a 60s class again, the material you’ve provided would make the story I’d tell much more interesting. Rather than Lembcke’s open-and-shut case, I’d be able to talk to the students about yet another struggle over memory, another history front in the culture wars (paraphrasing Mike Wallace).
But these are just my initial thoughts. I’d like more time to consider what this all means and to talk to experts in the field.
February 14, 2008 at 8:36 pm
urbino
Now I just don’t know …
Do tell.
February 15, 2008 at 6:38 am
Marsfarmer
To me, the untruth or exaggerated rate of these incidents isn’t what’s really compelling. It’s the tenacity, or maybe fertility, of the meme. This fake or minimal phenomenon has nonetheless been able to nurture a whole tree of bigger, more complex myths.
Like hydroponics for ideas.
Jeff Nunberg did some good writing on this subject too.
February 15, 2008 at 6:52 am
PorJ
are you seriously arguing in response to CharleyCarp that there was no anti-hippie violence?
Nope. I’m arguing that facts are sticky things. I think its very likely that there was plenty of violence perpetrated against hippies by returning soldiers. I also think its very likely that some soldiers were spat upon. But I can’t prove a negative (what you are asking me to do) and I wouldn’t set myself up to prove a negative. (BTW: That’s exactly what Lembcke did with his book and his assertions. He put himself in position to be de-bunked by significantly over-stating his case)
Unlike Ari, I’m persuaded by Pickett. CBS News profiled the guy in Vietnam, and the Dean piece is a follow-up done shortly after his arrival. It is contemporaneous. Then Shafer interviews him 30+ years later and Shafer – who admits he believed Lembcke and had spent years trying to counter the myth of the spit-upon veteran – comes to the conclusion that Pickett’s story holds up. That’s enough for me, but not enough for Ari. Plus, you’ve got all the Lindgren cites.
But the larger context is being ignored here. Ari says the links I’ve provided make a much better story for his undergraduate history class. But, in essence, they destroy the entire premise of the exercise. Imagine Ari does the whole raise-your-hand-if-you-heard thing. Then a student raises his or her hand and says, “Excuse me, Professor, but have you seen these links? And Prof. Lembke’s response to them? Can you play the CBS News piece to the class so we can decide for ourselves whether we believe you and Lembke?”
That spells trouble – and the trouble comes entirely from Ari’s assertion of certainty and invocation of authority. When you claim that: “a sociologist, had done extensive research and found that there’s no — as in zero — actual evidence supporting the spitting stories” what you are stating is technically accurate (i.e.: Lembcke did the following work) but you are tying your own credibility to someone in a different field, somebody who used different methodologies and standards of veracity than historians usually accept. Somebody who also has an explicit and vested political interest in his findings. You are – in essence – replacing your students’ myth with one of your own, but the difference is *your* myth (to be clear: the myth that there “is zero evidence supporting the spitting stories”) carries the weight of your authority in the classroom.
I’m all for challenging the students and teaching them to be critical about what they perceive as historical reality. But there is a way to accomplish this without replacing one kind of (flawed) certainty with another.
If this were my class I would side with neither Lindgren nor Lembcke. I would explain that some contemporary accounts explain that a few soldiers were spat on, but there is very little evidence that it was more than a few. The importance of the story is not in its actuality – that it was in any way representative of the homecoming of most vets – but, rather, in the political exploitation that followed. And then I would tie it to other similar (historical) cases in which a speck of truth was inflated, distorted and manipulated for propaganda purposes (i.e.: The USS Maine, the Zimmerman Telegram, etc.). In this way, history is not simply about what happened to a particular ship or person, but the meaning attached later. There is much more certainty in discussing the political utility of these examples than their actual veracity, and I would make that clear to the students.
Finally (pardon the length) – I really enjoy this weblog – I find it stimulating, engaging and funny – but we’re remiss if we don’t acknowledge the echo chamber effect in here. I can’t be the only person who knew of the Lembcke controversy? Here’s a sociological phenomenon explaining the issue (and why peer review failed to catch Lembcke): homophily.
