Vietnam War Protests and Civil Liberties in Texas—The San Marcos 10

 

Student anti-war demonstrators on the campus of Southwest Texas State University a surrounded by a hostile crowd.

 Note--This all but forgotten demonstration and its aftermath are an example of resistance under hostile conditions with little hope of immediate success.  It may be a model--and a warning--for action in these troubled times.

In 1969 anti-Vietnam War protests were literally a dime a dozen.  In the previous five years demonstrations had escaped  liberal/radical enclaves like New York City and Berkley, California and protest magnate Washington, D.C. to campuses across the United States and to cities and towns in the fly-over heartland.  After radicals and authorities clashed violently at the Pentagon in 1967 and in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention a year earlier, the respectable middle class including groups like Another Mother for Peace, Civil Rights and labor leaders joined the moderate wing of the peace movement to launch the Vietnam Moratorium on October 15, 1969 and an even larger wave of Moratorium protests were scheduled for a month later including a mass march on Washington.

An event like a small rally at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) in San Marcos, a small central Texas city 30 miles southwest of Austin, on November 13 was hardly a blip on the radar screen among the literally scores of protests being held daily.  It was particularly modest in scope and included no marches, picketing, speeches, or even any hand-out literature.  A few dozen students and a handful of sympathetic staff  simply sat down quietly in front of the landmark statue of rearing wild horses by sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt near the center of campus.  They held signs like “Vietnam is an Edsel” and  “44,000 U.S. Dead, For What?”  Some wore black mourning armbands for the dead on all sides.

Pretty tame stuff actually.  But not mild enough for Texas where patriotism was equated with jingoist militarism and protest of any kind was suspected of being Communist.

 

Texas author and historian E.R. Bills.

Esteemed Texas historian and writer E.R. Bills has documented the event and its significant fallout in his book, The San Marcos 10:  An Anti-War Protest in Texas  Bills’ previous books included the gritty depictions of horrific racist violence in The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas and his depiction of lynching by burning in Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror.  His new book comes on the heels of his essays in Texas Dissident: Dispatches from a Diminished State 2006-2016.  Bills earned his bachelor of arts degree and Texas State.  Most of the information in this post comes directly or indirectly from his research and work.

E.R. Bills new book.  In the cover illustration pro-war students drape the Huntington Horses monument with an American flag and a love it or leave it flag.

November 13 was actually not the first time students had rallied against the war at SWTSU.  Dozens joined a quiet protest at the same location on the first day of the Vietnam Moratorium on October 15 without incident or interference from the University.  But the publicity  surrounding the protest in the local and state press alarmed and embarrassed officials, perhaps especially so because the school was the alma mater of former President Lyndon Johnson who had been targeted and vilified by the anti-war movement for his escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Led by Dean of Students Floyd Martine, the administration scrambled to put the kibosh  on future demonstrations.  New rules strictly regulating protests were hastily promulgated  restricting protests to a designated “free speech area” away from the central quad and forbade demonstration assemblies before 4:00 p.m. on weekdays.  Free Speech Zones were then just beginning to be used to move protests out of sight out of mind and away from any targets of the demonstration.  They have since become ubiquitous and a notorious abuse of civil liberties due in no small part, as we shall see, to the events in San Marcos.

Students consulted with two lawyers recommended by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who advised them that that they a First Amendment right to hold another protest in the original location as long as they did not block traffic or create a disturbance.  They determined to press on with their plans for the second demonstration.  A sense of urgency was compounded when the first news of the My Lai Massacre was released the day before.

With plans going forward Martine set about recruiting football jocks and so-called cowboys—rowdy West Texas good ol’ boys always up for a display of macho swagger.  Neither group had appeared on their own to counter the first demonstration.  They were allegedly called out to “represent” a silent majority of patriotic and loyal students.  In reality they were given  wink and nod encouragement to disrupt and intimidated protesters.

The Huntington Horses sculpture by Ann Vaugh Hyatt was a central feature on the campus quad and a natural gathering point.  The rearing stallions who have thrown off one rider and are about to do the same to the other was said to represent the spirit of independence and freedom.

