No Vietnam = Less Riots in 1967 ?

I've tried a similar question some time before, but this is more specific:

OTL, in 1964, there were three well known riots -- in Harlem, Rochester, and Philadelphia -- that saw roughly 1,000 injuries combined. The next year, there was just one major riot of note -- but it was Watts, and it alone saw injuries of about 1,000. The year after saw a few riots, but not at nearly the same level as the previous two summers.

Then came 1967. 159 race riots across the US. In Detroit alone there were 2,000 riot related injuries. In Newark, there was 1500. And the numbers piled up in the many more. This was followed next year by another series of riots affecting at least 110 cities -- only these triggered by a single event, the assassination of Martin Luther King. Over a thousand were injured in DC alone. And it so happens that the worst of these riots had origins in returning Vietnam veterans.

Wikipedia said:

In the early hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police officers raided the unlicensed after-hours drinking club, expecting to find only a few people inside, but instead there were 82 people celebrating the return of two local veterans from the Vietnam War. The police attempted to arrest everyone present. While they were arranging to transport the arrestees, a crowd gathered around the establishment in protest

Click to expand...

FWIR, Detroit was not alone that year in terms of tensions having some roots in returning black veterans.

Is it possible, then, that an absence of escalation in Vietnam would be enough to somewhat dampen the violence of this fateful summer?

John Fredrick Parker said:

I've tried a similar question some time before, but this is more specific:

OTL, in 1964, there were three well known riots -- in Harlem, Rochester, and Philadelphia -- that saw roughly 1,000 injuries combined. The next year, there was just one major riot of note -- but it was Watts, and it alone saw injuries of about 1,000. The year after saw a few riots, but not at nearly the same level as the previous two summers.

Then came 1967. 159 race riots across the US. In Detroit alone there were 2,000 riot related injuries. In Newark, there was 1500. And the numbers piled up in the many more. This was followed next year by another series of riots affecting at least 110 cities -- only these triggered by a single event, the assassination of Martin Luther King. Over a thousand were injured in DC alone. And it so happens that the worst of these riots had origins in returning Vietnam veterans.



FWIR, Detroit was not alone that year in terms of tensions having some roots in returning black veterans.

Is it possible, then, that an absence of escalation in Vietnam would be enough to somewhat dampen the violence of this fateful summer?

Click to expand...

IMHO, this is actually very plausible and not hard to do. A large part of the reason for the rioting was exactly because of Vietnam; take that disaster of a war out of the equation and you indeed have a recipe for less violence.
However, though, there is always a possibility of other factors coming into play as well.......

Is it plausible it would be enough to make 1967 no cumulatively worse than 1964 or 1965?

John Fredrick Parker said:

Is it plausible it would be enough to make 1967 no cumulatively worse than 1964 or 1965?

Click to expand...

I'd say yes. Without Vietnam (or with one that's universally supported), there's going to be a lot less pissed off people.

Alright then, let's say you have this, plus no MLK assassination the next year -- does that mean 1968 doesn't see someone like Nixon campaigning on "law and order"? And if so, is this enough to avert the modern incarnations of the War on Crime and War on Drugs?

Less riots...well, to what degree less, and how much less do you need in order to prevent the rightward turn in politics?

Hard to say, the 1966 midterm elections were influenced by the aftermath of Watts and that's well before things really kick off.

To me, the big question is what happens with the Vietnam "peace dividend"? Kicking the War on Poverty into high-gear would probably help, but it's tricky after the '66 midterms, so '66 is the key year. Military spending spiked by $16 billion in that year, according to Campagna's Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War.

So if Johnson can get a significant chunk of that for the War on Poverty (although what he spends it on is crucial), while obviating the doubling of inflation that led the Fed to shift to contractionary monetary policy and thus a credit crunch in '66, he could possibly draw some of the teeth of the rightwing reaction. Some loss of seats is probably inevitable given the lopside Democratic victories in '58 and '64 that left a lot of Democrats in marginal seats, but the key thing is whether Johnson can keep his working majority.

How much impact this is going to have on the riots is uncertain - a huge amount of what's going on is decades of frustration and rage over police treatment of non-whites, and I don't know how much War on Poverty spending is going to affect that (likewise, "riot insurance" will still play in the conservatives' favor even without worsening conditions in '66 and '67).

StevenAttewell said:

Less riots...well, to what degree less, and how much less do you need in order to prevent the rightward turn in politics?

Click to expand...

Well JTBC, you don't have to avert a rightward turn in politics (at least per se) -- you could well see the US react to the Great Society with libertarian pushback, or to Civil Rights to some kind of (though hopefully, anti-segregation) Social Conservatism, for example -- but I'm specifically talking about an emphasis on "law and order" as a theme, that ads like this spoke to.

well the detroit riots started when cops busted up a party for some guys who just got home and some guys about to leave..

Vietnam threw gasoline on so many different conflicts in the 60s that it's hard to imagine the decade without it. But - to be optimistic about human nature - you could imagine that by 1967, a lot of the visible, most obvious signs of segregation are vanishing. With the prospect of slow but steady improvement in race relations, you don't have the riots or at least not as big.

Obviously, there are other problems in the big northern cities that simply might push them off into the 1970s. You have large swathes of factories being closed down, white flight and the burgeoning drug problem. So with places like Newark and Detroit being hollowed out, the African American middle class picking up sticks as well, you might be left with similiar tindersticks, waiting for a long hot summer...