February 15, 2008 at 7:59 am
charlieford
Golly. You’ve got to be kidding. First, if we know anything about that thing called reality, we know that whatever you can imagine, no matter what it is, if it’s in the realm of possible human behavior, it’s occured somewhere. But one needs to be some kind of prize-winning moron indeed to think that finding a difficult to assess report of an isolated incident or two somehow seals the case. There’s all kinds of people out there: some are enraged, some mentally ill, and yes, some work for COINTELPRO. So what? When todays brownshirts start screaming that veterans were spat upon, they aren’t saying some one vet somewhere was spat on. They’re saying this was a widespread and common occurrence, and, what is more, that this is what America had come to back then (before they rescued us): airports full of foul-mouthed, filthy hippies, screaming and spitting upon the vets AND NO ONE DOING A THING ABOUT IT. That latter is critical–it’s not hippies they’re arguing about so much as the endemic degradation of society. But really, one has to be some kind of nimrod to think this was remotely possible or likely. Certainly it’s a sign that one must not have been there, or wasn’t paying attention. Hippies, first of all, were not distinguished by their aggressiveness or their fondness for stereotypical masculine activities, such as intimidation or violence. (Not all anti-war demonstrators were hippies, of course, but, apart from the Weathermen, most had sympathies with the hippie ethos.) Second, if you were living then, you’d know that these groups–hippies, soldiers–weren’t isolated categories: they were related by family, or one was your girlfriend’s brother, or was someone your older sister once dated, etc. The idea that hippies or even the mass of war protesters was fulminating with hate towards the soldiers is ludicrous. Their hate, when they had any, was for the people in power. Lastly, there WAS spitting. I saw it. A small gathering of students known to be anti-war attracted the attention of a bunch of young conservatives at my high-school one afternoon about 1970 or 1971. It was not a demonstration, just people standing around shooting the breeze. The young conservatives came over, confronted us, began screaming at us–this was no attempt to initiate dialogue–and soon were spitting on us repeatedly. It was a pretty psychotic scene, let me tell you. So, what’s it mean? Anything?
February 15, 2008 at 8:04 am
ari
PorJ: I hope you’ve understood that, in the face of the links you provide, I’m entirely persuaded to back away from anything like “certainty.” But, it should also be said, my original exercise in class was all about suggesting to students that certainty, when it comes to collective memory, is anything but. That’s the very nature of memory: it’s contingent, politicized, and rooted in culture.
February 15, 2008 at 8:06 am
ari
Also: thanks for the nice words about the blog. And for the less kind but very important words about the echo chamber.
February 15, 2008 at 9:59 am
grandmofftexan
are you seriously arguing in response to CharleyCarp that there was no anti-hippie violence?
I recall one instance of a Vietnam War protester in central Texas being thrown in jail while the other inmates were told that he was a child molester. So, the other inmates went about systematically gang-raping him.
But I can’t remember the guy’s name. Can’t forget his face, though.
The victim emphasized that this was common practice by the police at the time.
.
February 15, 2008 at 10:58 am
Daniel Buck
A true, first person story: I was spit on in the summer of 1960. I was working on a highway construction crew in northern Minnesota — we were repaving Highway 2 between Ball Club (yes, that’s the town’s name) and Cass Lake. It was my day off and I was hitchiking back from an afternoon fishing. A car slowed down as if to give me a lift and the kid riding in the shotgun seat spit at me. The car sped off.
Did he spit at me because I was was hitchiking, wore glasses, worked construction, or had a fishing rod? Or was it because he was a jerk?
Dan
February 15, 2008 at 11:00 am
Daniel Buck
The way the comment page aligns posters’ names is confusing. My post above begins with “A true, first person story.” Dan
February 15, 2008 at 11:07 am
ari
That’s how it appears on my screen, Dan. I use Safari, a version that’s probably at least a year old, to browse the web. I’m not sure if that reassures you or makes things worse.
