And babies

Last updated
The Art Workers Coalition poster And Babies connected the My Lai massacre with anti-war sentiment And babies (anti-Vietnam War poster).jpg
The Art Workers Coalition poster And Babies connected the My Lai massacre with anti-war sentiment

And babies (December 26, 1969 [2] ) is an iconic anti-Vietnam War poster. [1] It is a famous example of "propaganda art" from the Vietnam War, [3] that uses a color photograph of the My Lai Massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968. It shows about a dozen dead and partly naked South Vietnamese women and babies in contorted positions stacked together on a dirt road, killed by U.S. forces. The picture is overlaid in semi-transparent blood-red lettering that asks along the top "Q. And babies?", and at the bottom answers "A. And babies." The quote is from a Mike Wallace CBS News television interview with U.S. soldier Paul Meadlo, who participated in the massacre. The lettering was sourced from The New York Times, [4] which printed a transcript of the Meadlo interview the day after. [5]

Contents

According to cultural historian M. Paul Holsinger, And babies was "easily the most successful poster to vent the outrage that so many felt about the conflict in Southeast Asia." [1]

History

Partial transcript [5] of the Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo in which Meadlo describes his participation in the massacre:

Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
A. Right.
Q. And you killed how many? At that time?
A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can't – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
Q. Men, women, and children?
A. Men, women, and children.
Q. And babies?
A. And babies.

In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), a group of New York City artists who opposed the war, used Haeberle's shocking photograph of the My Lai Massacre, along with a disturbing quote from the Wallace/Meadlo television interview, [6] [7] to create a poster titled And babies. [1] It was produced by AWC members Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks and Frazer Dougherty along with Museum of Modern Art members Arthur Drexler and Elizabeth Shaw. [1] The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had promised to fund and circulate the poster, but after seeing the 2 by 3 foot poster, pulled financing for the project at the last minute. [2] [8] MoMA's Board of Trustees included Nelson Rockefeller and William S. Paley (head of CBS), who reportedly "hit the ceiling" on seeing the proofs of the poster. [2] Both were "firm supporters" of the war effort and backed the Nixon administration. [2] It is unclear if they pulled out for political reasons (as pro-war supporters), or simply to avoid a scandal (personally and/or for MoMA), but the official reason, stated in a press release, was that the poster was outside the "function" of the museum. [2] Nevertheless, under the sole sponsorship of the AWC, 50,000 posters were printed by New York City's lithographers union.

On December 26, 1969, a grassroots network of volunteer artists, students and peace activists began circulating it worldwide. [2] [8] Many newspapers and television shows re-printed images of the poster, consumer poster versions soon followed, and it was carried in protest marches around the world, all further increasing its viewership. In a further protest of MoMA's decision to pull out of the project, copies of the poster were carried by members of the AWC into the MoMA and unfurled in front of Picasso's painting Guernica – on loan to MoMA at the time from the Rockefeller family, the painting depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians. [2] One member of the group was Tony Shafrazi, who returned in 1974 to spray paint the Guernica with the words "KILL LIES ALL" in blood red paint, protesting about Richard Nixon's pardon of William Calley for the latter's actions during the My Lai massacre. [9]

Although the photograph was shot almost two years prior to the production of the poster, Haeberle had not released it until late 1969. It was a color photograph taken on his personal camera, which he did not turn over to the military, unlike the black and white photographs he took on a military camera. Haeberle sold the color photographs to Life magazine where they were first seen nationally in the December 5, 1969, issue. [2] When the poster came out a few weeks later, in late December 1969, the image was still quite shocking and new to most viewers but already becoming a defining image of the My Lai Massacre and U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. [4]

The message of the poster was that American soldiers were killing babies in Vietnam, and therefore that the war was immoral. According to cultural historian M. Paul Holsinger, And babies was "easily the most successful poster to vent the outrage that so many felt about the conflict in Southeast Asia. Copies are still frequently seen in retrospectives dealing with the popular culture of the Vietnam War era or in collections of art from the period." [1] According to historian Matthew Israel, "My Lai became the representative incident of war crimes in Vietnam. It sparked a great deal of antiwar protest, including efforts by artists, the best-known of which was the And babies poster." [4]

The poster was included in two major MoMA exhibitions: Kynaston McShine's 1970 exhibition of conceptual art, Information; and Betsy Jones' 1971 The Artist as Adversary. [4]

During the 1972 Nixon reelection campaign, the poster was revived with the text replaced with "Four More Years?" in blood red. [4] The British punk band Discharge wrote the song "Q: And Children? A: And Children" on the album Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing (1982).

