Let There Be Peace

I hoped when Posters for Peace was published in 2015 by the Penn State University Press some of the anonymous artists of the posters would come forward. One artist, Jay Belloli, was known to me at the time of publication. Then another of the artists, Phil Allen, identified himself. Now another of the artists, Robin Repp has come forward.

With her permission I enclose Ms. Repp's letter to me about the creation of the posters. The plate numbers to which Ms. Repp refers are from Thomas W. Benson, Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

Here are the posters to which Ms. Repp refers, with plate numbers from the published book.

Robin Repp. Let There Be Peace and Let It Begin With Me. Plate 28.

Robin Repp. Did We Really Come in Peace for All Mankind? Plate 47.

Robin Repp and Michael [?]. It's Only the Beginning. Plate 27.

December 19, 2019

Hello Mr. Benson,

Thank you for your recent letter.  Yes, it was me who wrote the review on Amazon of your book, Posters for Peace. l really enjoyed reading your book.

Plate 28 and 47 are two of mine. Also, plate 27 I collaborated with a friend, Michael whose last name, I don't remember. It was May 1970, when I made my posters at home with photo silk screen techniques, printing on large paper, 26x40 and 17x22 that I purchased at a local store(Ponderosa?) on Page Street. I bought my screens at California Process Supply in Berkeley.  All of my posters were not part of the workshop that printed on that smaller, old computer paper. I made another poster that is not in the book, "The Cruel War is Raging", included in the Guardian article listed below.

I did bring my screens into the classroom when everyone started printing posters in large quantities. Lincoln Cushing, who lives in Berkeley has researched political posters extensively. You may know him? (http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Bancroft/1970folio/1970folio.html and http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Bancroft/1970workshop.html)

The Guardian, London, interviewed me a couple of years ago when there were 2 shows in London, one at the Stapero Modern and another exhibition at The Victoria and Albert Museum which included several of my posters.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jan/30/after-kent-state-1970s-anti-war-student-art-in-pictures

and

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/30/poster-power-anti-vietnam-war-art-berkeley-california-students-exhibition-shapero-modern

That would be great if you can make the proper attributions. If I can connect with the other artists, that would be wonderful.  The 50 anniversary exhibition idea would definitely be of interest. Since the original show was in the Berkeley Art Museum, organized by Hershel Chipp, seems like that would be the perfect place, or Worth Ryder Gallery.

Thank you for reaching out to me. I look forward to hearing more in the future.

Best regards,
Robin Repp

 Artist 

OCCCA

http://www.occca.org

https://www.saatchiart.com/robinrepp

STOP! Which Came First?

 

Stop Sign with Santorum bumper sticker. Near a Wegmans supermarket, State College, Pennsylvania, January 2016.

 

"Stop War" poster, silk screen, Berkeley, California, c. May 1970, from Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Special Collections, Penn State University Libraries and Thomas W. Benson, Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015).

When is the last time you saw a STOP sign decorated with an addition that constituted it as a political slogan? The "Stop War" poster shown above was part of the peace movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 1970, after the Cambodia invasion and the shootings at Kent State. Did the poster prompt others to add words to STOP signs, or was the poster artist inspired by a practice that was already ongoing? I can't remember, though it seems to me I saw STOP WAR on public STOP signs around the country at about that time, and perhaps before.

The STOP SANTORUM sign in the photograph above refers to and is a relic of the presidential primary campaign of 2012, and it was still there this week when I took the photograph -- January 2016.

It seems to me that the tone of these STOP WAR alterations was at the time somewhat transgressive, suggesting not only an appeal to peace but an act of resistance by defacing what is, after all, government property and a sign of government's regulative power. As the years have gone by, that cluster of rhetorical suggestions seems to me to have dimmed somewhat, with the worldwide spread of graffiti. Altering a STOP sign is still illegal, and so still formally an act of resistance or at least of exclamatory, even imperative, appeal, but the power has been diluted by use and context. STOP sign defacements are no longer the property of the Left, though probably most of such uses are anti-establishment in context and appeal. One has often seen, for example, Ron Paul, and now Rand Paul defacement of traffic signs. Are we all anti-establishment now?

