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The Beginnings of Artistic Antiwar Engagement: Artists and Writers Protest and the Artists’ Protest Committee

The beginning of substantial actions by the American antiwar movement in the spring of 1965 coincided with the first examples of antiwar engagement by American artists. These efforts took the form of what I have defined as “extra-aesthetic actions.” The New York–based group Artists and Writers Protest (AWP) organized the first extra-aesthetic actions. They consisted of two full-page advertisements run in the New York Times on April 18 (Easter Sunday) and June 27, 1965 (figs. 1 and 2). Both implored the cultural community to “END YOUR SILENCE” regarding the war.¹ The two ads listed a large group of well-known writers and artists who were supporters, such as Hannah Arendt, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joseph Heller, Arthur Miller, and Philip Roth.² In many respects, these lists functioned as the focus of the advertisements.³ Though these ads broke the ice for the American art community, they were not innovative in the context of the rest of the antiwar movement. Other professional groups—such as doctors, teachers, and physicists—had previously run similar advertisements in the Times, among other publications.⁴

In conjunction with the block of supporters in the April ad, AWP made two statements. First it outlined the principles of the group. The AWP described itself as follows: “We are grieved by American policies in Vietnam. We are opposed to American policies in Vietnam. We will not remain silent before the world. We call on all those who wish to speak in a crucial and tragic moment in our history, to demand an immediate turning of the American policy in Vietnam to the methods of peace.” Second, in response to an announcement by Johnson that he would begin “unconditional discussions” with North Vietnam, AWP urged people not to relax their insistence on an immediate end to the bombing and to “write to the president” about it.

1. Artists and Writers Protest, “End Your Silence” advertisement. Printed in the New York Times on April 18, 1965.

2. Artists and Writers Protest, “End Your Silence” advertisement. Printed in the New York Times on June 27, 1965.

AWP’s June ad presented its opinions more confidently. It depended slightly less on its signatories and instead marshaled specific historical evidence for its argument against the war. To begin with, it paralleled U.S. actions in the Vietnam War with France’s during the Algerian War for Independence (1954–1962), and compared the budding American antiwar movement with the anticolonialist movement against the Algerian War, in which French artists and intellectuals—from Jean-Paul Sartre and François Mauriac to Pablo Picasso and Albert Camus—called on the French people’s conscience to protest their leaders’ policy as immoral and to demand an end to the war.⁵

Comparing Vietnam and the situation in Algeria was not an abstract endeavor for some of the artists involved in AWP as well as other American artists who would become involved in antiwar engagement in later years. In particular, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (who were married) and Irving Petlin—all of whom would either go on to organize a significant proportion of New York and Los Angeles antiwar activities or create seminal antiwar artworks—had lived in Paris between 1959 and 1964 and had firsthand exposure to violence and antiwar protests in Paris related to the Algerian War.⁶ They witnessed bombings in Parisian cafés and newspaper offices by groups opposed to Algerian independence—such as the Organisation de l’Armée Secrete (OAS)—as well as public assassinations and militant (but for the most part peaceful) demonstrations against the war by the French Left. Petlin was almost killed due to his involvement in a February 1962 protest. A march he was taking part in against OAS was corralled by French police into the Charonne Métro station and the officers beat many of those involved. Nine died in the confrontation, and Petlin narrowly escaped. Petlin’s and Golub’s experiences undoubtedly prepared the ground for their later protests against Vietnam.⁷ Petlin, for one, saw the Algerian War as “a kind of pre-pattern of what would happen in the [United States] when a supposed liberal democracy tries to carry out a colonial war, and when it can’t win with its power, starts using methods which [are] horrendous.”⁸ In this way, he saw France “transformed by [the Algerian] war,” and he believed the United States “was headed in exactly the same direction.”⁹ Golub commented that because of his experiences in Paris, he was convinced the American government was lying to him during the Vietnam War. He explained, “Having witnessed the French involvement in Algeria, and having read about [France’s] earlier involvement in Vietnam, I understood that it wasn’t going to stop . . . that [it] would get bigger and bloodier, and that we had the technology to cause tremendous destruction and suffering and death.”¹⁰