Also: when I used to live in Oklahoma, I often went on long bike rides on country rodes. I’ve never gone in for spandex, so I used to wear baggy shorts and a t-shirt (I’m modest about my Washingtonian thighs). Regardless, people often threw things at me from cars: a full can of Coke (“thanks!”), a bag of pretzels “yummy!”), and a cherry slurpee (“sticky!”). It never occurred to me that they were trying to help out, either by sating my hunger or slaking my thirst. I just assumed that the world has its share of jerks. And riding a bike in Oklahoma passes for subversive behavior — for some people at least.
February 15, 2008 at 11:24 am
Daniel Buck
The Vietnam-vets-were-spit-on lament, especially as it ping-ponged around the media and then the Web, took on monsoon proportions. (Yes, a new low in mixed metaphors.) One got the image of vets darting furtively along the sidewalk, hunkered down under storm umbrellas.
That one or two vets might have been spat on, for whatever reason, is certainly plausible given that there were hundreds of thousands of vets interacting over the years with millions of civilians, some of whom were jerks and a few of whom were stark raving mad. But the idea that there was a spittle-driven campaign is an urban legend.
Dan
February 15, 2008 at 11:30 am
charlieford
Thank-you, Dan. We can never have too much sanity.
February 15, 2008 at 11:49 am
Sandie
Ari,
You’ve just reminded me why I stopped long-distance biking in OK. One day, my boyfriend (now husband) and I were riding, and somebody threw a cement block at us–nearly hit us, too! Between that and the wild redneck dogs, I stopped riding (except as a commuter). You’re right–riding a bike here is subversive behavior.
February 15, 2008 at 12:15 pm
PorJ
The truth is that nobody spat on Vietnam veterans and nobody is spitting on the soldiers today.
That is the “truth” as stated by Lembcke in the article linked to above. Now everyone here is backing away – “its plausible” or “it might have actually happened, but SO WHAT?”
What Daniel Buck says above can be summarized as “A few vets, most likely, got spat upon, but the spittle-driven campaign is an urban legend.” I agree 100%. But that’s not what Lembcke argues and the original post is first and foremost about Lembcke’s work (cited approvingly by Ari) and its relationship to history and collective memory.
If you are willing to concede that 1. Vets might have gotten spat upon and 2. There is contemporaneous, first-person evidence of this happening between 1967-1972, then you should not reference Lembcke to support your argument. He is UNEQUIVOCAL and absolute in his statements.
February 15, 2008 at 12:33 pm
charlieford
Obviously Lembcke isn’t meaning that to be taken in an utterly literal sense: in his book, he mentions a case where VVAW were spit upon during a parade. I think, PorJ, you’re mistaking the statement above for something framed according to a Russellian logical atomism mode. If I said, “nobody believes Dick Cheney anymore,” I would be obviously wrong, taken literally, but in a certain context it makes perfect sense. The issue is, which narrative is more accurate: the Reaganite nonsense that vets were beset by hordes of spitting hippies when they stepped off the plane, or Lembcke’s that they were not? All the rest of this about someone somewhere being spit upon by who knows who is just cuttlefish squirting ink.
February 15, 2008 at 6:59 pm
andrew
On country roads:
I read an interview a few years ago with a distance runner whose career lasted from the 1970s to the 1990s. Asked about the big changes during that time, one of the answers was: fewer people throw things at me when I’m running along roads.
On comment alignments:
I think the comment alignments are messed up in IE but not elsewhere. I generally comment from IE, because that’s the browser I keep logged in to wordpress, but I have to read on Firefox or else I won’t know whose comments I’m reading at any given time.
February 15, 2008 at 7:24 pm
charlieford
Comments all discombobulated in msn also.
