Propaganda and Protests: Vietnam War

  

Vietnam War

    The Vietnam War was between 1954 and 1975. This war took place in Vietnam and was the North Vietnam communist government and its allies in the South called the Viet Cong against the government of South Vietnam and the United States. By 1969, there were more than 500,000 American military personnel stationed in Vietnam. The Soviet Union and China were giving weapons and supplies to the North. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of the armed forces who died or were missing in the conflict. (Spector)

     The Vietnam War was one of the first televised wars in History. Camera crews could see the horrors in real time. Censorship had waned since WW2, and this allowed the media to portray this war negatively. Protests began of the war, drawing in hundreds of thousands of people. What started as a handful of people and groups in the 1960s turned into protests, such as the march through New York City on April 15, 1967, of more than 100,000 people. (McNamara)

Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969–74, cor-ten steel, aluminum, cast resin, polyurethane enamel, 740 × 760 × 330 cm, Yale University (photo: vige, CC: BY 2.0)

    This is a statue of a giant tube of lipstick from a military vehicle which stands at 24ft high. It appeared on campus at Yale in 1969 during student protests of the Vietnam War. Oldenburg hadn’t intended to make it a permanent installation and had initially built it out of plywood so the vinyl tip could be inflated or deflated like a balloon. But after ten months, Oldenburg removed it in order to remake it out of metal and place it in a less prominent spot on Yale's campus, where it still sits today.

    The artist combined the feminine product of lipstick with the masculine machinery of war to point at the hyper-masculine rhetoric of the military and the consumerism of the US. Additionally, the phallic bullet-like look seems masculine and violent, and the implication is that the U.S. obsession with beauty and consumption is distracting from the violence in Vietnam. (Dosch)

 

    This is such an interesting sculpture; the juxtaposition of lipstick with the war machine makes it look out of place. Initially, I had no emotional response to this piece, but after reading further into the reasons behind its creation and what was happening during the Vietnam war, I appreciated it more. If you remove the historical implications, I don’t find this work appealing. The simple shapes, straight edges makes it seem like a large children’s toy. The time and place it was presented carries this work into the spotlight. 

Art Workers' Coalition, Q. And babies? A. And babies., 1970, offset lithograph on paper, overall: 25 × 38 in. (63.5 × 96.5 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jon Hendricks, 2017.10, © 1970 Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks, and Frazer Dougherty

    The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) was a New York artist-activist group. Group members Frazer Dougherty, Jon Hendricks, and Irving Petlin designed this poster after the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in 1968 in the My Lai Massacre. This group used actual journalistic evidence to convey the horrors of the war instead of symbolism or metaphors. They printed fifty thousand of these posters and distributed them for free to the public.

 

    This poster elicits such an emotional response seeing the dead bodies of so many people. I can almost hear the hushed tones of the question, “And babies?” hoping and begging that the response is different, but it’s not. Thankfully, this image isn’t bloody and graphic beyond the obvious death. As difficult as it is to see content like this, I respect the AWC for promoting the real atrocities happening instead of downplaying them with symbolism. The real and unfiltered work is what was needed to inspire more people to protest the war. 

Courtesy of National Archives, "Communism Means Terrorism," U.S. Information Agency, 15 September 1954

    This poster was created and distributed internationally by the United States Information Agency (USIA) to amplify fear of communism in Vietnam. The poster reads, “Anywhere there is communism, there is terrorism and assassination!” There were many events that frightened Americans and made them believe there was a global communist plot, the “Red Scare.” Such as the Soviet Union testing an atomic bomb, Chinese Communists formed the People’s Republic of China, and North Korea invaded South Korea. (National Archives)

Courtesy of Library of Congress, Valtman, Edmund S., "Stick 'em up!" The Hartford Times, 9 June 1964

This is an ironic political cartoon showing that the United States had the most advanced nuclear arsenal. However, that didn’t mean we would win in Vietnam. It shows a Viet Cong soldier pointing a handgun at a startled President Johnson. 

A North Vietnamese poster from 1968 shows VC fighters “determined to beat the American enemy.” A shot-down U.S. pilot lies in the foreground while an American jet crashes in the distance. (Courtesy of Joel Montague and Nora Taylor, Photographed By Mouncy Ferguson)

1968’s Tet Offensive inspired this North Vietnamese battle poster. One of the captions reads, “Sweep clean the American enemy aggressors.” (Courtesy of Joel Montague and Nora Taylor, Photographed by Mouncy Ferguson)

    These posters are from Vietnam; both the North and the South used propaganda. These posters were of great importance to promoting viewpoints, conveying ideas, and inspiring people to action since, by 1945, 80% of the population was illiterate. (Bock)

 

    Finding specific artists for the Vietnam propaganda was challenging, but the four posters included were from a few different viewpoints from both sides. None of these caused much of an emotional reaction in me. They are similar in terms of big pictures depicting guns and war, with big triggering words. I am sure that when these posters were circulating, they had a tremendous effect on citizens and soldiers.

 

    I felt like it was difficult in this mid-modern era to find specific art for the Vietnam War or artwork with a lot of depth to it. There were so many burgeoning styles, such as the Jackson Pollock style of abstract art to paintings of everyday life with photo realism. So much history unfolded with protests for black equality, women's equality, and anti-war demonstrations. With televisions making their way into almost every household, news, pictures, events, and ideas are spreading faster and easier than ever before. So much “art” during this era has drastically moved away from the old mediums and has been modernized and weaponized by governments. I feel like art has its value in modern times in what it represents or the movement or people it signifies as opposed to having value in and of itself. The propaganda and cartoons are artwork without many elements to them, yes they have different colors, shapes, and lines but there isn’t much depth to them. I can create a lot of mid-modern art, but I could not make almost any art before this era.  

Bock, Jon. “During the Vietnam War, These Colorful Posters Aimed to Win Hearts and Minds.” HistoryNet, 3 Jan. 2024, www.historynet.com/vietnam-war-posters-propaganda/.
During the Vietnam War, These Colorful Posters Aimed to Win Hearts and Minds (historynet.com)

 

 

Dosch, Dr. Mya, and Dr. Mya Dosch. “Protesting the Vietnam War, with Lipstick.” Smarthistory, smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/lipstick-ascending-sa/. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.
Smarthistory – Protesting the Vietnam War, with lipstick

 

 

McNamara, Robert. “How the Vietnam War Protests Started a Movement and Changed History.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 28 July 2019, www.thoughtco.com/vietnam-war-protests-4163780.
The Vietnam War Protests and the Antiwar Movement (thoughtco.com)

 

Poster 306-PPB-124; Communism Means Terrorism; 9/15/1954; Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, ca. 1950 - ca. 1965; Records of the U.S. Information Agency, Record Group 306; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/communism-terrorism, August 1, 2024]
"Communism Means Terrorism," September 15, 1954 | State Historical Society of Iowa

 

 

 

Spector, Ronald H.. "Vietnam War". Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Jul. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War. Accessed 1 August 2024.
Vietnam War | Facts, Summary, Years, Timeline, Casualties, Combatants, & Facts | Britannica

 

 

“‘Stick 'em up!’ June 9, 1964.” “Stick 'em up!” June 9, 1964 | State Historical Society of Iowa, history.iowa.gov/history/education/educator-resources/primary-source-sets/cold-war-vietnam/stick-em-june-9-1964. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.
"Stick 'em up!" June 9, 1964 | State Historical Society of Iowa