See also http://nyti.ms/1Lrhss3 "Why Can't the GOP Stop Trump?" March 3, 2016.

No Nixon Agnew War -- artist identified as Karl Kasten

"No Nixon Agnew War." Poster, silk screen. Artist: Karl Kasten. From the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Penn State University libraries. 

The artist has been identified as Karl Kasten, a professor of art practice at Berkeley in 1970. Source: note to the author from Phil Allen, received November 3, 2015 (see next note on blog). The poster is Plate 20 in Thomas W. Benson, Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

Run This One Up Your Flagpole, Dick -- artist comes forward

"Run this one up Your Flagpole, Dick!" Poster, silk screen, Berkeley, California, c. May 1970. Artist: Phil Allen. The poster is in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Pennsylvania State University libraries.

Since the publication of Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015) I have been hoping that some of the unknown artists who designed and screened these posters would come across the book and get in touch with me to reveal something more about the origins, organization, and aftermath of the posters, which were produced at the University of California, Berkeley, in the weeks after the U. S. invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State University and Jackson State College.

Just yesterday, one of the artists, Phil Allen, came forward to identify himself as the artist of the poster "Run this on up Your Flagpole, Dick!"  Here is his note (reproduced here with permission):

-----

Dear Prof. Benson,..

I'm glad I thumbed through the copy of Posters for Peace newly displayed at my local city library, as two of the depicted posters --screened at UC-Berkeley in the Spring of 1970--hold more-than-routine attention.

I designed/screened the one shown in Plate 18. It gave me a chance to exercise my newly-recovered (childhood) interest in flags, and include 'clever' language and an Oliphant-like caricature of Mr. Nixon. The registration number '4973' was shared by other artists, as required by some quasi-authority in charge of the liberated classroom in Kroeber Hall. The slanted line and triangle is my stylized monogram. Vexillarily, I've since gone on design and research flags. If there is an authority on the football penalty flag, I am he.

Plate 20 was the work of one of my art-practice professors, Karl Kasten. It has a level of quality missing in most of the others we cranked out. Nice of him to include one of the lesser grim personalities of the era.

Plates 27, 31, and 53 have always been particularly effective for me. 27 and 53 were to me something of a personal invitation to wrestle with inner beliefs and outward commitment, and 31 is possibly the most enduring single image of all our creations. I still see it around.

Many folks hereabouts had quite a time of it recently, as last autumn the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement was celebrated with many gatherings, albeit with fewer notables due to death. I found myself unable to get involved in '64, still being in high school at the time, and full of adult envy. I decided to be a grump about it last year until I realized that my time came during that highly-charged, far less remembered Spring of 1970: Cambodia's invasion and 4-5 more killings at Kent/Jackson, and locally...Peoples' Park (1 more death); many energized youth who got progressives elected to state and national office, and those posters. When 2020 comes around, I'll be ready.

phil allen, Cal '71 (Art)

-----------
If this posting reaches anyone who was one of the artists, or who knows one of the artists, I hope you will come forward so that we can continue to add more fully to the historical account. Please consider sharing this on Facebook and other social media, so that it might eventually reach some of the other artists.

See also Amerika Is Devouring Its Children

God Bless the Establishment

On May 11, 1970, New York construction workers again attacked students who were demonstrating against the war. A front page picture shows workers holding up a huge printed sign bearing the words

WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW
GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT

In Augusta, Georgia, state troopers and the National Guard confronted a riot. Four African Americans were shot and killed.

poster: from poster workshop at University of California, Berkeley, May 1970. Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Penn State University.

see:

Bigart, Homer. “Thousands Assail Lindsay In 2d Protest by Workers: Thousands Assail Lindsay at City Hall.” New York Times. May 12, 1970.

“4 Dead, Guard Called In Augusta Disorder: 3 DIE, GUARD SENT TO AUGUSTA, GA.” New York Times. May 12, 1970.

