How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America

by Joseph Darda

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022

A cultural history of how white men exploited the image of the Vietnam veteran to roll back civil rights and restake their claim on the nation

“If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks,” Frederick Douglass asked in 1875, peering into the nation’s future, “what will peace among the whites bring?” The answer then and now, after civil war and civil a white reunion disguised as a veterans’ reunion.
 
How White Men Won the Culture Wars shows how a broad contingent of white men––conservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and nonvet––transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reconciliation. Conservatives could celebrate white vets as raceless embodiments of the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices must be heard. Erasing Americans of color, Southeast Asians, and women from the war, white men with stories of vets on their mind could agree, after civil rights and feminism, that they had suffered and deserved more. From the POW/MIA and veterans’ mental health movements to Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” they remade their racial identities for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism in the image of the Vietnam vet. No one wins in a culture war—except, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army green.

Genres: History, Race, American History, Politics

277 pages, Hardcover

Published May 25, 2021

Reviews

[Fredrik deBoer · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may genuinely be the most intellectually dishonest book I've ever read. I wrote about its basic argument and an article that discussed it here; I've since read the book. The basic point I'll make here is this. The idea that it was returning Vietnam war veterans who powered the Reagan revolution is simply indefensible; the people who powered that movement (like, I don't know, Ronald Reagan) were almost all too old to serve in Vietnam. Vietnam also coincided with a dramatic decline in the political power of veterans, in terms of representation in the electorate and Congress. But what really makes this an act of academic misconduct is that Darda constantly complains about a supposed overrepresentation of white men and enlistees in the image of the Vietnam war vet, when in fact the absolutely dominant majority of those vets were white and enlisted, making Darda's complaints nonsensical. Some 65% of all combat personnel in Vietnam were enlisted, 70% of combat casualties were enlisted, and 85%+ of both were white. From this, Darda generates a narrative that the picture of the white volunteer Vietnam veteran is a disproportionate myth! He constantly hides the football to obscure the fact that his essential complaint makes no sense. Particularly funny is consideration of POWS and complaints that the movement about them was mostly concerned with white men - when almost all POWs were white, since 80%+ of POWs were pilots and pilots were almost all white. This book is worse than a joke; it's an insulting and dangerous act of revisionist history designed to bring Darda academic celebrity by hitting a soft target. Despicable, really.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great way to understand why white people are so weird about veterans. Explains the Vietnam war and its impact on American politics in a way I never would have gotten from my APUSH class.

[Charlotte Hogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is engaging and illuminating--Darda's cultural history is smart and readable and will reach a range of readers. I've recommended it to a recent college graduate whose dad was in the military, Gen-Xers who grew up surrounded by media trying to make sense of Vietman, and more. I find it one of those books I keep bringing up in conversation. Darda carefully builds the case through deft but accessible analysis that includes, among other things, hero creation through icons in literature (O'Brien), film (Stone--both Oliver and Sylvester), and music (Springsteen). The book walks readers through the ways "stories about the Vietnam War organized a more subtle white racial movement, a movement so mainstream that most Americans didn’t see it as either racial or as a movement at all" (p. 13). Worth your time.

[Mills College Library]

305.809 D215 2021