THE WAR AT HOME Movie Review
1979 Barry Alexander Brown, Glenn Silber
Directors Glenn Silber and Alexander Brown make no claims of objectivity in their documentary about opposition to the war in Vietnam, neither do they attempt to show the nationwide “big picture.” Instead they focus almost entirely on one community—Madison, Wisconsin. While that college town does not have the notoriety of Berkeley or Harvard, it is a legitimate microcosm for campus resistance to the war. During most of the years that Silber and Brown describe, I was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the development of student involvement followed virtually the same course there.
Silber and Brown tell their story through the familiar combination of television news film, other archival footage, and interviews with key participants. They begin in 1963. John Kennedy is President and times are good in “the all-American town.” Even so, anti-nuclear weapons demonstrations have already been staged at the University of Wisconsin, and on October 16, the first anti-Vietnam war activities take place. Nobody pays any real attention, but American involvement intensifies. So does public interest. By 1966, when the Midwest is still “a hotbed of lethargy,” the first sit-in occupation of a university administration building occurs.
During those same years, Lyndon Johnson's campaign releases the infamous girl-with-daisy-and-mushroom-cloud ad against Barry Goldwater, and Sen. Teddy Kennedy appears on campus to defend the administration's decisions to send more men to Vietnam. The student movement is not specifically or entirely anti-war. Local problems are important to such groups as the Student Tenant Union and the Black Student Union. In ‘67, demonstrations against the Dow chemical company for its manufacture of napalm provide a preview of the Democratic convention in Chicago the next year, and violence becomes a more important consideration for the anti-war movement. The footage of a party on Mifflin Street that somehow becomes a confrontation could have come from almost any college town at that time. It's obvious in the sequence that neither the kids nor the local police knew exactly what they were doing. Both sides made mistakes and false assumptions, and it's remarkable that more people weren't hurt or killed sooner. The most sympathetic interviewee is Ralph Hanson, the University Police Chief who appears to have understood the true nature and intention of young demonstrators but still could not control what happened.
That escalation of violence was still a couple of years away. The filmmakers follow the disorganized, make-it-up-as-we-go-along nature of the student demonstrations through the McCarthy campaign, and the more serious opposition to the Army Mathematics Research Center which, finally, was the target of a serious bomb attack that killed one person. They note national events—the Moratorium of 1969, the killings at Kent State and Jackson State in May of 1970, the mining of North Vietnamese ports in ‘72—but their focus stays on Madison. Local television stations and archives provided a wealth of footage, superbly edited by Chuck France. When it comes to the interviews, the filmmakers stay off camera and let all of their subjects speak for themselves. No tough questions are asked; no one is put on the spot. At the same time, nostalgia for the good old days of wild youth is absent, too. The film was produced in 1979, before warm and fuzzy ‘60s revisionism became a cottage industry. Anyone who can recall those times with any accuracy remembers the fear that the country was flying apart, that the center could not hold with such angry passion fueling the extremes.
Even today, those who are still angry at the excesses of the opposition may fault Silber and Brown for things that they have left out. On the important points, though, and on the emotions of the times, they get it right.
Producer: Barry A. Brown, Glenn Silber, Catalyst Films. Running Time: 100 minutes. Format: VHS.