February 15, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Remember the Maine « The Edge of the American West
[…] a very thoughtful comment below, PorJ raises the issue of the propaganda surrounding the Maine. Well, it just so happens that on […]
February 16, 2008 at 2:45 pm
charlieford
Reading some of Lindgren’s stuff, it appears we’re conflating several kinds of incidents here. When the “Vietnam-Veterans-Were-Spat-Upon” Myth Purveyors tell their tales, they are implying that the vets were being spat upon because of their association with the Vietnam War. The subtext is: “If you oppose this current war, you’re morally indistinguishable from the spitters.” But few of these stories establish that, if there were spitters, those spitters actually knew their victims were Vietnam vets, or that the spitting was because they were connected to Vietnam. Much of this may have been random taunting, or indistinguishable from civilian-military conflict of the sort that pre-dated Vietnam. Servicemen from different branches of the military often treat each other with great disrespect, insulting, fighting, and (I’ll bet) perhaps some spittle flies. PorJ gets himseld in an unfortunate logical tangle because he is unable to recognize these distinctions. Her says above, “If you are willing to concede that 1. Vets might have gotten spat upon . . .” and right away we have a problem. I’m willing to concede some vets had their cars hit by other drivers. I’m sure I can get Lembke to say “Nobody was ramming their automobiles into vets’ vehicles.” Does that mean Lembke’s wrong? (By the way, I grew up in Bucks County in the 1960s, where one of the incidents reported about sailors supposedly occured. I doubt any of the reform-school types circa 1967 had even heard of Vietnam, let alone cared. If they were spitting on sailors, it was because they were just goons.)
February 16, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Jerry Lembcke
In his 2/15/08/2:15 p.m. posting PorJ writes that I am unequivocal and absolute in saying that no one spat on Vietnam veterans.
On pp. 67-68 I write, “Undoubtedly, there were instances of incivility between veterans and anti-war activists . . . . Given the temper of the times, there were surely intemperate remarks exchanged by soldiers and radicals. . . . The chances for hurt feelings and misunderstandings from careless comments were great.”
On page 81 I also report claims dating from the war years that veterans had been spat on. One was made by the psychiatrist Robert Lifton, the other by Chaplain (later Cardinal) John O’Connor. Neither was a first-person or even eyewitness claim. On page 82 I quote at length Murray Polner’s 1971 book “No Victory Parades” wherein he quotes veterans’ claims of mistreatment from anti-war activists.
Elsewhere, I written that I would be surprised if it had never happened. Indeed, I always thought that stronger evidence for actually spitting would have surfaced by now. I never thought, though, that the quantity and quality of evidence would ever be such that the mythical character of the stories would be negated.
Regarding my words that he quotes (“Truth is that the stories are bogus . . .”) I suppose I should have been more careful but I think most people can interpret them in the figurative sense in which they are meant.
Rearding Ari’s posting of 2/14/08/8:25 that my respose to Jim Lingren was “a bit small,” I took Lingren’s intervention to be more of a right-wing rant than something to be taken seriously and so I thought I would have some of my own fun with it.
By contract (to Lingren) the forgoing exchange here is one of the most thoughtful that I’ve followed on the issues of spat-upon veterans.
Jerry Lembcke
February 16, 2008 at 9:19 pm
ari
Professor Lembcke: You’re very kind to stop by the blog. I really do hope you’ll come again. And thanks for a very thoughtful comment.
February 16, 2008 at 10:17 pm
urbino
Professor Lembcke: You’re very kind…
There you are. I’d about decided you and Sundance had met the Bolivian Army.
February 17, 2008 at 9:46 am
PorJ
Its great that Lembcke stopped by. If he returns, could he answer the following:
1. Were any first-person or eye-witnessed accounts of vets getting spat upon broadcast or published between 1967 and 1972?
2. What do you think of the Delmar Pickett story aired on the CBS Evening News in 1971, linked above?
3. Is the following intended to be read figuratively or literally: “The truth is that nobody spat on Vietnam veterans and nobody is spitting on the soldiers today.” ? If figuratively, what is the literal meaning that you intended to convey with your figurative language?
Thanks-
February 17, 2008 at 10:25 am
Jerry Lembcke
Re PorJ’s last inquiry. 1) I don’t recall having known of any first-person eyewitness published accounts when I wrote The Spitting Image in the mid-late 1990s. I wrote to then-Cardinal O’Connor asking him if he personally saw troops spat on the the Pentagon and I get a oddly-worded response from an aide saying the Cardinal could not remember if he had seen or reported what had been told to him. We now have the Demar Pickett story which meets the criterion of having been reported in “the day.”
