Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme’s Eventful Visit to Kenyon

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This week my group, the global politics group, refined our selected materials and continued to look through the archives for anything else of interest, this time looking through person files. One of the person files we were provided with on Friday was a box on Olof Palme, who attended Kenyon in the late 1940s and later went on to become prime minister of Sweden. I was surprised that I had never heard anything about him until I looked through his box, especially since he has an entire building named after him, but quickly learned of his somewhat controversial nature as a radical progressive political figure in international politics. As I gathered from the items in his box, Palme was shaped by his time in the US, essentially saying that it radicalized him into his social democratic views both due to what he witnessed when he travelled around the US after completing his bachelor’s degree and the engaged student community he was immersed in while at Kenyon. The particular event that piqued my interest was when Palme gave a speech entitled “On the Freedom of Men and the Freedom of Nations” while visiting Kenyon in 1970, drawing protestors from the International Longshoremen’s Association who were outraged by the Swedish government’s criticism of the US’s war in Vietnam.

According to Hajar Yazdiha (2023) in The Struggle for the People’s King, politically opposing groups often invoke the same collective memories, while also altering that collective memory to construct their own narratives and fit their own interests. As illustrated by Yazdiha’s history of the political invocations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement more broadly from across the political spectrum these appeals to collective memory take place in the context of appeals to shared cultural values and (inter)national histories. These appeals are meant to win over swing groups by framing and reframing their ideological positions and attempting to respond to their opponents doing the same in order to form the most convincing argument and orientation of themselves in history. These appeals are strategically deployed and themselves rework collective memory based on the political position and aims of the people deploying them. This also creates a dynamic relationship between opposing groups as they respond to each other and adjust their own positions and appeals based on what their opponents are saying, causing opposing groups to cause each other to develop and evolve in their rhetoric and political positions.

I could see this dynamic of opposing groups playing out in the context of Palme’s speech at Kenyon and the protestors it drew. The ideological clash in question was over the US war in Vietnam, Palme being against it and the International Longshoremen’s Association being in support of it. This took place in the broader context of the Cold War and anti-communism in the US–we even found a pamflet from when Palme visited Kenyon that attempted to discredit Palme by essentially saying that he was an avid supporter of the Viet Cong and their communist agenda. Both parties were attempting to appeal to a shared conception of what American was and “American values” like democracy and freedom, both for the individual and for nations; for Palme that was the right for Vietnam to exist without the extreme violence of US military intervention and for the protestors–who viewed Palme as a communist or at the very least a communist sympathizer–that was the US’s right to eradicate communism internationally which, through the roundabout logic of the domino theory, was fundamentally a defense of national sovereignty.

Bibliography

Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton University Press.

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