MORATORIUM” was scarcely a household word a couple of months ago. The
dictionary definition is “a period of permissive or obligatory delay,”
and to most people it meant a pause in paying one’s debts or in
talking. Now, suddenly, “moratorium” has become the focus of national
attention in its special 1969 sense: M-day, Oct. 15, a movement
intended by its organizers and supporters to show the Nixon
Administration that large and growing numbers of Americans want out of
the Viet Nam war as fast as possible. Across the nation, M-day observances are aimed at suspending
business-as-usual in order to allow protest, debate and thought about
the war. The Moratorium demonstrates a diversity and spread unknown in
the earlier landmark protests against the war: the march on the
Pentagon in October 1967, which inspired Norman Mailer’s The Armies of
the Night, and the bloody riots the following summer in Mayor Daley’s
Chicago. Each of those involved directly only a minority of the young
and the radical intelligentsia, not anything resembling a cross-section
of U.S. society. M-day is different. In Brunswick, Me., 1,000 candles were to be left
burning atop the Senior Center, the tallest building in northern New
England. In Washington, 16 Representatives announced that they would
keep the House in all-night session in order to speak against the war.
In North Newton, Kans., an antique bell long disused was to be tolled
some 40,000 times for the U.S. dead in Viet Nam. In the conservative
city of Los Alamos, N. Mex., housewives agreed to block a bridge
leading to local defense plants while carrying signs: HELP STOP THE
WAR. Students from Gonzaga University and Whitworth College organized a
march to the federal building in Spokane, Wash., where they would wear
white armbands speckled with blood. Letting Nixon Know Small-town housewives and Wall
Street lawyers, college presidents and politicians, veteran
demonstrators and people who have never made the “V” sign of the peace
movement—thousands of Americans who have never thought to grow a
beard, don a hippie headband or burn a draft card—planned to turn out
on M-day to register their dismay and frustration over Viet Nam. Yes
terday’s Vietniks are determined to grow into tomorrow’s majority. The core of M-day activism is on the campuses, as it was in the campaign
for Eugene McCarthy in 1968; hundreds of colleges and universities are
closing for the day or radically altering schedules to allow for
Moratorium demonstrations. The idea has spread from the campuses to the
community at large—though not without arousing resistance. In the
affluent suburb of Westport, Conn., the representative town meeting
bitterly debated for nearly three hours last week and then only
narrowly passed, 17 to 15, a resolution asking immediate action to get
the U.S. out of Viet Nam. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the
Porterville police chief denied local residents permission to march
down the customary Main Street route on their peace parade this week;
the city council backed him up, and the protesters had to settle for a
route around the edge of town. No Allegiance to Mao