Fatal Politics

Ken Hughes, Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection (University of Virginia Press, 2015).

from the publisher:

"In Fatal Politics, Hughes turns to the final years of the war and Nixon’s reelection bid of 1972 to expose the president’s darkest secret.

"While publicly Nixon promised to keep American troops in Vietnam only until the South Vietnamese could take their place, in private Nixon agreed with his top military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers that Saigon could never survive without American boots on the ground. Afraid that a pre-election fall of Saigon would scuttle his chances of a second term, Nixon put his reelection above the lives of American soldiers. Postponing the inevitable, he kept America in the war into the fourth year of his presidency. At the same time, Nixon negotiated a "decent interval" deal with the Communists to put a face-saving year or two between his final withdrawal and Saigon’s collapse. If they waited that long, Nixon secretly assured North Vietnam’s chief sponsors in Moscow and Beijing, the North could conquer the South without any fear that the United States would intervene to save it. The humiliating defeat that haunts Americans to this day was built into Nixon’s exit strategy. Worse, the myth that Nixon was winning the war before Congress "tied his hands" has led policy makers to adapt tactics from America’s final years in Vietnam to the twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, prolonging both wars without winning either.

"Forty years after the fall of Saigon, and drawing on more than a decade spent studying Nixon’s secretly recorded Oval Office tapes--the most comprehensive, accurate, and illuminating record of any presidency in history, much of it never transcribed until now-- Fatal Politics tells a story of political manipulation and betrayal that will change how Americans remember Vietnam. Fatal Politics is also available as a special e-book that allows the reader to move seamlessly from the book to transcripts and audio files of these historic conversations."

Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers, and Democratic Deliberation

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is an Oscar nominated independent documentary, aired on public television, that tells the story of how Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department insider, released the Pentagon Papers, revealing the extent of deception about America's involvement in Vietnam from the Truman administration onward.

For me as a scholar interested in rhetoric and public deliberation, it is chilling to be reminded of the extent to which democratic deliberation is undermined by the secrecy imposed by the conditions of a national security state in a condition of more or less perpetual war -- which has been the situation for the United States since World War II.

On May 11, 1973, the trial judge in Ellsberg's case declared a mistrial on the grounds of government misconduct, specifying that Ellsberg could not be tried again.

Mother's Day 1970

poster: University of California, Berkeley, c. May 1970. Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Penn State University.

On Mother's Day 1970, President Nixon celebrated with his wife Pat and their two daughters, Julie and Tricia, and with Mamie Eisenhower and her grandson David, husband of Julie and a Nixon son in law.

The New York Times published a brief and charming story of the smiling group on the White House lawn and described the prayer service, with a guest clergyman from Ohio and the choir of the Calvin Theological Seminary. Mr. Nixon wore a blue suit and a big smile.

On the same day, in a front page story, the Times published a long interview with eleven Kent State University students, some of them Vietnam veterans, about the shootings at Kent State. One student said that he now understood what it must be like to be a black person in America; a couple of the women said that the events at Kent State convinced them they should not become mothers. A student told of talking to some residents of his home town who said of the events at Kent State that the students should all be shot.

In Berkeley, students continued to produce posters, several of them inspired by themes of motherhood.

See:

“Nixon Family Prays Together at Mother’s Day Services in White House.” New York Times. May 11, 1970.

“The View From Kent State: 11 Speak Out: The View From Kent State: A Discussion With 11 Outspoken Ohio Students.” New York Times. May 11, 1970.

President Nixon's Pre-Dawn Visit

 

poster, Berkeley, CA, May 1970. From Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Penn State University

On May 8, 1970, large numbers of student demonstrators arrived in Washington, D.C. to oppose the war in Vietnam and the killings earlier in the week at Kent State University. Numbers were estimated as some 75,000.

In the pre-dawn hours of May 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon and his valet, Manolo Sanchez, along with a group of Secret Service agents, drove to the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon told the students that in 1939 he had thought Neville Chamberlain was right, but that he soon realized Winston Churchill had been right. One student on the scene told reporters that when she told Nixon she was a student at Syracuse University, he talked to her about football; to a student who had come from California he talked about surfing.