In addition to paralleling Algeria and Vietnam, AWP’s second advertisement exposed the “invasion” of Vietnam by the United States as the continuation of over a decade of covert CIA actions. Further, it condemned the recent U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic as “nothing less than armed intervention in the civil war of another nation.” (This invasion took place after the first AWP ad had been run, and it was a major motivation behind AWP’s decision to publish a second so quickly.)¹¹ The ad concluded that these colonial aspirations of the United States would come to a horrible end. Nonetheless, while the first ad had recommended writing to the president, AWP’s second statement, like many protest actions that would appear during the era, offered no road map for how to solve these current problems. In other words, though the statement bore witness to current injustices and condemned U.S. involvement, it offered no policy.

Though the American art press barely acknowledged AWP’s ads, the second provoked a surprising reaction in the New York Times, and one that came indirectly from the Johnson administration. The staunchly conservative group Freedom House ran a full-page ad on July 25, 1965, titled “The Silent Center Must Speak Up.” The ad accused some of the artists who placed the AWP ad of being avowed communists and offered a list of reasons to support U.S. involvement in Vietnam. This list was presented in the form of a six-point “credo.” And above it the group inserted into the ad a letter of support for their effort from none other than President Lyndon Johnson.

The other group involved in extra-aesthetic actions during this early period of artistic engagement was the Los Angeles–based Artist s’ Protest Committee (APC). Petlin was a major factor in the group’s formation and the group’s chief instigator. Between 1964 and 1966, while he was involved with AWP (which, again, was based in New York), he was artist-in-residence at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and used his appointment to create a protest group similar to AWP in LA. Although APC existed only for one year between 1965 and 1966, it marked the beginning of artistic engagement on the West Coast, and it made a substantial impact on subsequent national antiwar engagement.

APC began with a meeting on the subject of artists and the war, which Petlin called at LA’s Dwan Gallery in the spring of 1965. Dwan was then best known as the West Coast gallery of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Petlin said in retrospect that he called the meeting almost on a “dare.” He explained, “I had been talking with people at dinners, casually, about how we should do something . . . and the reaction was: ‘this is Los Angeles—are you kidding?’ So I decided to [see if I could] get people out for a meeting. . . . The first meeting had twelve attendees. As meetings followed, they included more and more ‘artists and art world people.’”¹²

One of APC’s first actions was, again, an advertisement, run in the Los Angeles Free Press in May 1965 (fig. 3).¹³ The ad urged an end to the escalation of the war through three elements: the presentation of a symbol of a ladder leading upward accompanied by the word “stop”; the names of 174 supporters; and a statement. Like the second AWP ad, APC’s statement expressed its commitment to an American foreign policy that prioritized the immediate removal of U.S. forces from Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Following this explanation was a description of what APC called “The Realities.” The group used this device to bring its constituency up to speed on foreign affairs. In sum, these realities were: force cannot stop transition in world nations; people all over the world should have the freedom to revolt; the United States, through its military intervention, is “destroying” the United Nations and compromising its own ideals; and finally, U.S. actions abroad weaken its pleas for domestic freedom. In this respect, APC wrote that “Selma and Santo Domingo are inseparable,” aligning American activity in the Dominican Republic with Alabama state troopers’ recent attack of six hundred civil rights marchers on March 7, 1965, which sparked widespread response in the United States.

What differentiated APC’s ad from those created by AWP is that it informed the public of a subsequent plan of action in which they could take part. It explained that a “Stop Escalation” protest would occur that weekend in Los Angeles, during which the following would take place: (1) on Saturday, APC would cover exhibited paintings in a large number of galleries on La Cienega Boulevard (then the center of Los Angeles galleries) with a large band of paper bearing the image of the “Stop Escalation” ladder; (2) on Sunday,APC would picket the brand-new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) building—which at that time was the second-largest museum in the United States, after the National Gallery of Art—with placards bearing the “Stop Escalation” ladder; and (3) on Monday, APC would stage a “walk across” in which artists would use four crosswalks at a major intersection in the gallery district to block traffic on La Cienega during the Monday night Art Walk. The Art Walk was one of the major social and cultural events in Los Angeles at the time, during which all the major galleries—such as Ferus, Feingarten, David Stewart, and Felix Landau—held coordinated openings. The review column in the Los Angeles Times was even called “Art Walk.”

