President Nixon visited the Lincoln Memorial and chatted with protestors who were sleeping there in anticipation of a protest organized in reaction to the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The President encountered about nine protestors and chatted with then in the early morning hours.
Protests were occuring all across the country on this day in reaction to the Cambodian invasion and in reaction to the shooting at Kent State.
On this day, about 450 Canadian peace activist crossed into the United States at Blaine Washington, location of the Peace Arch, and committed acts of vandalism in the town. The presence of Canadian peace activist was completely nonsensical and their act of vandalism contrary to the claimed spirit of their actions. It reflected more on events in Canada than it did in the United States in which the formerly highly conservative country was rocketing into a state of liberalism in which it remains, although it is contested, that started under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau. Canada, in the less than one hundred years prior to 1970, had fought in the Boer War, World War One, World War Two and the Korean War. It opposed the Vietnam War in a way, although it's often forgotten that it contributed a hospital ship to the allied forces there at one time and its contribution in terms of military volunteers approximated the number of American draft evaders who sought refuge there.
Another Canadian protest occurred on the same day on Parliament Hill when Canadian pro abortion activist protested a recently passed Canadian law addressing abortion. This occurred three years prior to Roe v. Wade in the United States. At the time, just ten years following the advent of birth control pharmaceuticals, the direction things were going in seemed obvious. Canada would repeal its law eighteen years later and no Canadian federal law has passed since. Since that time, however, support for abortion in the United States has reversed to the point that the majority of Americans oppose it and its only a matter of time until the weakly reasoned case of Roe is repealed and the matter is returned to the states. Canada, which is highly liberalized, has been slower to follow but has started to, with there being a small resurgent conservative movement that has come about over issues such as this, but also due to really extreme social speech provisions enacted in Canadian law.
Showing how odd the times were, retrospectively, Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke to a disappointing crowd of 10,000. . . 100,000 had been expected, at Georgia's Stone Mountain Park. The Park is the location of a giant carving into natural stone depicting Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson, all mounted. It's impossible to imagine an American politician speaking there today.
The memorial had first been proposed in 1914, which was in the midst of the boom in Confederate memorial building across the south. As we've discussed elsewhere, most of the now controversial monuments to Southern rebel figures and to the Southern Civil War cause in general date from this period. The monument itself does not, however, as its construction had an exceedingly odd history.
Land for the monument was purchased in 1916 but a sculptor was not hired until the early 1920s, with that sculptor being Borglum, of Mount Rushmore fame. He was fired over a financial conflict in 1925, however. Congress got into the act in 1926 with the approval of the sale of commeorative coins for the effort thereafter.
After Borlum departed he destroyed his models which lead to the Association dedicated to the effort seeking to have him arrested. In a sort of retaliation, the Association had the face of Lee that Borglum had partially completed blasted off of the mountain. Subsequent sculptors took up the work but it lingered until 1958 when the State of Georgia purchased the area in order to complete it in a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education. The state park was dedicated on April 14, 1965, 100 years plus one day after Lincoln's assassination in 1865. The dedication of the monument occured in 1970, with Vice President Agnew appearing for the event, but it wasn't actually completed until March 3, 1972. It's now the biggest tourist site in Georgia.
Now, of course, a lot of the smaller Confederate monuments have come down, but many more remain. It's amazing to realize that as late as the 1970s there were still Southern public efforts to put them up, and that they were very associated with protest over desegregation. The degree to which the support for the war had been lost was demonstrated by Agnew's failure to draw a crowed in the highly conservative south where opposition to the war had not been strong.
On the same day, Jimi Hendrix played in Ft. Worth and the Doors played in Columbus, Ohio.
