Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam

1971 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Opinion Poll ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
The Korean War

In an examination of responses to public opinion poll questions designed to assess the degree of generalized support for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, popular support for the two wars was found to follow highly similar patterns. Support was high initially but declined as a logarithmic function of American casualties, a function remarkably similar for both wars. While support for the war in Vietnam did finally drop below those levels found during the Korean War, it did so only after the fighting had gone on considerably longer and only after American casualties had greatly surpassed those of the earlier war. These trends seem to have been fairly impervious to particular events in either of the wars.It is suggested that the greater vocal opposition to the Vietnam War reflects mainly a shift of opinion within the intellectual left on the wisdom of the two wars. Armed with new techniques of protest learned in its identification with the civil rights movement, the intellectual left has been able effectively to garner great attention for its cause during the Vietnamese War.Also noted was the presence of a rather large body of opinion inclined to follow the President on war policy, giving him considerable room for maneuver, at least in the short run, and making public opinion in this area highly sensitive to current policy.A crude comparison with data from World War II suggests that, while the earlier war was unquestionably more "popular" than the wars in Korea and Vietnam, support was less consensual than might be expected. The popularity of the Korean War rose slowly after its conclusion, but this sort of retrospective support for World Wars I and II may have declined as time went by and, at any rate, was quite sensitive to current events,In repeated instances, differences in question wording were found to alter substantially the response generated to poll questions about the wars.

A New Day? Revolution, Cold War, and Decolonization, 1950–1965

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
R. Keith Schoppa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
General Success

In the aftermath of World War II, global realities seemed to have been grouped into binary formats: the United States and the USSR in a policy the United States called “containment” and included the establishment of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the Korean War. Violent decolonization rose for Great Britain in Malaysia and Kenya and for France in Vietnam and Algeria. Another chapter dichotomy was the general success of the civil rights movement in the United States and the concomitant strengthening of apartheid in South Africa.

An American Challenge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Male Nurses ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Female Nurses

This chapter examines how concerns about national security shaped the Army Nurse Corps's (ANC) response to male nurses' integration and the push to desegregate the U.S. military. In the decade following World War II, professional nursing viewed its responsibilities to the health and welfare of the nation as being bound to the global defense of democracy. Nursing became part of the “frontline” in maintaining America's strength against the perceived evils of communism. The chapter first considers black activism in early Cold War defense and the anti-discrimination campaign of the American Nurses' Association, along with the pursuit of equal opportunity between male and female nurses. It then explores how the Korean War turned into a battleground for testing race desegregation and debating gender roles within the context of the nursing profession. It also links the male nurses' integration campaign to the civil rights movement and concludes by showing how the ANC reinforced its gendered opinion on nursing within the nurse corps.

scholarly journals Heroes at Home: Honoring our Nation’s Veterans

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Kayla Vasilko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
World War ◽  
Safe Place ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Treatment Court

There are currently 17.42 million veterans living in America today. These heroes dedicated their services in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Gulf War, leaving home and giving up the comforts of stability, family, and guaranteed safety to ensure that America remains a stable and safe place for individuals and families to call home, yet upon returning home themselves, our nation’s veterans have had to face immense hardships. About 40,000 veterans are without shelter in the U.S. on any given night; some of the leading causes of veteran homelessness include PTSD, social isolation, unemployment, and substance abuse. This is why programs such as the Porter County Veteran’s Treatment Court (PVTC), Folds of Honor, Southshore Friends of Veterans, and Disabled American Veterans designed to support our nation’s veterans are so important for our community. This reflection details my research into each one of these Northwest Indiana organizations. In this account, I illustrate the impact of dozens of one-on-one interviews with the heroes running these programs, and veterans a part of these programs themselves. A special focus is placed on the results of the Purdue University Service-Learning grant received on behalf of the PVTC within that treatment community. During interviews, veteran Bob Carnegy stated: “People don’t understand the meaning of the word veteran. Each one is special, yet connected. No matter what branch they serve, each veteran had to raise their right hand and pledge their life to this country. That pledge is what connects us all.” Going off of his words, this reflection marks an overall goal of increasing awareness for the great acts of service our veterans perform, not just overseas, but also when they return home to the community.

“I Wanted It to Change and to Make Up for Its Past”

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-204
Author(s):  
Simon Wendt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

The chapter explores the organization’s post–World War II history. This period saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America’s “imagined community.” Despite these challenges, the DAR’s views on race, immigration, gender, and the nation’s past remained virtually unchanged. It continued to embrace ethnic nationalism, opposing racial integration and a liberalization of America’s immigration laws, and upheld the very same ideals of femininity and masculinity that its campaigns had emphasized prior to 1945. The organization regarded the social movements of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and second wave feminism, as a grave danger to the nation. Although the DAR began to admit black members in 1977 and finally acknowledged African Americans’ patriotic contributions to American independence in the 1980s, its public rhetoric of civic tolerance frequently belied the DAR’s conservative views on race and gender.