2) I’ve read the Pickett transcript and it seems legit to me. But it’s still an accusation, not proof, and it was made about 6-months after it happened at a time (if I’m remembering correctly) when VVAW was in the news about its Winter Soldier hearings, the medal turn-in on the capital mall, and John Kerry’s speech. The point being that if someone accused you of breaking into their house six months ago, you wouldn’t want the accusation counted in court as proof. Jack Shafer, finally, reported that Pickett’s version of the story today has a different location for the spitting than the original version, a discrepancy that I don’t think is a serious flaw but neither should it be discarded.
3) I mean to be taken literally that the words are something like a “royal we,” e.g. in saying that “everyone knows” the Bush Administration lied about WMD, we also know that not literally does “everyone know” that. Someone in a previous posting to this thread makes the same point, I think. And, literally, it’s still true that we don’t know (for a fact) that any anti-war activists DID spit on Vietnam vets
Jerry Lembcke
February 17, 2008 at 10:35 am
Jerry Lembcke
A p.s. on my just-posted comment. Lingren cited a James Reston NY Times report of spitting at the Pentagon in 1967, a report that I was willing to count when I read Lingren. But a few months ago, Maurice Isserman at Hamilton College (writing his piece on the Pentagon demonstration that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last fall) messaged me that he had delved into the Reston report and thinks Reston may not have seen it happen but rather reported something that had been told to him.
That was the case with the NY Times story about a year ago that at the Washington DC march and rally against the war in Iraq, an Iraq-war veteran and amputee was spat on by an anti-war opponent. I wrote to Ian Urbina, the Times reporter, to aske if he had seen it. The answer: no. It had been reported to him by his assistant. I wrote to her (Urbina gave me her contact information) to get her first-hand account and never heard back from her. I did hear, though, from a freelance photographer who said he was standing right behind the veteran when the incident supposedly happened and he saw no spitting.
Jerry
February 17, 2008 at 11:07 am
charlieford
PorJ:
If you have time and inclination, perhaps you would humor me and explain why this
“Were any first-person or eye-witnessed accounts of vets getting spat upon broadcast or published between 1967 and 1972?”
matters, when whether the Spanish blew up the Maine or the US attacked the Chinese with poison bugs does not?
Thanks in advance.
February 17, 2008 at 12:55 pm
PorJ
I don’t have time to give this the answer it deserves – but the short answer is: evidence.
I’m asking Lembcke about the existence of evidence – not about whether the spitting actually occurred*. I’m more interested (and, I’m arguing, we should all be more interested) in the claims being made about the existence – or non-existence, as Ari posited in his class exercise – of the evidence.
*(Look closely at the wording of the question – I think you are assuming that I accept the event as having occurred because reports were published or broadcast. I am not)
On any historical question, from the evidence (or lack of it) there has to be a leap of faith to develop a narrative (which I’m fine with). But I’ve got a problem when the leap of faith results in claims of certitude concerning the accurate representation of reality. That’s where my position on the spitting question, the USS Maine question, and the bugs-dropped-on the Chinese Army question is consistent…
February 17, 2008 at 2:58 pm
charlieford
You’ve actually made two, related but different, claims.
Claim One is (relative to Claim Two) weak, and has to do with your interests and what you consider to be the valid interests of historians, to wit: “I’m more INTERESTED (and, I’m arguing, we should ALL be more interested) in the CLAIMS being made . . .” (emphasis added)
Claim Two is stronger, and aims to delineate what “matters”: “I’m arguing that IT DOESN’T MATTER whether the US Army did, in fact, drop poison insects on the Chinese. What MATTERS is that some people want to believe that the US did . . .” (emphasis added)
There are several problems here. First, you would need to explain WHY one should be interested in cliams or reports (ie why they matter), but should not be interested in the veracity of these claims or reports (ie why truth-status of the events they purport to describe doesn’t matter).
To my way of thinking, both matter, and I see no reason to choose between them. Protests that contained claims and reports of Indians being removed to the west under Jackson have all kinds of politics and motives and manouvres threaded through them, but it I fail to see why it doesn’t matter that INDIANS WERE BEING REMOVED TO THE WEST. Indeed, I find it slightly bizarre that that should even need saying, but here we are.