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Modern Art</span> Art museum in New York City, U.S.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">My Lai massacre</span> 1968 U.S. war crime during the Vietnam War

The My Lai massacre was a war crime committed by the United States Army on 16 March 1968, involving the mass murder of unarmed civilians in Sơn Mỹ village, Quảng Ngãi province, South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. At least 347 and up to 504 civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. soldiers from C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade and B Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Division. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12. The incident is the largest massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Calley</span> American army officer convicted for leading massacre at My Lai, Vietnam (1943–2024)

William Laws Calley Jr. was a United States Army officer convicted by court-martial of the murder of 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. Calley was released to house arrest under orders by President Richard Nixon three days after his conviction. The United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia granted him a new trial, but that ruling was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. His initial life sentence having been modified to a term of 20 years and then further reduced to ten, Calley ultimately served three years of house arrest for the murders. Public opinion at the time about Calley was divided. After his dismissal from the U.S. Army and release from confinement, Calley avoided public attention.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seymour Hersh</span> American investigative journalist (born 1937)

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Varnado Simpson</span> American mass murderer

Varnado Simpson was an U.S. Army soldier who participated in the My Lai Massacre, torturing, murdering, and mutilating multiple South Vietnamese civilians. He committed suicide nearly 30 years later.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald L. Haeberle</span> United States Army photographer at Mỹ Lai

Ronald L. Haeberle is a former United States Army combat photographer best known for the photographs he took of the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968. The photographs were definitive evidence of a massacre, making it impossible for the U.S. Army or government to ignore or cover up. On November 21, 1969, the day after the photographs were first published in Haeberle's hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, discussed them with Henry Kissinger who was at the time National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon. Laird was recorded as saying that while he would like "to sweep it under the rug," the photographs prevented it.

The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was a massive demonstration and teach-in across the United States against the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. It took place on October 15, 1969, followed a month later, on November 15, 1969, by a large Moratorium March in Washington, D.C.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Ridenhour</span> American whistleblower and investigative journalist (1946–1998)

Ronald Lee Ridenhour was an American known for having played a central role in spurring the federal investigation of the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam. When he first learned of events there, he was serving in the United States 11th Infantry Brigade in Vietnam. He gathered evidence and interviewed people before the end of his tour. After returning to the US in 1969, he wrote to President Nixon, members of his cabinet and two dozen Congressmen recounting what he had learned. A full-scale Department of Defense investigation eventually took place.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernest Medina</span> U.S. Army captain during the Vietnam War; partly responsible for the 1968 My Lai massacre

Ernest Lou Medina was a captain of infantry in the United States Army. He served during the Vietnam War. He was the commanding officer of Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry of the 11th Brigade, Americal Division, the unit responsible for the My Lai massacre of 16 March 1968. He was court-martialed in 1971 for his role in that massacre, but acquitted the same year.

Tony Shafrazi is an American art dealer, gallery owner, and artist. He is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York City who deals in artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle.

Dinh Q. Lê was a Vietnamese American multimedia artist, best known for his photography work and photo-weaving technique. Many of his works consider the Vietnam War, known as the American War in his native country, as well as methods of memory and how it connects to the present. Other series of his, such as his From Hollywood to Vietnam, explore the relation of pop culture to personal memory and the difference between history and its portrayals in media. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal described him as "one of the world's most visible Vietnamese contemporary artists".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sơn Mỹ Memorial</span> Memorial to victims of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam

The Sơn Mỹ Memorial is a memorial to victims of the My Lai Massacre, which took place on 16 March 1968 in Son My, Vietnam. This was a war crime committed by United States Army personnel involving the mass murder of unarmed civilians in Sơn Tịnh district, South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. Mỹ Lai was actually the name of only one of four hamlets in the village of Sơn Mỹ in Quảng Ngãi Province. The event is referred to as the Mỹ Lai Massacre in the United States and the Sơn Mỹ Massacre in Vietnam.

The Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) was an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff that formed in New York City in January 1969. Its principal aim was to pressure the city's museums – notably the Museum of Modern Art – into implementing economic and political reforms. These included a more open and less exclusive exhibition policy concerning the artists they exhibited and promoted: the absence of women artists and artists of color was a principal issue of contention, which led to the formation of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) in 1969. The coalition successfully pressured the MoMA and other museums into implementing a free admission day that still exists in certain museums to this day. It also pressured and picketed museums into taking a moral stance on the Vietnam War which resulted in its famous My Lai poster And babies, one of the most important works of political art of the early 1970s. The poster was displayed during demonstrations in front of Pablo Picasso′s Guernica at the MoMA in 1970.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1969 in the Vietnam War</span>

The inauguration of Richard Nixon in January led to a reevaluation of the U.S. role in the war. U.S. forces peaked at 543,000 in April. U.S. military strategy remained relatively unchanged from the offensive strategy of 1968 until the Battle of Hamburger Hill in May which led to a change a more reactive approach. The U.S. and South Vietnam agreed on a policy of Vietnamization with South Vietnamese forces being expanded and equipped to take over more of the ground combat from the departing Americans which began to withdraw in late June without any reciprocal commitment by the North Vietnamese. The morale of U.S. ground forces began to fray with increasing racial tensions and the first instances of fragging and combat refusal. The antiwar movement in the U.S. continued to grow and public opinion turned increasingly antiwar when the Mỹ Lai massacre was revealed in November.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander D. Shimkin</span> American war correspondent

Alexander Demitri "Alex" Shimkin was an American war correspondent who was killed in the Vietnam War. He is notable for his investigation of non-combatant casualties in Operation Speedy Express.

<i>Four Hours in My Lai</i> British TV series or programme

Four Hours in My Lai is a 1989 television documentary written and directed by Kevin Sim for Yorkshire Television concerning the 1968 My Lai Massacre by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. The film includes interviews with soldiers at the massacre, and the later trials of those involved. The programme first broadcast on ITV as part of Yorkshire Television's First Tuesday documentaries. Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, who created the film, based a book of the same name off the documentary. The book, which is still in print in the United States and the UK, has also been translated and published in Japan. It remains on the reading list around the world of many college and university courses on the Vietnam War.

The first known reference to an Art Strike appears in an Alain Jouffroy essay: "What's To Be Done About Art?".

<i>Waging Peace in Vietnam</i> 2019 book edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright and Barbara Doherty

Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War is a non-fiction book edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty. It was published in September 2019 by New Village Press and is distributed by New York University Press. In March 2023 a Vietnamese language edition of the book was launched at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Jean Toche (1932-2018) was a Belgian-American abstract artist and poet involved in New York's radical political art scene.

Jon Hendricks is an American artist, curator and political activist. Since 2008, he has served as the Fluxus Consulting Curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Holsinger, M. Paul (1999). "And Babies". War and American Popular Culture. Greenwood Press. p. 363. ISBN   9780313299087.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Frascina, Francis (1999). Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America. Manchester University Press. pp. 175–186+. ISBN   978-0719044694. Archived from the original on 2018-05-29. discuss the creation of the poster.
  3. ↑ Cooper, Daniel (2003). "Art". In Nicholas John Cull (ed.). Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. ABC-CLIO. p. 23. ISBN   9781576078204. Propaganda art found more fertile ground in criticizing the U.S. government during the Vietnam conflict through works such as the famous Art Workers Coalition piece Q. And Babies? A. And Babies (1970) which commented on the horrors of the My Lai incident. The poster is also discussed in Moore, Colin (2010). Propaganda Prints: A History of Art in the Service of Social and Political Change. A&C Black. p.  181. and in Brewer, Susan. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. Oxford University Press. p.  221.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Israel, Matthew (2013). Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War. University of Texas Press. pp. 121–127.
  5. 1 2 Meadlo, Paul; Wallace, Mike (November 24, 1969). Meadlo-Wallace interview transcript 1969 . Retrieved May 28, 2014– via Internet Archive.
  6. ↑ Eysenck, Michael W. (2004). Psychology: An International Perspective. Taylor & Francis. p.  723. ISBN   978-1841693606.
  7. ↑ Milgram, Stanley (2009) [1974]. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. HarperCollins. pp.  183–186. ISBN   9780953096473.
  8. 1 2 Selz, Peter; Landauer, Susan (2006). Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California And Beyond. University of California Press. p.  46. ISBN   978-0520240520.
  9. ↑ Hoberman, J. (13 December 2004). "Pop and Circumstance". The Nation . pp. 22–26. Archived from the original on 19 March 2005.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.