Regardless about 75 protestors arrived by the statue at 10 am and began their witness.  They were quickly surrounded by jeering and threatening counter demonstrators as well as a large number of curious onlookers.  At by 10:35 campus police began roping in the demonstrators.  Martine read a statement.

Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention please? I am Floyd Martine, Dean of Students. In the judgment of the university administration, this assembly is a violation of established university policies as set forth in the Student Handbook. I hereby direct you  to leave this area within three minutes. Any student remaining beyond that time will be  suspended from school until the fall of 1970.

While the 200 or so members of the mob surrounding the demonstrators screamed epithets and threats including ominous chants of  “string ‘em up!” most of the protestors left the penned in area, many receiving rough handling and pommeling by the jocks with no attempt by campus police to protect them.  Ten students remained kneeling or sitting.  At the last moment German instructor Allen Black ducked under the rope to join them.

Campus police string the rope line to pen in the protestors being given an ultimatum to leave.

In exactly three minutes Martine told the protestors “Your time is up!”  and began taking names of the remaining students.  No one was arrested that day, but the protestors promptly received official written notice that they were suspended.

Despite continued efforts to smear the students as commies and dirty hippies, they were nothing of the sort.  Like most of the students at this second tier public university they were the sons and daughters of ordinary working and middle class families, several the first in their families to attend college.  They did not look or dress particularly different from the counter protestors screaming at them.  They included a Who’s Who math student, two veterans, one a baseball player, three other mid-20s males, a 19-year-old male and three women.  They were:

27-year-old, Vietnam veteran David G. Bayless of Silver City, New Mexico, 19-year-old Frances A. Burleson of Houston, 23-year-old Paul S. Cates of San Antonio, 19-year-old Arthur A. Henson of Pasadena, 23-year-old Michael S. Holman of Austin, 27-year-old David O. McConchie of Wimberly, 24-year-old Murray Rosenwasser of Lockhart, 21-year-old Joseph A. Saranello of Brooklyn, New York, 20-year-old Sallie A Satagaj of San Antonio, and 18-year-old Frances A. Vykoukal of Sealy.

While the students were all immediately suspended, the German instructor was not initially punished.  But he and a few other junior faculty who voiced public support for the students ultimately had their teaching contracts not renewed.

E.R. Bills wrote in an essay for the Zinn Education Project:

On the evening of the San Marcos 10’s suspension, hundreds of their classmates and faculty members marched on the Administration Building protesting the 10’s treatment. The next morning they reappeared and Texas State President Bill Jones told a group of student representatives the university “means to hurt no one.”

“After all,” Jones said, “we are here for the same purpose—education.”

The legal battle on behalf of the students quickly was on.  It turned into an epic.  It began as a grievance within the University system presenting their case to the Student-Faculty Board of Review, Jones,  and the Texas State University System Board of Regents. Their appeals were denied at every level.

The ACLU took the case to Federal Court suing Martine, Jones, and SWTSU for $100,000 in damages.  They also asked for a temporary restraining order to prohibit enforcement of the suspensions until the case was resolved in court, a permanent injunction preventing the university from making notations on their permanent records,  and a declaratory judgment that the Student Handbook policy dealing with student expression be void because it was vague and over-broad.  The ACLU reasonably argued that the University and other defendants had “created a policy which violates the rights of freedom of speech and assembly granted under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

In early December the court denied the immediate appeal for reinstatement of the students without ruling on the merits of the case.  But he wrote, “no party denies that the First Amendment applies with full vigor on the campus, but a university by reasonable regulation, can limit and regulate the exercise of rights granted by the Constitution. . .”  That was a clear signal the whole action would ultimately be denied.

However on December 13 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans temporarily blocked the suspensions pending disposition of the appeal.  The students were allowed to resume studies at the University and enroll for the spring semester as the case wound through the courts.