The excursion was evidently thought to be weird, condescending, or completely out of touch.

In the White House, the 82nd Airborne had been summoned, and troops relaxed in basement corridors. Buses were parked bumper to bumper in front of the White House to prevent its being stormed by protesters.

photo and story at WETA

Robert B. Semple Jr., "Nixon, In Pre-Dawn Tour, Talks to War Protesters," New York Times, May 10, 1970.

Tom McNichol, "I Am Not a Kook: Richard Nixon's Bizarre Visit to the Lincoln Memorial," The Atlantic, November 4, 2011.

Amerika Is Devouring Its Children

Jay Belloli, "Amerika Is Devouring Its Children," poster, Berkeley, California, c. May 1970. This image from the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest collection at Penn State.

Francisco de Goya, "Saturn Devouring His Son," oil, 1819-1823; original in the Prado, Madrid; this image public domain from Wikipedia.

See also Thomas W. Benson, Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015).

Most of the student- and faculty-made antiwar posters circulated from the Berkeley campus in May 1970 were anonymous. Some time later, Jay Belloli revealed his authorship of "Amerika Is Devouring Its Children." Belloli had been an undergraduate art history major at Stanford who in 1970 was an art history graduate student at Berkeley. See his recent YouTube account of his work.

All His Parents' Love and Devotion

President Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia, announced on April 30, 1970, sparked immediate and widespread opposition across the country and in Congress. Students at many campuses engaged in demonstrations opposing the widening of the war.

On May 4, 1970, National Guard troops opened fire on distant students on the campus of Kent State University. Four students were killed; nine more were wounded. The poster shown here, from the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at Penn State uses a photograph taken by a student photojournalist that day as part of a poster appealing for citizen action for peace.

Incursion or Invasion? Cambodia, 1970.

On April 30, 1970, Richard M. Nixon, in a televised speech from the White House, announced a Cambodian "incursion," sparking widespread protest among citizens, students, and political leaders.

Posters for Peace

Thomas W. Benson, Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015.

from the publisher:

“With Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action, Thomas Benson generously shares an archival treasure trove with readers. By itself that might be enough, but Benson doesn't stop there. He offers a thoughtful and sophisticated rhetorical analysis of the posters that reads them in historical context, elaborates the visual traditions from which they drew their representations, and considers how viewers of the era might have responded to them. In doing so, he makes a compelling case for the posters' rhetorical importance, both then and now. The book skillfully models the practice of visual rhetorical history for students and scholars alike.” —Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois

“Thomas Benson has rediscovered and shared a treasure of poster art, along with some history, brilliantly told.” —Tom Hayden

“Long before there was a subdiscipline called ‘visual rhetoric,’ Thomas Benson was probing the rhetorical dimensions of visual images. His books on the films of Frederick Wiseman and on political documentaries set the standard for rhetorically informed criticism of documentary film. Now Benson has turned his attention to the political protest posters that appeared in Berkeley, California, throughout the tumultuous year of 1970. Benson was a visiting assistant professor at UC–Berkeley during the 1969–70 academic year, where he witnessed firsthand the distribution and placement of many of the posters he examines in this book. He places the posters in their political, cultural, social, and rhetorical contexts, and he engages in a close reading that uncovers the layers of meaning and significance that were clear to the creators at the time of production but which now, almost forty-five years later, are often lost in the mists of time. This is a masterful work of recovery that reminds us anew of that time when the whole world was watching.” —Martin J. Medhurst, Baylor University

“Thomas W. Benson's Posters for Peace examines numerous political posters that circulated in Berkeley, California, in 1970 during intense controversies over the Vietnam War and racism. Benson’s critical approach features close examination of the posters in combination with creative comparisons in order to explore their visual rhetoric in the national scene. To develop his central argument, he traces earlier sources of consequence pertaining to posters as a rhetorical medium with an international history. Benson's book offers his readers a wealth of previously unstudied primary materials, which are featured and catalogued in the course of his careful history and criticism of the protest rhetoric.” —Lester C. Olson, University of Pittsburgh

By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians—including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon—exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy—even in a time of war.

