Note 1-A — CHAPTER 1 Background to Military Assistance The Geographic Setting—The People—Vietnam’s Recent History—Post-Geneva South Vietnam—The American Response

Founded just after World War I, the Cao Dai claims more than one and a half million faithful in South Vietnam. The religion incorporates elements of Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, and large doses of spiritualism. Its clergy, headed by a “pope,” is organized in a hierarchy modelled on that of the Roman Catholic Church. The extent of its borrowing is suggested by the fact that adherents count the French author Victor Hugo as one of their saints. Politically, the Cao Dai moved sharply in the direction of nationalism during the 1940s, organized its own army, and fought sporadic actions against the French and the subsequent French-controlled government of Emperor Bao Dai until suppressed by the Diem government in 1954.

Like the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao is peculiarly Vietnamese. In the late 1930s, a Buddhist monk named Huynh Pho So began a “protestant” movement within the worldly, easy-going Buddhist faith then prevalent. His followers, whose ranks grew rapidly, called themselves Hoa Hao after the village where Phu So began his crusade. Like the Cao Dai faithful and Catholics, they tended to live apart in their own villages and hamlets concentrated in the very south and west of Vietnam, primarily along the Cambodian border. Intensely nationalistic and xenophobic, they were under constant attack from the French, Japanese, and Viet Minh, and by the late 1940s had recruited a large militia which was subsequently disbanded. Today their overall membership stands at about one million.