But in July of 1970 the same court ruled that the school had acted within their rights, effectively affirming the original suspension order.  Lawyers filed an appeal of that ruling and a second suit demanding that the students receive full credit for the work completed during the initial appeal.

The second suit again landed before Judge Roberts who ruled against the 10, stating that he could see no constitutional justification for reversing the finding conclusion of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Ironically when SWTSU president Jones tried to personally apologize to Lyndon Johnson for the protest, the former President who was racked with regrets over the war told him, “They were right.”

Liberal icon and court maverick William O. Douglas was the only member of the Supreme Court to vote to hear the San Marcos 10 appeal.

 

In 1972 an appeal was made to the Supreme Court, but only stalwart liberal Justice William O. Douglas voted to hear the case.  Without comment or a determination of the facts, the Supreme Court’s inaction allowed the suspension decision to stand.

Not only were the San Marcos 10 retroactively suspended, but they were denied refunds to their already paid tuition.  The following notation was placed in their student transcripts, “The U. S. Supreme Court has ruled for the administration and all credit is denied.”

The case of the San Marcos 10 was quickly obscured as anti-war demonstrations heated up across the country by student occupations of college facilities, and student anti-war demonstrators were shot and killed at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi in 1970 leading to more than a week of student strikes across the nation.

But the ghost of the case still haunts justice.  It remains a precedent often cited in cases of university attempts to stifle campus free speech.  Although some lower and appeals courts have reached different conclusions depending on the exact details of the suppression the current hyper conservative Supreme Court majority can be counted upon to apply the precedent broadly against dissent.

So It Goes—Kurt Vonnegut’s Life Skating on the Edge

 

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kind of things you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He would go on to become a veteran of another war and the experience shaped him as a human being—one of the great iconoclasts of his time, and a confirmed pacifist.

His death on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84 was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a mere semi-colon (he despised semi-colons.)  He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping and falling in his Manhattan apartment several days earlier.  It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.

And Vonnegut would have noted the connection to the announcement in Washington the same day that all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were having their tours in the war zones extended by another 120 days.  He despised the war and the men who started it.  Leaving behind such brutal stupidity would have been a pleasure for him.

Vonnuegut's complicated and sometimes contradictory views on religion were a natural reflection of his family's German Free Thinking tradition, childhood attendance in an Indianapolis Unitarian church, his wartime trials and disillusionment, and his disgust at the rise of the Religious Right as a thin cover for racism and bigotry.  Bible thumpers returned the disdain and are behind making his books among those most banned from school curricula and libraries.

Unitarians Universalists, in our insecurity, are always making lists of “greats.”  Having dominated 19th Century American literature, there is often a kind of desperately wide net thrown to haul in contemporary writers to keep up our cultural bona fides.  Vonnegut shows up on these lists.  

He was, after all, very publicly avowed Humanist, the successor to another science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, as honorary chair of the American Humanist Association. A Man Without a Country, his last book, was something of a Humanist scream in a world corrupted by fake Christianity.  It was largely assembled from his essays in the Chicago—based socialist magazine In These Times.  We all know that Humanism has also found a home in Unitarian Universalism.

Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and his family, wife Edith, eldest son Bernard, and daughter Alice.  Kurt, Jr. would arrive in 1922 shortly after this picture was taken.  The family came from a long line of German Free thinkers and the family attended the Indianapolis Unitarian Church for which architect Kurt Sr. designed a building.

Vonnegut was proud to claim descent from generations of German-American free thinkers, just the sort of folks who found a congenial home with the radical brand of Unitarianism espoused by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the old Western Unitarian Conference at the turn of the 20th Century.  Vonnegut’s parents were married by a Unitarian minister and the family belonged to the congregation in Indianapolis.  Architect Kurt, Sr. even designed a building for the congregation.  Although not much of church goer later in life, he liked to tell of visiting a Unitarian congregation and hearing the minister joke about the bells peeling “No Hell! No Hell!” (surely a Universalist sentiment.)  He sometimes referred to himself as a Unitarian and was glad to be called to give the prestigious Ware Lecture at the 1986 UUA General Assembly.  He was also asked to speak on the occasion of William Ellery Channing’s 200th birthday at First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

But Vonnegut was hard to pin down—and idealist and a cynic, a humorist whose satire was tinged with the deepest melancholy of man who had been brought up to believe in human progress “onward and upward forever” only to witness the gravest savageries of the 20th Century.  He genuinely believed in the pieties of civics lessons learned at James Whitcomb Riley School in Indianapolis.  Yet he saw his father, a sensitive and creative architect, ruined by the Depression, and his mother sink into mental illness and suicide. 

