Vietnam War: Spit or Myth?
An item yesterday referred to a column by Slate’s Jack Shafer, in which he asserted that the “myth” that Vietnam War opponents spat on veterans has been debunked. Shafer rests this claim on Jerry Lembcke’s 1998 book, “Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam,” which Shafer says he has made his “best efforts to publicize”:
Lembcke found no news accounts or even claims from the late 1960s or early 1970s of vets getting spat at. . . . Then, starting around 1980, members of the Vietnam War generation began sharing the tales, which Lembcke calls “urban myths.”
But Jim Lindgren, blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, says he “easily found many accounts published in the 1967-1972 period claiming spitting on servicemen.” They include articles in the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as smaller papers. Here’s just one example:
Among the journalists who gave first-hand accounts of spitting on soldiers was James Reston, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Spitting was one of the actions tame enough for Reston to describe in his New York Times front page story covering the October 21-22, 1967 Washington anti-war demonstrations: “It is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. Many of the signs carried by a small number of militants . . . are too obscene to print.”
If such stories existed, why did Lembcke fail to find them? Another Lindgren post offers this quite plausible explanation:
Having done literally thousands of WESTLAW and LEXIS/NEXIS searches, I can say that when something starts appearing in the press in the early 1980s, that is almost always a function of when these two news services started including the full texts of major newspapers.
We recall once editing an article in which the author claimed that some idea gained greater currency because an Nexis search for it turned up more references with each passing year. The trouble is, Nexis includes more publications with each passing year, so that results like this will be deceptive unless you limit the search to publications that have full Nexis coverage for the entire period of interest.
Did Lembke, a sociologist at the College of the Holy Cross, really make such a basic error in methodology?
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