It strikes me, from your last sentence, that you are ultimately concerned about premature claims to certainty. If so, it seems to me you’ve taken a rather extreme, and in the end not really defensible, position in order to make improper certitude claims impossible, to wit, by declaring a whole class of events (ie, those that aren’t themselves “claims” or “reports”) off-limits to the historian.
Premature certitude may be quite harmful, but I’m not convinced they are so disastrous that we have to reconstruct the epistemological foundations of the discipline in such a way as to ensure they never get made.
February 17, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Eric el pescado. « The Edge of the American West
[…] 17, 2008 in meta, our thing by eric Our various discussions about spit and memory reminded me of my favorite passage on the subject of truth and observation, […]
February 17, 2008 at 7:56 pm
PorJ
It strikes me, from your last sentence, that you are ultimately concerned about premature claims to certainty.
I don’t have time to go through this thread and reiterate all the times I said, explicitly, that this was the entire basis of my concern. This is the “larger context” I speak of being ignored above; this is why I said the myth Ari is constructing in the classroom exercise is not that zero vets were spat on, but, rather, that there “is zero evidence supporting the spitting stories.”
You know, I had a long post ready to go, but I’m going to drop it. We’re going in circles here, so let’s just say my words speak for me, Ari’s speak for Ari, Jerry Lembcke’s speak for Jerry Lembcke and CharlieFord’s speak for CharlieFord. I get the feeling that we’ve reached “tree-falling-in-the-woods” territory. I apologize for not adequately responding to your characterization of my argument.
Now – I’ve got some lost keys that need finding.
March 21, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Jim Lindgren
Some of you may have missed the point of my recounting some of the many contemporaneous spitting stories in the press in the 1967-72 period.
There are dozens of retrospective eyewitness accounts of spitting on servicemen (and on at least one woman) published in Bob Greene’s 1989 book Homecoming — and hundreds more have since been posted on the internet. Some are too sketchy to be taken seriously and a few are implausible, but the great majority of the stories are at least plausible on their face.
So are all (or almost all) of these people lying or seriously deluded?
Although one should always be at least somewhat skeptical about evidence, particularly about the truth of any one person’s story, before rejecting substantial evidence from hundreds of independent sources (both pro-war and anti-war) a scholar should have solid reasons beyond his political commitment for or against the Vietnam War. (For the record, I was against the war and attended some campus demonstrations in 1970-71; in 1970 I also did some campaigning for one of the country’s most anti-war Congressional candidates. Unlike Prof. Jerry Lembcke, however, I did not devote significant time or effort to the anti-war movement.)
Lembcke rejects Greene’s collection and other retrospective eyewitness accounts of spitting for what I see as two main reasons (and several lesser ones):
(1) If all this retrospective evidence were true, then there should have been some contemporaneous discussions of spitting in the press at the time. Lembcke claimed there weren’t any contemporaneous claims.
(2) A nontrivial minority of accounts involve being hassled upon arriving in uniform at civilian airports (particularly San Francisco). Lembcke asserts that these stories are almost certainly false because returning servicemen did not regularly fly directly into civilian airports.
Both of these factual reasons for rejecting the retrospective evidence turn out to be wrong.
Some of you who only read Lembcke’s “response” to me might not realize what his actual public claims were. In his own words, here is what Lembcke argued (in various books and publications linked in my posts at volokh.com):
[1] “The truth is that nobody spat on Vietnam veterans . . . .” (Jerry Lembcke, Spitting on the Troops: Old Myth, New Rumors, The Veteran, vol. 33, no. 1 (2003))
[2] “STORIES ABOUT spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It’s hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.” (Boston Globe, April 30, 2005)
[3] “Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus.”
[4] “Not only is there no evidence that these acts of hostility against veterans ever occurred, there is no evidence that anyone at the time thought they were occurring.” (Lembcke, 1998, The Spitting Image, p. 75)
[5] “Problem is, the spitting story seems to be fantasy. Perhaps some soldiers somewhere got spat on. Yet no reports of such incidents ever appeared while the Vietnam war was going on. Not until years later did the story surface.” (Lembcke, Newsday, May 1, 2000).