 

Vonnegut sans helmet was snapped with a column of GI POWS in 1944.  They young soldier looks frightened and by clasping his hands behind his head showed he was more compliant with orders than his companions.

Then it was off to war as an infantry scout for Patton’s 3rd Army.  In the confusion of the Battle of the Bulge Vonnegut was separated from his unit and wandered for several days behind German lines before being captured.  As a prisoner of war, in the defining moment of his life, he survived the Allied firebombing of the historic city of Dresden and was put to work collecting and disposing of the incinerated corpses of the old city.  This was the central event of one of his most famous novels, Slaughter House-Five, named for the actual facility in which he and his fellow prisoners rode out the fire storm.  The incident also figures in at least 5 other novels.

In post-war America he participated in the rush to corporate security when he took a public relations job with General Electric in Troy, New York.  The job didn’t last long, but the bitter experience of corporate corruption, power, and arrogance lingered.  Troy became the Ilium of several Vonnegut novels beginning with his first novel Player Piano, a savage corporate dystopia.  The book was a publishing failure in 1952, but slowly gained a cult following as paperback editions followed.

 

A successful author at last--Vonnegut with some of his books.  Several had been initial failures but were reprinted after the huge success of Slaughter House Five. Almost all are now considered modern American classics that somehow escaped the science fiction pigeon hole and literary ghetto.

Many of his novels involved organized religion on one hand and a drive for spiritual honesty on the other.  In Sirens of Titan gave us The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  In Cat’s Cradle it was the transparently fraudulent, but serenely comforting—and perhaps actually saving—Bokononism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater even distills what might be called a theology of atonement, forgiveness, and kindness.  In it Eliot Rosewater says:

Hello, babies, welcome to Earth.  It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It’s round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you’ve go about a hundred years here.  There only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

Vonnegut thought so much of that last passage he repeated it in his swan song A Man Without a Country.

 

He had his heroes.  His fright-wig hair and droopy mustache were surely homage to both Mark Twain (for whom he named a son) and Albert Einstein.  He admired Abraham Lincoln of whose speech attacking the Mexican War he wrote “Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!” He paired Jesus and Socialist—and fellow Terre Haute native—Eugene V. Debs.  He liked to quote Debs, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.  As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and follow up with the Beatitudes.  

 

Vonnegut in later life used variations of this to illustrate his books and to sign letters and autographs.

Vonnegut was a fearless opponent of war and injustice—any war and all injustice.  He despised hypocrisy.  He despaired for humanity.  People like that are hard to come by.
 

 

 

Armistice or Veterans Day and The Identity Crisis of a National Holliday

 

Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, First Sea Lord, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch (standing), the French leader of the Allied forces,  accept the German surrender ending fighting in the Great War.

Note:  A return of a semi-regular post.  But it will be new and news to some of you.

11/11/11.  That’s how Americans remembered the Armistice that went into effect on November 11, 1918 at 11 a.m. local time in France ending hostilities on the Western Front in what was up to that time the most catastrophically bloody war in history.  The German High Command signed the armistice just two days after revolutionaries in Berlin overthrew Kaiser Wilhelm and proclaimed a Republic. The shooting part of the Great War was over.  It would not officially end until the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919.

President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the day as Armistice Day, an occasion for national Thanksgiving and prayer.  Americans and the world were thankful, but they were more in the mood for wild celebration that day than for sober reflection and prayer.  From the great cities of Europe to the simplest of rural American villages spontaneous celebrations erupted in the streets.

