The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest, and Agony in Dixie by Joseph A. Fry (review)

A half-century after the Vietnam War, the South and the U.S. military remain deeply intertwined. Southerners are the most likely Americans to enlist, and when they do, they are likely to stay in the region; more than one-third of active-duty troops are based in Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. Nonetheless, the region’s response to the Vietnam War—the most divisive conflict in twentieth-century U.S. history—has garnered only passing attention. Joseph A. Fry’s masterfully researched and well-written account of southerners’ diverse engagement with the intractable war admirably fills this gap.

The South, Fry asserts, is unique. Embracing a regional identity more deeply felt than those of other regions of the country, southerners have also embraced a distinctive view of the United States’ global interests and of the military’s role in securing them. As a result, “[t]he South’s preferences for staunch anti-communism, unilateral interventions, and the decisive use of force” led southerners to support the Vietnam War more stridently than did other Americans (p. 46). In his detailed discussions of how tenets of southern identity facilitated the war even as its futility became evident, Fry reveals how southerners allowed the war to persist longer than it might otherwise have done and “afforded both Presidents [Lyndon B.] Johnson and [Richard M.] Nixon vital political space as they reluctantly made decisions leading toward US withdrawal” (p. 283).

The great strength of Fry’s book, however, is his emphasis on the diversity of southern attitudes and the anxieties that ensued as dominant southern perspectives collided with the war’s realities. The opposition of some southern legislators, like Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, is familiar. Most compellingly, Fry shows how everyday southerners also came to question the conflict. For some, opposition was rooted in enduring “sensitivity to outside influence” tied to remembrances of the Civil War (p. 141). For others, even staunch anticommunist and pro-military attitudes could not endure when faced with the possibility of their own children being killed. Fry also takes the relatively few southern campus protests seriously, showing how they helped cast antiwar sentiment as a national phenomenon. To show the diversity and evolution of these views, Fry relies on his deep research. Having consulted every major southern newspaper, he also uses constituents’ letters to many of the region’s legislators to lay bare the excruciating tension between southerners’ deeply held values and the war’s realities.

At times, however, Fry’s focus on southern identity adds less to an understanding of the Vietnam War than one might hope. His discussion of southern service members’ experiences focuses on draft inequality, feelings of obligation, and the allure of combat, but the uniqueness of those men’s experiences compared with those of other young Americans reared during the Cold War seems a difference of degree rather than kind. Additionally, because southerners were, as Fry notes, the primary actors, accounts of familiar episodes like the Fulbright hearings do not cover significant new ground. A more serious omission, however, is Fry’s relatively scant discussion of the war’s legacy for southerners. Fry persuasively contends that “the sense of national invincibility, innocence, and exceptionalism that allegedly perished in the jungles of Vietnam survived most intact in Dixie” (p. 363). But he might have used his formidable research and analytical skills to explore more fully how that enduring view facilitated Sun Belt conservatism’s rise and, with it, a renewed commitment to military spending and an interventionist foreign policy.

These critiques, however, should not detract from Fry’s achievement. The American South and the Vietnam War: Belligerence, Protest, and Agony in Dixie is a valuable book—deeply researched, well written, comprehensive, and persuasive. For courses on the Vietnam War, this book offers a regional counterpoint to texts that...