User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

Written by
Katharine Westaway

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Abstract: Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.

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Note: This paper served . . . me to participate.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr07dick

On a in weekend in October of 1967, tens of thousands of demonstrators amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam." Mailer’s nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history. Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

Armies is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture vis-à-vis the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a rendering of the American reality”, and Armies becomes Mailer’s attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character. When Armies was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no. Mailer addresses the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war

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protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared." Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history, and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their experience." Mailer understood the great possibility of his novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America." Armies was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence, their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste." Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture. But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and

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patriotism. Most important, Mailer, as narrator/protagonist, gives Americans outside the march a sense of what it was to be a demonstrator.

One of Mailer’s main tasks as an author is to acquaint his readers with the character of the marchers themselves, so a primary concern of Armies is media bias as it affected the American public’s sentiments about the acts of resistance happening all around them. But the mainstream press was hawkish: before the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, “not a single major newspaper or television network call[ed] for the end to the war." In fact, the mainstream media plainly opposed the anti-war effort “in the heady days early in the war when American correspondents doubled as government handmaidens, they openly condemned anti-war protesters as traitors." This was the atmosphere in which Mailer attempted to tell a moving tale of the anti-war movement.

Mailer renounces conventional journalism; he doesn’t trust the media to analyze the anti-war movement fairly. Media studies of the time show that “throughout [the] various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders for the military." Mailer frequently points out the unfair coverage that the press gave to the actions of the demonstrators and how "[e]mphasis was put on every rock thrown, and a count was made of the windows broken. (There were, however, only a few.) But there was no specific mention of The Wedge [a brutal crowd control technique, which resulted in beating of the marchers]. Indeed, stories [of police brutality] quickly disappeared." This becomes evident as Mailer distinguishes the reporting of mainstream press from that of the alternative press. The alternative press (such as the Catholic Worker, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, National Guardian, and Ramparts) was critical of the war going back in some cases to the 1950s when troops were first deployed to Vietnam.

One of the most damning charges in the book is the brutality perpetrated against the marchers, who were for the most part peacefully protesting; some protestors were “clubbed until they were broken and bloody." The abuse was amplified by the fact that it often went unreported. For the reports of police violence, Mailer relies upon outside sources because he had been arrested early in the demonstration before most of the violence occurred. Yet he gains credibility when integrating outside witnesses and reportage into a book that was mostly reported from his standpoint,

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and these external sources may have lent more authority to the charge that protesters were abused. For any journalist there was difficulty in covering something as large as the march on the Pentagon “because of the extensive terrain in question and the rapid movements of the protestors and soldiers." Acting as a novelist-journalist, Mailer collects varied media accounts of the march and weaves them into the narrative; here he features one Leftist perspective of the march, identifying the witness as “Harvey Mayes of the English Department at Hunter”:

One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him—understandably, I think—and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier’s side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl’s leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of the troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force.

Mailer was obliged to portray the graphic scenes from the march which were missing in many media reports. Perhaps the stories of abuse were reported on more by the Left media because the Left journalists were among the protestors, down in the tussle, while mainstream reporters observed from a safe distance, avoiding a potential encounter with violent police.

Mailer also gave accounts of “the [mainstream] press [who were], in the aftermath, antagonistic to the March” and so included passages of an article from the New York Times which stated that “[i]t is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. . . . [M]any officials here are surprised that there was not much more violence." Notice that the Times does not mention any specific violence of the MPs. Numerous commentators condemned not the beatings meted out to the demonstrators, but the protest itself; David Brinkley called it a “coarse, vulgar episode." However, Maurice Isserman, one marcher, remembers the marchers for the most part as peaceful, remaining “pretty true to Gandhian principles."

In looking beyond Mailer’s collection of media accounts of the march, it

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