The Vietnam War: A Glimpse through the American protest song

Abstract

Among all the conflicts that the U.S. has participated in during the 20th century, the Vietnam War has left the deepest wound in American society. After being proclaimed as a war to defend democracy, the American people showed their disagreement with this intervention. American society expressed their unrest through different ways in literature, cinema, or music. The latter showed the concerns of the beat generation, the hippie movement and all those who opposed the conflict through a music genre: the protest song. This paper analyzes the genre of the protest song through a selection of songwriters and their themes as a source, alongside an exhaustive book documentation about the issue regarding specific topics related to the Vietnam War. By using them, we demonstrate how the conflict affected American society during the 1960s and 1970s and how this war was criticized due to controversial topics such as the arms industry, the recruitment or draft, anti-war protestors, and casualties. This analysis provides a portrait of the conflict and its consequences. In the same way, we investigate the subsequent evolution of a genre that, even though it has remained, has languished after a period of hyperactivity.