3. Hardy Hanson and Artists’ Protest Committee, “Stop Escalation” flyer, which was run as an advertisement in the Los Angeles Free Press on May 14, 1965, volume 2, issue 20, pp. 6–7. Offset lithograph. Sheet: 18 × 14-1/16 in. Charles Brittin Archive, Getty Research Institute. Used with permission.

More than one thousand people participated in the Saturday APC event. La Cienega between Melrose and Santa Monica was covered with Stop Escalation signs. They could be seen on parking meters, lampposts, telephone poles, and in the windows of many of the galleries. Some (though not many) of the galleries even took the step of covering their works of art with the placards. On Sunday, visitors to LACMA came face-to-face with the activists—a five-hundred-person vigil at the entrance of the museum—with many of them deciding to join the protestors. On Monday, one thousand people “carrying posters calling for an end to the bombing[,] . . . for the UN to take charge in Vietnam,” and occasionally shouting “stop the war,” walked the series of crosswalks in front the galleries on La Cienega in a line two blocks in length and several people wide that obstructed traffic at several intersections.¹⁴ Yet the three-day event drummed up little attention outside those in attendance. And the media virtually ignored it. In other words, as the Los Angeles Free Press explained, (with the exception of their own coverage) “the White Out was blacked out.” As a result it has been absent from almost all extant histories of the era.¹⁵ One can surmise that Los Angeles–based media outlets chose not to cover the event because of a fidelity to the cause of the war in these early years. Yet there was also the fact that the press may have believed the actions of artists were simply inconsequential.

Possibly in response to the Stop Escalation protest’s lack of impact, in the summer of 1965 APC moved the site of its public, extra-aesthetic protest against the war away from Los Angeles art galleries, museums, and the art-going public, and closer to the institutions of the U.S. government itself. This move ran counter to what American antiwar arts groups did in later years concerning extra-aesthetic actions. With the rise of the Art Workers’ Coalition and the Art Strike in New York in the late 1960s, these actions focused more on museums, which were seen as the most appropriate site for protests by artists. (This move paralleled a greater tendency of protest to focus on smaller institutions relevant to one’s profession, the idea being that through one’s own institutions, which one knew more about, more could be achieved.) APC’s new locus of protest was the RAND Corporation, the think tank for postwar U.S. foreign policy, which had a major hand in the U.S. approach to Vietnam. Petlin in particular argued for a focus on RAND because of his interaction with RAND employees in Los Angeles. One of them was a man named Roman Kolkowicz. Kolkowicz was greatly concerned about the escalation of the war, engineered in part by RAND, as well as the parallels between the war and the Holocaust, in which his family had died. Petlin had similar concerns. In later years he commented that the Holocaust—like his experiences in France—made him aware of “what governments and powers can do . . . the cruel and horrible things that can happen to men and women.”¹⁶ Petlin met other RAND employees at various art parties, dinners, and openings on Monday nights on La Cienega, “the way artists tend to get to know such people.” These men were quite different from Kolkowicz. According to Petlin, the way they approached the war indicated an ignorance of Vietnam’s particular identity. He explained, “Listening to [these men] talk about the war, it was as if things like culture and history did not matter. They didn’t seem to know or care that the French had been unable to defeat the Vietnamese, or what the Vietnamese might be fighting for. The RAND people I met had a detached, businesslike approach to the war. They were the intellectuals, the ‘liberals,’ in a way—that’s how they saw themselves.”¹⁷RAND’s “intellectual” theories regarding the war, which were made known at the time, were quite drastic, and they horrified Petlin. In general, RAND wanted to relocate the civilian population to small areas. Then, on what they could expect to be either empty land or Vietcong territory, they would “unleash the full effects of American technological warfare.”¹⁸