 

These Doughboys may never have made it to the Front, but had plenty to celebrate in an impromptu New York City parade celebrating the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

By the time of the first anniversary most Allied nations had officially adopted November 11 as a holiday.  In Britain, Canada, and other Commonwealth Countries it is called Remembrance Day or Poppy Day for the red paper flowers almost universally worn on that day.    In the United States, where holiday proclamations were traditionally left to the states, only a handful had yet designated a formal holiday.  But with troops only recently come home, cities and towns across the country marked the day with parades and speeches.

Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. issued the call for the Paris Caucus where Officers and enlisted men still in France in May 1919 laid the groundwork for the establishment of the American Legion.

The spread of the day as an official holiday was promoted by veterans’ organizations.  One such organization was envisioned by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. as a group analogous to the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Civil War Veterans which dominated American public life for more than 50 years.  Within days of the Armistice Roosevelt gathered officers in Paris to plan for the organization.  In March 1919 the Paris Caucus of over 1000 officers and enlisted men adopted a temporary constitution and the name American Legion.  Congress granted the Legion a charter in September and a founding convention was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota over three days that coincided with the 1919 Armistice celebrations.

Unlike the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), an existing organization of Spanish Civil War, Philippine Insurrection, Boxer Rebellion, and Mexican Expeditionary veterans which began accepting Great War veterans into their existing network of Posts, the American Legion had a distinct ideological tone.  From the beginning, its leadership was in ultra-conservative hands, and some were eager to mobilize the ranks in campaigns against the Red Menace of the post war period.  Legion officers often encouraged their members to act as organized strike breakers.

On that same Armistice Day in 1919, an American Legion parade in Centralia, Washington, the heart of lumber country and long running labor strife, broke ranks on a pre-arranged signal and attacked the local hall of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). 

The American  Legion  in Centralia, Washington parading on Armistice Day 1919 moments before they  broke ranks to attack the IWW Hall.

Wobblies in the hall opened fire in self defense as the Legionaries tried to charge up the stairs.  Four Legionaries were killed in the attack and several others were wounded inside the hall in a confusing melee before most of the union men were disarmed.  Wesley Everest, himself a veteran and in uniform, escaped although wounded and was chased down to the river where he shot two or more of his pursuers before being overwhelmed.   

That night a mob of Legionaries, with the complicity of authorities, seized the wounded Everest from his jail cell, dragged him behind an automobile, castrated him, and hung him from a railroad bridge.  Several IWW members including those captured in the hall and others tracked down by posses in a massive man hunt were put on trial.  Eight Wobblies were convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to long prison terms.  No Legionnaires were charged in the initial assault.

President Warren G. Harding, standing left at the entombment of the Unknown Soldier on Armistice Day 1921.  He also proclaimed a one-time Federal Holiday for the occasion.

When the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was dedicated on Armistice Day 1921, a onetime Federal Holiday was declared.  In 1926 a Congressional Resolution proclaimed the “recurring anniversary of should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations” and that the President should issue an annual proclamation calling for the observance of Armistice Day.  It still fell short of the declaration of a Federal holiday.  At the time 27 states had official observances.  Spread of the holiday, although popular with the public, was strongly opposed by business interests.

Although the rival veterans’ organizations both campaigned for the establishment of Armistice Day as an official Holliday and supported wounded veterans, their emphasis, and political agenda, was clearly different.  The VFW was more interested in obtaining benefits and support for veterans while the Legion promoted respect for the military and patriotism.  The VFW spearheaded the campaigns that resulted in the first Veterans medical benefits, vocational training for wounded veterans, the establishment of the Veteran’s Bureau, and an act of Congress to pay Great War veterans a Bonus in 1942. 

When the Depression hit veterans especially hard, the VFW endorsed efforts to get Congress to authorize an early payment of the promised Bonus.  Although not officially supporters of the Bonus March on Washington in 1932, they were outraged when troops under General Douglas MacArthur violently dispersed the demonstrators and destroyed their camp.  The Legion, on the other hand, supported the Army and painted the Bonus Marchers as Communists.

