Domestic deployment of active-duty U.S. military, as is now taking place in Los Angeles, is both rare and perilous. Not since the 1992 riots in that same city has the country seen such a use of the armed services. But that was a one-off. The more relevant, and worrying, parallel may be the period from 1957 to the end of 1968, when military forces actively patrolled U.S. soil on eight separate occasions. Perhaps the recent deployment is just the beginning—not a one-off, but a wave.
Those eight deployments resulted in just one fatality—a testament to remarkable restraint by the military. But many of the norms that fostered such restraint—bipartisan consensus, respect for institutional expertise, and well-planned rules of engagement—are today weaker, or gone altogether. What’s more, whereas U.S. marines were previously accompanied by Army military police trained in crowd control and de-escalation, they are now deployed alone, an unsettling break with past practice.
The 12 years spanning 1957 to 1968 were a period of great societal tumult and revolution, especially over race and the Vietnam War. Of the eight deployments, two were to enforce desegregation court orders, most famously at Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Four were to quell riots, three of which were part of the numerous outbreaks across the country that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. And the remaining two were in response to protests: one to protect a famous 1965 march of civil-rights activists in Selma, Alabama, to push for the Voting Rights Act, and the other to tamp down a forgotten and chaotic attempt by anti-Vietnam protesters to blockade the Pentagon in 1967.
That 1967 deployment was perhaps the most extraordinary. In a surreal prelude to the confrontation, as the rock band the Fugs played, Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg chanted to levitate the building, turn it orange, and exorcise its demons—a ritual humorously sanctioned in the protest permit. (The General Services Administration did, however, stipulate that the Pentagon could be levitated no more than three feet, to protect the building’s foundations.) Although roughly 50,000 demonstrators marched to the Pentagon, about 2,500 took part in a direct assault on the building. They surged up the steps—some smashed windows and tried to force open the doors, while others hurled objects and splashed paint on the soldiers stationed inside. Military police from the 503rd MP Battalion formed the first line of defense inside the entrance, physically blocking and repelling protesters who briefly breached the glass doors and entered the foyer. As pressure mounted, commanders deployed paratroopers from the 1st Battalion, 325th Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division, who engaged demonstrators outside the entrance and helped stabilize the scene. By day’s end, 21 civilians were reported injured—seven treated at the scene and 14 hospitalized—but, remarkably, no fatalities had occurred.