-
20. Troubled Times
- University Press of Colorado
- Chapter
- Additional Information
349 20 Colorado’s future looked bright in the summer of 1963. Among the more than 5 million tourists visiting the state that year, a few caught sight of Debbie Reynolds and other Hollywood stars in Montrose where they were filming The Unsinkable Molly Brown, a movie based on Colorado’s own Margaret Tobin Brown. In Pueblo a white fantail pigeon beat 373 other birds to become the champion pigeon at the annual State Fair, which marked its ninety-first anniversary by attracting 160,000 people during six days in late August. Drought seared crops on the plains, but Denver celebrated what it thought was a long-term solution to its water woes as it began filling Dillon Reservoir with Blue River water. Theatergoers watching the first act of the touring Broadway musical Camelot at the Denver Municipal Auditorium in September might well have thought their state was as fortunate as King Arthur’s fabled kingdom. Camelot soon went sour, and so did Coloradans’ effervescent optimism. Beside the “good news today” stories, newspapers reported ugly events—four African American girls killed when white supremacists bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama; civil rights organizer Medgar Evers assassinated in Mississippi. In Vietnam, Buddhist monks, protesting the US-backed government , doused themselves in gasoline and died in flames. Already alerted to the dangers of DDT and other toxic chemicals by Rachel Carson, whose best-selling book The American people are daily faced with news that attempts to brainwash them into approving of a war that can only bring shame and disgrace to the most powerful nation in the world along with misery and destruction to a weak and helpless people.1 —Rodolfo “CoRky” Gonzales, auGust 6, 1966 troubled times DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c20 chapter twenty 350 Silent Spring (1962) was serialized in the Denver Post, Coloradans learned in September 1963 that the nation’s milk contained record levels of radioactive Strontium 90 created by atmospheric testing of atomic bombs. The issues of 1963—war in Vietnam, civil rights, the environment—soon took center stage. The Civil Rights Movement, initially focused on ending discrimination against African Americans, was embraced by those anxious to advance the rights of Hispanics, Native Americans, women, the disabled, gays, and lesbians . Rachel Carson’s environmental warnings flowered into a broad environmental movement, and the antiwar crusade grew stronger as the war in Vietnam intensified. Vietnam War opposition AfterWorldWarII,theUnitedStatesdedicateditselftostoppingCommunism. Sometimes America’s efforts worked, as in Greece; sometimes they ended in stalemate, as in Korea; and sometimes, as in Vietnam, they led to agony. Most Coloradans knew little and cared less about the remote Southeast Asian country in the early 1960s. By late 1963 the United States had sent more than 16,000 troops there, and in August 1964 President Lyndon Johnson won congressional approval to widen US involvement. According to historian Frank Harper, antiwar demonstrations began in Colorado in mid-February 1965 as “Dennis Atkins of the Socialist Party” and “a tiny contingent of protestors marche[d] near the state capitol building in Denver.”2 As the war escalated and casualties increased, the protests grew larger and more frequent. Some burned their draft cards in a symbolic gesture of defiance. Historian Phil Goodstein recounted the story of Mendel Cooper, who partially destroyed his card at a rally on October 16, 1967. The son of World War II Holocaust survivors, Cooper had “vowed that he would never be a soldier in a criminal war.” At a University of Denver demonstration he proclaimed, “I protest repression in the name of ‘anti-communism.’ I protest killing in the name of God and country.” He also criticized the Pledge of Allegiance.3 Cooper was sent to the penitentiary for five years. Fueled by the escalation of the Vietnam War, antiwar protests continued for years. President Richard Nixon’s April 1970 announcement of the US invasion of Cambodia sparked numerous demonstrations, including one at Kent State University in Ohio where state troopers killed four students. In Colorado [18.191.24.202] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:36 GMT) troubled times 351 more than 12,000 protested at the State Capitol. At the University of Colorado (CU), 500 students occupied Hellems Hall. CU activists also maddened motorists by blocking the Denver-Boulder Turnpike for sixteen hours on May 9, 1970. Students and faculty at the University of Northern Colorado canceled late May classes.4 At the University of Denver, students slapped together a shack and tent village they called “Woodstock West Peace...