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, twice a Medal of Honor winner, was recruited by business leaders and high American Legion officials to be the "Man on a White Horse" to front a coup d'etat overthrowing Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.  Instead, he exposed the plot to Congress.

In the early days of the Franklin Roosevelt administration some Legion leaders were involved in the aborted plot to stage a military coup against the President and replace him with a military Man on a White Horse.  They planned to use legion members as Italian Fasciitis and German Nazis had used their Black and Brown Shirts, largely drawn from the ranks of their own veterans.  The plot was exposed when an officer who was offered the titular role military savior, Marine Corps General Smedley Butler publicly exposed the cabal.  The plot was averted but its leaders were so powerful that none were ever charged or tried for treason.

On May 13, 1938 Congress finally approved of a Federal Holiday on November 11 “dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day.’”

By then another world catastrophe was on the horizon.  After World War II veterans organizations and the public were both divided between creating a new public holiday making the end of that war, mostly likely on V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, or if Armistice Day should be renamed to include the new wave of veterans.  Veterans of World War I, as the first conflict was now called, were united in their desire to keep Armistice Day for themselves.  The huge wave of young vets was split.  Whatever happened, business interests were strongly opposed to the creation of any more Federal holidays for any reason.

 

After signing legislation creating the official new Federal Veteran's Day holiday, President Dwight D. Eisenhower posed with leaders of the American Legion, left, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, right. Representative Edwin Rees of Kansas, the sponsor of  the legislation is to the immediate left of Ike.

Finally, the issue was settled when on June 4, 1954 with a whole new crop of veterans from the Korean War already coming home, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Act of Congress that transformed Armistice Day into Veterans Day.

Traditionalists still grumbled.  But they were really given something to complain about in 1968 when Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which sought to ensure three-day weekends for federal employees and to encourage tourism and travel by celebrating four national holidays, Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Columbus Day on Mondays.  Federal Veterans Day was moved to the last Monday in October.  When the first observance under the new scheme was held on October 21, 1971 the public was outraged and most states refused to go along, maintaining November 11 as state holidays.  In many states that meant two observances—and competing claims for paid holidays by workers in private industry covered by labor contracts.  Businesses hated that. 

Bowing to public pressure, President Gerald Ford signed a new law returning the observation of Veterans Day to November 11th beginning in 1978. If November 11 falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the Federal government observes the holiday on the previous Friday or following Monday.  This year the original date can be observed and preserve the long weekend.

In recent years mid-week observance of Veterans Day has lowered its public profile.  Fewer and fewer cities and towns held Veterans Day parades.  Participation in local commemorations faded as first the World War I veterans passed and then the ranks of World War II and Korean Veterans shrank.  Veterans of the unpopular Vietnam War often felt unwelcome in Legion and VFW posts and were stigmatized by the public as troubled and possibly dangerous.

Veterans organizations became outraged as a wide-spread movement to keep kids in school resulted in Veterans Day being dropped as a school holiday in many places.  Ironically, with schools in session and many state legislatures mandating veteran curricula on that day, the holiday may have gotten a boost in interest among students who previously would have just enjoyed a day away from studies.

The long, lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan produced new rounds of veterans, many of them National Guardsmen and Reservists, older soldiers with deep roots in their home communities.  They are giving the day new meaning.

Younger Vets have replaced aging World War II, Korean, and Vietnam vets in parades like this pre-pandemic one in New York City. 

Both pro and anti-war people have used the day to advance their causes.  Despite the predictably bellicose stance of the national leadership of the American Legion and to a lesser extent the VFW, most of these new veterans adamantly refuse to allow the holiday to be politicized.  They want to honor the service of all veterans regardless of opinions on the wars by the public—or by veterans themselves.

Unfortunately, that determination was ignored by Donald Trump who famously yearned to stage an epic military parade including tanks and missiles to roll by a reviewing stand like observances in France—and Russia.  That wild dream was hosed down by the almost unanimous opposition of military leaders, technical difficulties, and the enormous expense.