Charles Preston Warren II

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Alice Baldwin-jones
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Medical Examiner ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Vietnam War

This chapter explores the life and work of Charles Preston Warren II, a pioneer theoretical and applied forensic anthropologist who made significant contributions to Philippines studies. As the longest serving military forensic anthropologist, Warren identified America’s dead from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He also worked with the county sheriff’s office and medical examiner office in Chicago and Indiana. He conducted research among the Palawan of the Philippines and disputed the prevailing classification based on skin color of the various ethnic black Asians populations known as Negritos, arguing instead that they differed culturally from each other.

9. Confronting the Soviets

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-109
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Primary Mission ◽  
The U.S

At the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy was more than twice as large as all the rest of the navies of the world combined. The inevitable contraction that followed was less draconian than after previous wars because of the almost immediate emergence of the Cold War. ‘Confronting the Soviets: the Cold War navy (1945–1975)’ explains that while deterring a Soviet missile strike remained a primary mission of all of America’s services throughout the Cold War, the United States also confronted a series of smaller wars around the world. These included the Korean War, unrest in the Middle East, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, 1965–74.

Asia and the Far East: Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases

War Epidemics ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Smallman-Raynor ◽  
Andrew Cliff
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Scrub Typhus ◽  
Q Fever ◽  
Emerging Diseases ◽  
Haemorrhagic Fever ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War

In the last chapter, our consideration of camp epidemics ended with an examination of a strange and debilitating illness that, prior to World War II, was hardly known to medical science—Q fever or ‘Balkan grippe’. Historically, Q fever is one of many seemingly ‘new’ diseases that have suddenly and unexpectedly erupted into military conciousness. In Chapter 2, for example, we saw how maladies such as the mysterious English sweating sickness, along with venereal syphilis, typhus fever, and yellow fever, appeared—ostensibly for the first time—in association with wars of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. More recently, trench fever (World War I, 1914–18), scrub typhus (World War II, 1939–45) and Korean haemorrhagic fever (Korean War, 1950–3) provide twentieth-century examples of the emergence phenomenon (Macpherson et al., 1922–3; Philip, 1948; Gajdusek, 1956). At the same time, wars have also served to fuel the epidemic re-emergence of many classical diseases, of which human plague (Vietnam War, 1964–73), visceral leishmaniasis (Sudanese Civil War, 1956–), and diphtheria (Tajikistan Civil War, 1992–) are recent instances (Velimirovic, 1972; Seaman et al., 1996; Keshavjee and Becerra, 2000). In the present chapter, we develop the theme of war and disease emergence and re-emergence, taking selected conflicts and diseases in the Asian and Far Eastern theatres to provide examples. We begin in Sect. 9.2 by locating war within the broader conceptual framework of emerging and re-emerging diseases. Subsequent sections examine the wartime emergence of three zoonoses which, on their novel appearance in deployed western troops, prompted a series of landmark epidemiological investigations into the diseases concerned: scrub typhus among Allied forces in Burma–India during World War II (Sect. 9.3) and Japanese encephalitis and Korean haemorrhagic fever in the UN Command during the Korean War (Sect. 9.4). We then turn to the wartime re-emergence of classical diseases, illustrating the theme with reference to US troops (malaria) and Vietnamese civilians (human plague) during the Vietnam War (Sect. 9.5). The chapter is concluded in Section 9.6.

Epilogue

The Sit Room ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 279-284
Author(s):  
David Scheffer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The United States ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Colombian Government ◽  
Syrian Conflict

A result from which “all ugliness will flow again.” WARREN CHRISTOPHER THE BOSNIAN WAR took three years of intensive diplomacy to end, while combat and atrocities were unremitting. The talking phase of armed conflicts has veered wildly from days to decades in recent history, and often failed completely when one side fought to achieve outright military victory. There were no negotiations to end World War II; only total defeat of the Axis Powers sufficed. The Korean War ended in a stalemate absent any substantive talks, and the United States and North Korea remained, technically, at war, for decades thereafter. Negotiations to end the Vietnam War began in 1968 and continued into the next decade only to be eclipsed by the total victory of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in 1975. The catastrophic Syrian conflict began in 2011 and continued unabated despite years of U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva. The Colombian government and the indigenous guerilla group, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC), finally ended their civil war in 2016 with a peace agreement after 26 years of on-again, off-again negotiations....

Remaking Reality

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
Film And Video

After World War II, U.S. documentarians engaged in a rigorous rethinking of established documentary practices and histories. Responding to the tumultuous transformations of the postwar era--the atomic age, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the emergence of the environmental movement, immigration and refugee crises, student activism, the globalization of labor, and the financial collapse of 2008--documentary makers increasingly reconceived reality as the site of social conflict and saw their work as instrumental to struggles for justice. Examining a wide range of forms and media, including sound recording, narrative journalism, drawing, photography, film, and video, this book is a daring interdisciplinary study of documentary culture and practice from 1945 to the present. Essays by leading scholars across disciplines collectively explore the practices of documentarians who not only record reality but also challenge their audiences to take part in reality's remaking.

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