Political Poster Collection now of Flickr

The Political Poster collection that I donated to Penn State is now available on Flickr -- which permits comments. I am hoping that this will elicit some participants, and perhaps some of the artists, to recall the era. The collection is here.

In Buddha's Company

Richard A. Ruth, In Buddha's Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2010).

from the publisher:

“From 1965 to 1972 Thailand sent nearly 38,000 military personnel to fight in the Vietnam War. Based on interviews with rank and file volunteers, who saw themselves as Buddhist warriors, this book is the first serious study of Thailand’s involvement in the war. Richard Ruth challenges the stereotypes and lazy generalizations about this forgotten episode of the war, and he offers fresh and compelling arguments to explain how this episode has contributed to the militarism in Thailand’s modern history.” —Craig J. Reynolds, Australian National University

“The Vietnam War has generated a vast literature, but Richard Ruth has succeeded in producing a wholly original study of interest both to military historians and Southeast Asia specialists. Ruth displays a deep understanding of and sensitivity toward Thai culture and reveals much about how the Thai soldiers—most of them from poor families in upcountry areas—viewed and interacted with the Americans who trained and sponsored them, the rural residents of South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong enemy. His work sheds new light on Thailand’s involvement in the Vietnam War and on non-elite Thai culture in the mid-twentieth century.” —E. Bruce Reynolds, San Jose State University

“Breaking with the standard American-centric portrayal of Thai soldiers as Washington’s ‘mercenaries’ in the Vietnam War, Ruth provides Thailand and Thai combatants with agency. What makes this study particularly original is Ruth’s account of how that agency manifested itself ‘down below’ in South Vietnam—and back in Thailand.” —Christopher Goscha, Université du Québec à Montréal

In Buddha’s Company explores a previously neglected aspect of the Vietnam War: the experiences of the Thai troops who served there and the attitudes and beliefs that motivated them to volunteer. Thailand sent nearly 40,000 volunteer soldiers to South Vietnam to serve alongside the Free World Forces in the conflict, but unlike the other foreign participants, the Thais came armed with historical and cultural knowledge of the region. Blending the methodologies of cultural and military history, Richard Ruth examines the individual experiences of Thai volunteers in their wartime encounters with American allies, South Vietnamese civilians, and Viet Cong enemies. Ruth shows how the Thais were transformed by living amongst the modern goods and war machinery of the Americans and by traversing the jungles and plantations haunted by indigenous spirits. At the same time, Ruth argues, Thailand’s ruling institutions used the image of volunteers to advance their respective agendas, especially those related to anticommunist authoritarianism.

Drawing on numerous interviews with Thai veterans and archival material from Thailand and the United States, Ruth focuses on the cultural exchanges that occurred between Thai troops and their allies and enemies, presenting a Southeast Asian view of a conflict that has traditionally been studied as a Cold War event dominated by an American political agenda. The resulting study considers such diverse topics as comparative Buddhisms, alternative modernities, consumerism, celebrity, official memories vs. personal recollections, and the value of local knowledge in foreign wars. The war’s effects within Thailand itself are closely considered, demonstrating that the war against communism in Vietnam, as articulated by Thai leaders, was a popular cause among nearly all segments of the population. Furthermore, Ruth challenges previous assertions that Thailand’s forces were merely “America’s mercenaries” by presenting the multiple, overlapping motivations for volunteering offered by the soldiers themselves.

In Buddha’s Company makes clear that many Thais sought direct involvement in the Vietnam War and that their participation had profound and lasting effects on the country’s political and military institutions, royal affairs, popular culture, and international relations. As one of only a handful of academic histories of Thailand in the 1960s, it provides a crucial link between the keystone studies of the Phibun-Sarit years (1946–1963) and those examining the turbulent 1970s.