The Los Angeles Free Press announced that APC would be protesting at RAND headquarters in a front-page article on June 26, 1965, the day before the protest would take place. The article included a statement from APC—echoing the thoughts of Petlin—that explained its view of RAND. It read:

The Rand Corporation is the site and target of this demonstration because it is for us here in Los Angeles a physical and visible symbol of the “new” strategic thinking that dominates the Johnson administration. This area of function by the Rand Corporation supports administrative unilateral recourse in foreign lands and thereby violates our commitment to the United Nations as the proper peacekeeping agency for the world. Today, the United Nations celebrates its twentieth anniversary of founding on American soil. We respectively celebrate this U.N. anniversary. We dishonor any national establishment which knowingly and indifferently eliminates the function of the United Nations.¹⁹

Regardless of whether it was because they were forewarned, RAND employees immediately intercepted APC’s protest. At first APC was bluntly dismissed. When the RAND employees learned that APC planned to be there on a weekly basis, however, they proposed alternatives to public action. They first asked if APC would agree to debate its issues with the organization privately at a future date, but APC members rejected this notion out of hand, because they wanted the protest to remain public in some way. Both parties eventually agreed to have two debates—one public and one private. While the attention and consideration RAND paid to APC may seem surprising, it is essential to remember that at this juncture in the war Vietnam protests were quite rare, and therefore were taken very seriously by the Johnson administration. Robert McNamara himself advised RAND about the APC protest. It was supposedly his idea to propose a debate. At the time, McNamara allegedly explained that he wanted to see what this group of forward-looking intellectuals was thinking, and in so doing, use his findings to understand what the rest of the country would be thinking six months in the future.²⁰

The private debate between APC and RAND took place on July 7, 1965, at RAND headquarters. Though accounts differ, among those involved were Petlin, Golub, Larry Bell, Lloyd Hamrol, Craig Kauffman, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Max Kozloff, and Annette Michaelson and nine RAND representatives.²¹ The physical details of the debate are clear. It lasted nearly six hours; it took place at a large conference table; papers were distributed to the attendees; there was careful questioning and answering, and much tension between the two groups; and it was highly secure (to the extent that APC members had to be accompanied to the bathroom). Additionally, it was observed by at least twelve members of the RAND Corporation, possibly including Daniel Ellsberg (who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971), and it was purportedly recorded—though when APC members asked for a tape after the debate, RAND said the recording device they used had malfunctioned and no tape existed.

Francis Frascina describes the first debate’s content as follows:

The artists attributed the United States methods and their origins to historical Fascist methods of state terror, with technology being used as a new potential method of genocide either through indifference and inattention or through intent and focus: technology made either possible. The RAND representatives argued that different technologies and methods were essentially [attributable] to the nature of the difference between the two societies in the conflict; each one fought with what was “best” for itself. For the artist the enormous difference between the relative effects of B-52 bombers and Third World guerrilla warfare was ignored by RAND’s ideological defense of the United States in Vietnam. A basic moral gulf that separated the two sides was the artists’ disbelief that these intelligent RAND people could feel so positive about continuing such an unequal policy against a peasant society. A basic historical and political gulf centered on the role of the United States as an imperialist power since the late 1940s particularly in Southeast Asia.²²

While no reaction from RAND employees was recorded, APC attendees felt after the debate that they were on equal footing with RAND regarding their understanding of the current state of the war and what future action the United States should take. This was an important realization for those involved. In particular, it was a major turning point for Golub, one that would have a profound effect on his future artistic production. In retrospect he explained:

I . . . learned something in that meeting . . . It was kind of profound, really. Here were these experts, big guys, okay? They had all these studies, some of them had been to Vietnam, they knew the numbers, and so on. But really, when you got right down to it—and this was a startling thing for me—they basically had no better idea than we did as to what was actually going on. Where was the war headed? What would the situation be like a year or two down the road? They had no idea, really . . . It was in this meeting . . . [that] I saw that those in power cannot be simply trusted to do the right thing, to even know the right thing—[and] that they play hunches, take gambles, even, as in this case, with peoples’ lives. And you could say that ever since that meeting I have . . . been trying to call people’s attention in one way or another to the way power is used and abused.²³

The planned public debate between APC and RAND took place on the evening of August 3, 1965, at the Warner Playhouse in Los Angeles. Each side had three representatives. For APC, they were Golub, Petlin, and Kozloff. Representing RAND were two employees who had participated in the previous debate: Guy Pauker, an expert on Southeast Asia, and Bernard Brodie, a well-known author and nuclear strategist. A China expert also joined them, though this individual’s name is not in the historical record. The moderator was Judd Marmor of UCLA, a well-known psychiatrist. The debate sold out and attendance was far over capacity. Four hundred people fit into the playhouse but eight hundred showed up. Spectators stood in the aisles and sat outside the theater. Those outside listened to the proceedings on a loudspeaker.

In general, what APC and RAND said over the course of the public debate was similar to that of the private debate, although during the public debate RAND’s comments were less candid and APC’s more rhetorical. Like the private debate, APC also remembered the public debate as a “win” for their side. As Lucy Lippard explained, “To many it appeared that the small but intense and extremely well-informed artists’ group came out on top.”²⁴ She commented that the debate also gave the “sense not only that [one] should do something about the war—but could.” The reticence of RAND representatives to speak freely during the debate, which Petlin believes was because they were under instruction not to reveal classified information, helped APC’s side. The artists were also quite confident, knowledgeable, well-spoken, and skilled in debate—especially Golub—and their arguments showed that the way the United States was pursuing the war was indefensible, even in front of “non-experts.”²⁵ Further, the audience, made up primarily of hundreds of antiwar students, nearly all backing the artists’ position (over the course of the evening), became so vocal in their support of APC and their dislike of RAND that the moderator could hardly keep them quiet. After the public debate, RAND executives were reportedly instructed never “to get into such a spot again.”²⁶

At the end of 1965, even with the successes of the RAND debate, APC reviewed its previous actions and decided that they were not having the desired effect. The war had escalated virtually unabated, and the group’s messages had been effectively kept away from a national audience. Consequently, APC decided it needed to pursue higher-profile tactics that would have more lasting impact and be more in keeping with the profession. Thus was born the idea for a large, collective artwork that would make a visible statement against the war. This idea eventually became 1966’s Artists’ Tower of Protest (also commonly known as the Peace Tower).

As a final note, apart from the actions of AWP and APC in 1965, it is worth mentioning artists’ involvement in extra-aesthetic actions related to the poet laureate Robert Lowell’s public refusal to participate in June 1965’s White House Festival of the Arts—the first festival of its kind to ever be sponsored by a president. In the New York Times (and excerpted in the New York Review of Books), Lowell had expressed his “dismay and distrust” of U.S. foreign policy and commented, “Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments.”²⁷ Lowell further explained that he would not want his attendance to be “mistaken for personal approval of . . . Johnson’s Vietnam policies.”²⁸

While all the artists who had been invited did attend—and among them were Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Larry Rivers, Alexander Calder, Paul Strand, and Jack Levine—they did so only after signing a telegram in support of Lowell (and they explained their attendance by claiming they did so “in order to give the arts in general a much-needed boost”).²⁹ During the festival, the critic Dwight MacDonald also collected signatures for a petition supporting Lowell. Those who signed included Isamu Noguchi, Herbert Ferber, Peter Voulkos, Willem de Kooning, Art News executive editor Thomas Hess, Brandeis University museum director Sam Hunter, and Library of Congress consultant Reed Whittemore. The outcome of the petition is unknown. However, the affair attests to the involvement of high-profile artists and art professionals in antiwar activities from the early stages of the war as well as their interest in making an antiwar statement in a decidedly public forum.