[6] “[Greene’s] stories have to be taken very seriously, but as historical evidence they are problematic. In the first place, stories of this type didn’t surface until about ten years after the end of the war. If the incidents occurred when the storytellers say they did, in the closing years of the war, why is there no evidence for that?”
Thus, the reason to look at contemporaneous news accounts is not only to assess the credibility of the underlying accounts, but to remove the chief reason that Lembcke offers for discounting the substantial existing evidence, much of which is otherwise quite plausible.
In more than a half dozen posts at volokh.com, I detailed specific contemporaneous news accounts recounting spitting incidents. After listing several examples of 1967-72 accounts of spitting on servicemen, I wrote:
“With all this documented spitting going on, not surprisingly there were many more discussions by politicians and writers of letters to the editor complaining about militants spitting on the military. Indeed, one might say that people at the time were almost obsessed with spitting: in just a day of searching, I found dozens of stories about spitting on flags, spitting on police, spitting on the military, and spitting on protesters. Responsible anti-war activists, such as Allard Lowenstein implored students who opposed the war to stop all the spitting (May 14, 1969 WAPO). . . .
The tipping point seemed to come with the White House’s efforts to found a counterforce to John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In early June 1971, there was a huge press push to trumpet the new organization headed by (among others) John O’Neill (later of Swift Boat fame) and Jim Minarik. The first paragraph of the most common story included a claim by Minarik that (after arriving home) ‘he walked out of doors in his uniform and he was twice spat upon.’
Over the following eight months, there was an explosion of concern about the shabby treatment of veterans returning from Vietnam, discussions in which some version of Minarik’s story seemed to resonate. . . .
In the December 11, 1971, Stars and Stripes, the brilliant behavioral scientist Norman Zinberg wrote about the three weeks he spent that fall in Vietnam studying heroin addiction for the DOD. By then, the stories of harassment and spitting were so engrained in the minds of soldiers that they used them as excuses for their addictions. Zinberg writes about a difference from earlier wars:
“The society which sent the soldier to fight not only does not reward him for his participation, but in fact is often hostile to him. EM (Enlisted men) repeatedly told me bitter and poignant stories (some of them undoubtedly apocryphal about two types of letters they received from home).
“One would be from a buddy who would report that he had walked down a street in ‘The World’ still in uniform and somebody had harassed or even spat on him. . . .
Note that by late 1971, the spitting story (in a form much like Minarik’s) had become such a cliche that Zinberg probably correctly surmised that more a few tellings of it were not literally true.
In any event, by the fall of 1971 the story of the spat upon serviceman was both well known and much written about. Lembcke’s . . . arguments [quoted above] are simply wrong: Stories of gob-covered servicemen started appearing in the press when anti-war protesters started spitting on them in the late 1960s, not around 1980. MANY 1967-72 SPITTING INCIDENTS ARE DOCUMENTED IN THE PRESS(http://volokh.com/posts/1170928927.shtml)
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In the spitting story that Lembcke most frequently attempts to debunk, a narrator claims to have flown into the San Francisco airport. As to the implausibility of landing at civilian bases such as San Francisco and being greeted by anti-war demonstrators, Lembcke argued:
[7] “GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops. There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge.”
It would be hard to make as many mistakes in one paragraph as Lembcke makes in his:
(1) As I detailed in one long post, military regulations designated the San Francisco International Airport as one of the four main West Coast “ports of debarkation” where servicemen returned on direct flights from Vietnam and the Far East.
(2) Not only did Army Regulations in the late 1960s and early 1970s designate the San Francisco International Airport to receive direct flights of military personnel, they required the Oakland Army Terminal to staff a returnee team located at the San Francisco Airport to meet and process servicemen arriving directly from Vietnam and the Far East. With a returnee team at the airport to handle the heavy load of service personnel flying directly to San Francisco from the Far East, it would not have been necessary to be “immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge,” as Lembcke mistakenly claims.
