GI Coffeehouse Movement

GI COFFEEHOUSE MOVEMENT. In late 1967, antiwar organizers Fred Gardner, Donna Mickelson, and Deborah Rossman set off cross-country from the San Francisco Bay Area to Columbia, South Carolina, home to Fort Jackson, the army’s largest training base. They were going to Columbia to establish what would become the first GI antiwar coffeehouse. The brainchild of Gardner, a former army reservist, the coffeehouse idea was simple: a hip, off base hangout spot for soldiers who were skeptical of the war to gather and - potentially - plug into the peace movement. The first coffeehouse, named the UFO, soon opened its doors in Columbia. With its live music and countercultural vibe, the UFO quickly became a big attraction for GIs, and some patrons even began to protest the war. The GI coffeehouse movement was born.

Building on the example of the UFO, new coffeehouses were set up throughout 1968. This was aided by the Summer of Support, a campaign that Rennie Davis and other antiwar organizers began in early 1968 to help the spread of GI coffeehouses. Mad Anthony’s at Fort Leonard Wood didn’t last long, but coffeehouse projects like the Shelter Half near Fort Lewis, Washington and the Oleo Strut near Fort Hood, Texas, became mainstays of the GI movement. These coffeehouses, and a host of others, brought the antiwar movement to the unexpected locales of conservative military towns and became hubs for regional peace organizing.

The Oleo Strut, for example, was at the center of a vibrant local GI protest movement in Killeen, Texas. The milieu around the Strut, made up of antiwar soldiers, veterans, and civilians, helped organize a range of creative actions that attracted hundreds of GIs into the early 1970s. These included an outdoor July, 1968 antiwar “love-in,” a boycott of a jewelry store chain that preyed on the finances of GIs, and protests on Armed Forces Day (or Armed Farces Day, as the GI movement called it). The Fatigue Press, one of the more well-known GI antiwar newspapers, was produced at the Strut. The coffeehouse supported the “Fort Hood 43,” a group of Black GIs that refused to perform riot duty against protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Jane Fonda, a supporter of the GI movement who starred in an antiwar vaudeville called FTA, held several fundraisers and press conferences at the Strut.

Antiwar civilians helped establish and staff coffeehouses, and they set up organizations that provided indispensable support for the growth and maintenance of the movement. The most important was the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), established in early 1969. The USSF provided thousands of dollars in money grants to local coffeehouses and GI newspapers and helped sustain the wider GI movement into the early 1970s. It shared information between different local projects and helped promote and popularize GI protest within the larger antiwar movement. The civilian networks of support for antiwar GIs, and their general sympathy toward servicemembers being made to fight an unpopular war, contradicted the trope of an antiwar movement that hated - or even spit on - US soldiers.

The coffeehouses were subversive and liberating venues for many soldiers, with a cultural feel that offered a stark contrast from the rigidities of military life. GIs and civilians discussed topics like imperialism, racism, and patriarchy under posters of Stokely Carmichael and Janis Joplin. They mocked the petty machismo and careerism of military “lifers” as they drew inspiration from the women’s liberation and Black Power movements. Some coffeehouse projects tried to organize WACs (members of the Women's Army Corps) and the wives of GIs. They recognized the catalyzing role of Black GI struggle and developed strong anti-racist political commitments. Some coffeehouses were among the few integrated places in small military towns, while others grappled with trying to become spaces for Black GIs. Different left ideologies - from Maoism to Trotskyism to anticolonial radicalism - made their way into the coffeehouses. Many of these venues became centers for tight-knit, countercultural communities.

By the early 1970s, the coffeehouse movement was at its global peak. Coffeehouses and their variations (such as “Movement Centers”) populated the archipelago of US military installations from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Iwakuni, Japan. Along with underground GI newspapers, these venues were essential pieces of the wider GI movement infrastructure - concrete spaces where soldiers and civilians converged and organized, consumed antiwar literature, and where GIs could find a helping hand in the form of counseling or legal support - or, simply just a cup of coffee and some music.

Coffeehouses also faced significant obstacles. Many encountered strong opposition from local authorities, who issued trumped-up ordinance violations and other measures in efforts to shut them down. Police surveilled, harassed, and raided coffeehouses, arresting staff and scaring off GIs. City officials challenged coffeehouse business licenses, and landlords were pressured to evict them. Elected officials and federal agents investigated the coffeehouse movement. Even more, paramilitary violence, ranging from shootings to explosions, rattled many coffeehouses. For example, the Covered Wagon in Mountain Home, Idaho, was burned to the ground by arson in 1971. Nor were the problems just external - some coffeehouse projects descended into dogmatism and sectarianism than alienated GIs.

The coffeehouse movement declined with the end of the US war on Vietnam, but its legacy lived on. After the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, several antiwar coffeehouses opened, drawing their inspiration from the Vietnam War-era examples.

Carver, Ron, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty. Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War. New York: New Village Press, 2019.

Cortright, David. Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005.

Parsons, David L. Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Seidman, Derek. “The Unquiet Americans: GI Dissent during the Vietnam War.” Brown University, Dissertation, 2010.