“Interesting enough, instead of radicalizing America, the anti-war movement started to fizzle out after Kent State.”
Living in the DC Metro area during those times, that was not the way I remember it. Here is an interesting quote I found:
In the spring of 1970, President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings (followed by those at Jackson State) sparked the greatest display of campus protest in U.S. history. A national student strike completely shut down over 500 colleges and universities. Other Americans protested in cities across the country; many lobbied White House officials and members of Congress. Over 100,000 demonstrated in Washington, despite only a week’s prior notice. Senators John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church sponsored legislation (later passed) prohibiting funding of U.S. ground forces and advisers in Cambodia. Many labor leaders spoke out for the first time, and blue-collar workers joined antiwar activities in unprecedented numbers. However, construction workers in New York assaulted a group of peaceful student demonstrators, and (with White House assistance) some union leaders organized pro-administration rallies.
Despite worsening internal divisions and a flagging movement, 500,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington in April 1971. Vietnam Veterans Against the War also staged protests, and other demonstrators engaged in mass civil disobedience, prompting 12,000 arrests. The former Pentagon aide Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Meanwhile, the morale and discipline of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam was deteriorating seriously: drug abuse was rampant, combat refusals and racial strife were mounting, and some soldiers were even murdering their own officers.
With U.S. troops coming home, the antiwar movement gradually declined between 1971 and 1975. The many remaining activists protested continued U.S. bombing, the plight of South Vietnamese political prisoners, and U.S. funding of the war.
The American movement against the Vietnam War was the most successful antiwar movement in U.S. history. During the Johnson administration, it played a significant role in constraining the war and was a major factor in the administration’s policy reversal in 1968. During the Nixon years, it hastened U.S. troop withdrawals, continued to restrain the war, fed the deterioration in U.S. troop morale and discipline (which provided additional impetus to U.S. troop withdrawals), and promoted congressional legislation that severed U.S. funds for the war. The movement also fostered aspects of the Watergate scandal, which ultimately played a significant role in ending the war by undermining Nixon’s authority in Congress and thus his ability to continue the war. It gave rise to the infamous “Huston Plan”; inspired Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers led to the formation of the Plumbers; and fed the Nixon administration’s paranoia about its political enemies, which played a major part in concocting the Watergate break-in itself.
from The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Copyright © 1999 by Oxford UP.”
What I remember most is those two massive demonstrations in DC of 100,000 and 500,000 people. Not mentioned in the article I quote above is that thousands of the more militant protesters marched on the Pentagon with much tear gas and arrests. That may be the 12,000 arrests referred to in the quote. I spoke with someone a few years later who said they had driven down from up north with friends, were stopped by police and had the car completely dismantled searching for weapons. None found. They had been joking on the phone about hooking up with a very radical group and figured their phones were bugged.
Perhaps today’s radicals think they can be as effective as the antiwar movement was in affecting the new administration using the lessons of the past.