The United States ended combat operations in Vietnam 50 years ago this month, setting the stage for its withdrawal two years later — and the end of what was then the nation’s longest war and costliest defeat.
St. Louis played a major role. It sent its young men to fight and die. Its big employers — companies like McDonnell Douglas and Monsanto — were major military contractors. And its universities — especially Washington University — saw their share of antiwar protests, some violent.
The antiwar movement — the biggest and most organized in U.S. history — is the focus of just two of 15 chapters of “Left in the Midwest,” a new scholarly look at progressive activism in St. Louis in the 1960s and ’70s.
The Vietnam chapters are largely about Washington University activists, the destruction of the ROTC buildings there and Howard Mechanic, the student protester turned fugitive.
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The rest of the book — edited by two St. Louis University faculty members, Amanda Izzo, associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Benjamin Looker, associate professor of American Studies — deals with other battles.
Some will be familiar to most St. Louisans. The newspapers covered them as they unfolded. The famous Baby Tooth Survey of the early 1960s that helped confirm alarming levels of strontium-90 caused by above-ground atomic testing. The long campaign by Percy Green’s ACTION to shame the Veiled Prophet organization. The unsuccessful effort to keep City Hall from closing Homer G. Phillips, the northside hospital that served the African American community.
Less familiar are stories of how gay St. Louisans fought discrimination — and their allies in the religious community. How women networked to support access to abortion before the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. How they called out rape culture and organized the first “Take Back the Night” march in 1979. How the lesbian community, facing constant harassment, created and defended safe spaces.
It’s hard to exaggerate the hostility the gay community faced in the 1970s. As the book recounts, A Woman’s Place — a Lesbian Alliance-sponsored venue near Gravois Park — didn’t last a year before it was firebombed. Four years later, Mor or Les, a new lesbian bar in Dutchtown, also was hit by an arsonist. A police sergeant told the Post-Dispatch at the time, “South St. Louis just isn’t ready for a lesbian bar.”
The book is a reminder that the groundwork for some stories was laid many years earlier. Long before Ferguson erupted in 2014, St. Louis activists worked to end police violence. One long-ago case mentioned in the book: Dennis Benson, a 23-year-old man who died July 9, 1980, two days after he struggled with police responding to a disturbance call. Fourteen witnesses told the Post-Dispatch that officers beat Benson repeatedly with flashlights and nightsticks after he was handcuffed. The case sparked protests, but a grand jury refused to indict any officers.
While it covers a lot of ground, “Left in the Midwest” leaves a lot out. For example, the push for economic conversion, trying to get manufacturers like McDonnell Douglas to shift away from military production. Activists — not all progressives or left-wingers — opposed Union Electric’s nuclear plant in Callaway County (and lost) and the Meramec Dam (and won). Groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) fought redlining in the 1970s. And late in the decade came campaigns to end apartheid in South Africa and against U.S. meddling in Central America.
The book also could have benefited from a deeper look at some of the economic changes that were transforming St. Louis during this time, the loss of major employers, local ownership, offshoring and plant closings.
For most of Missouri, especially the GOP leadership in the Legislature, St. Louis is a hotbed of progressive tomfoolery. At the same time, some progressives who live here think the place is culturally conservative and politically stagnant — and they despair.
As one longtime activist quoted in the book says, “It’s a great place to organize, but a tough place to make a difference.”
Still, “Left in the Midwest” shows a lot can be accomplished by regular folks, pushing to make things a little better.