My lottery number was 12 and I rode a bus to Houston for my physical. (Got classified 1-A so it was a matter of time.) When I got home my dad seemed a bit down and later that evening he told me that if I got drafted, he expected me to report. But that he did not want me to go to Viet Nam if I was ordered to go. He said we were not trying to win the war, it wasn't our war, and not to go.

Sounded strange coming from him, and three of my classmates heard similar things from their fathers. All those fathers had served, mine was wounded on Tarawa and Saipan, one of the other fathers fought in the Battle of the Bulge, another on Peleliu, and so it seemed strange to me at the time that they felt that way. Definitely a change in attitude from the time they served and the time for their sons to serve.

But the draft was stopped so I never had to make the decision.

The percentage of people protesting the war, burning draft cards, etc. was actually really small nationwide, and even smaller in Texas. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease of media attention.

Most people who opposed the war did so quietly by simply getting deferments (most of those college kids already had one, so burning their draft cards is gratuitous), and that was behind the scenes and didn't get a lot of attention.

As for the video's explanation of the shift to the GOP, I think there is a tie, but I don't think that's a very accurate description of how that happened. The video's author posits that Vietnam created skepticism about big government that shifted people away from the Democrats. I don't think this is true, because even though the South was solidly Democratic, they were skeptical of big government going back decades. The skepticism of big government in Democratic circles in Texas can be traced back to VP John Nance Garner basically deciding to run against FDR's new deal in 1940, and was on his way when FDR engineered a coup in the DNC and outflanked Garner to get a third term.

There were other factors not involving race that were helping in the shift to the GOP. The state had been rapidly developing industry and commerce since the 1940s, and those fields are closely aligned with the GOP, so more and more Texans were aligned with the GOP on some of those issues.

The real shift in the party that occurred relative to Vietnam was I think the reaction to the extremes of the anti-war left, and the belief that the Democratic Party was moving in an anti-American direction. LBJ was still able to win by attacking Goldwater, but when you get people like McGovern becoming the standardbearer (even though he flew B-24s in WWII, he was basically an anti-war pinko), a lot of Democrats really started losing faith in their party on the national level (though they still stayed loyal to local politicians).

Best explanation of why Texas and the South became Republican

Back in the day there were options to the draft, and the most honorable was to volunteer. The Army has more jobs involving brains than they do involving shooting people but testosterone gets in the way sometimes. Despite what you may read on Facebook there were a ton of cooks and clerks and mechanics in Vietnam, for some reason they just don't admit it. The draft was a 2 year commitment, I volunteered for helicopter pilot training, that was 3 years after flight school, or 4 years. It wasn't much safer but the living conditions were much better. Friend of mine got drafted while in law school, they let him finish but he went to Vietnam as an 11B grunt. He also didn't have 4 years to waste he said.

Yeah it is comical, so why did you set up such any easy to knock over straw horse?

BQ78 said:

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She's from Vandy, it is a Praeger video.

What specifically did she get wrong?

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She failed to follow the left wing narrative.

Quote:

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the idea that there wasn't a massive ideological realignment of the parties with conservative white Southerners transitioning to the Republican Party and African Americans transitioning to the Democratic Party beginning in the 20s is just comical.

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You obviously didn't take the time to watch the video. She discusses that very point.

I lived through much of that transition and watched my folks and family members change from Dems to Republicans. That change had nothing to do with racism, but everything to do with the growing dominance of the anti-military mindset within the Dem party, the fiscal liberalism of the Dem party, and the stripping of power from the states to the federal government.

During the 60s and 70s, the primary issue that united the Republican party was opposition to the Soviet Union and support for our military. The Democratic party was virulently anti-military.

The experience of your family does not negate the reality of the Democrat party in the 1960s and since