(3) A substantial number of the airport spitting stories, including the very one that Lembcke is trying to debunk, involve a serviceman who was home on leave or “emergency orders,” not someone who needed to be processed for reassignment or discharge. The regulations for “emergency orders” specifically authorized flying from the Far East directly to civilian airports on civilian planes. Thus, even if this story were about the Chicago airport, rather than the San Francisco airport, there would be nothing unusual about servicemen flying on emergency orders directly to a civilian airport. That would have been entirely routine.
(4) Some servicemen flew first into military bases in the US and then transferred to civilian airports to take civilian flights home. In the particular story that Lembcke is trying to debunk with his comment about the implausibility of flying into civilian airports, the serviceman did not say that he flew into San Francisco directly from the Far East. He might have flown from the Far East to a military base near Seattle and then flown from Seattle to San Francisco (but if he was indeed flying home on emergency orders, as he claimed, he probably flew directly from the Far East to San Francisco).
(5) To rebut the narrator’s claim to have been hassled when he flew into San Francisco, Lembcke asks “how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site?” This is nonsense.
An article on the USO club at the civilian San Francisco airport describes how in December 1969, their busiest month so far, 54,766 servicemen stopped into the USO club at the SF airport; the picture accompanying the article shows a soldier signing into a log (December 17, 1970, San Mateo Times). That’s over 1,500 a day. And it’s probably just a fraction of the military personnel who went through that civilian airport every day. Many who arrived at the airport by bus or car from the Oakland Army Terminal would have simply caught their flights for home without stopping into the USO or signing a USO log.
With perhaps a million or two service men and women going through the SF airport each year, anti-Vietnam War activists would not need to be informed about when troops would be arriving by plane to have a critical mass of targets for recruiting or abuse.
And there is evidence that antiwar activists did stake out the San Francisco civilian airport because there were so many vets returning from Vietnam going through the airport. Indeed, activists went to the SF Airport “because it was ‘the first civilian ground they’d set foot on back in the states.’” Antiwar activist Steve Rees writes in his 1979 book, They Should Have Served Coffee, that part of their standard greeting to servicemen was: “Hey, soldier. Welcome home. F**k the Army.” (p. 159)
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Most of the Lembcke’s other reasons for discounting the stories fare as badly as what I see as his two main ones. For example, Lembcke claims that spitting stories were created by pro-war purported eyewitnesses to fulfill their pro-war psychological needs, but I show that some eyewitnesses were anti-war. Also, there was much more hostility between individual anti-war demonstrators and soldiers than Lembcke believes. And he actually makes the ridiculously sexist claim that “girls” don’t spit, which is easily debunked by looking at contemporary (and current) evidence.
Having told your students that spitting stories are false is not a good enough reason for treating them as false. That it seems highly likely that spitting was not as common as people came later to believe is not a good reason for treating almost all of the many plausible stories of spitting as false.
Such an attitude toward evidence shows that academics are just as susceptible as their students to fall for urban legends, in this case such folklore as:
(a) there were no contemporaneous spitting accounts,
(b) these accounts only started appearing around 1980,
(c) they almost all fit the same pattern,
(d) servicemen returning from Vietnam didn’t fly routinely into the San Francisco airport,
(e) there was not enough hostility in the streets between demonstrators and the military to generate spitting incidents (eg, read the Walker Report on this issue), and
(f) women don’t spit.
On one side, I see a mound of evidence, some of it seemingly quite sound, some of it merely plausible. On the other side, I see no evidence at all and a string of false factual claims that are easily refuted.
Why would any fair-minded scholar disbelieve dozens of seemingly honest reporters and narrators not known to be in error who are telling plausible stories and instead believe a scholar who tries his best to refute these stories but succeeds mainly in making a string of demonstrably false factual claims?
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Three of my posts:
http://volokh.com/posts/1172040644.shtml
http://volokh.com/posts/1172056414.shtml
http://volokh.com/posts/1172051190.shtml
Two of Lembcke’s stories:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/30/debunking_a_spitting_image/
http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=350
Jim Lindgren
Northwestern University
July 5, 2008 at 9:28 pm
ari
I never noticed that Professor Lindgren came by the blog as well. And now I feel like a jerk for not welcoming him, too. A belated but wholehearted welcome, Professor Lindgren!