May 4, 2007
Kent State Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST The front of this website notes that the Kent State killings occurred on this day in 1970. I was in college at the time, and a couple of long-dormant memories are suddenly rather clearer than the meaning of the events at Kent State. Exactly what happened in Ohio that day remains a bit murky. Nixon had sent the U.S. Army into Cambodia on April 29, sparking widespread protests and some riots, and on May 1 there was a massive demonstration at Kent State, with some calls to “bring the war home.” Around midnight there was violence and looting in the town of Kent. The following day, Kent’s mayor declared a state of emergency and asked Ohio’s governor to send the National Guard, which arrived that evening, just in time to witness arson and the stoning of firemen and police who had tried to extinguish a fire. The following day, the 3rd, saw a thousand troops on campus trying to enforce a curfew. On May 4 the troops tried to disperse thousands of students, and some were stoned; in the course of attempting to disperse one crowd, 28 (on other accounts, 29) out of 77 Guardsmen fired between 61 and 67 bullets over a period of 13 seconds, some aiming into the air or ground, most aiming not at the students who seemed the likeliest threat to them, but at students further away (the nearest student to be wounded was 71 feet from the Guardsmen, and none of the four who were killed was closer than a few hundred feet). The Adjutant General of the Ohio Guard later said that the Guardsmen had come under sniper fire, a claim that remains unproven, and seems very unlikely. One witness claims to have heard an order to fire, which is also unproven, as are allegations that one Guardsman boasted of having taken deliberate aim at one of those killed. As for the four students who were killed, two of them were simply going from one class to another, and one was a member of ROTC. The other two students shot to death had participated in the protests. The Guardsmen, who claimed to have fired because they had been in fear for their lives, because a crowd was advancing on them, eventually saw their defense affirmed by juries in two federal trials, one criminal, one civil. A 1998 article by two Kent State sociologists makes for interesting reading. The article’s authors point out that “a prominent college-level United States history book by Mary Beth Norton et al. (1994), which is also used in high school advanced placement courses, contains a picture of the shootings of May 4 accompanied by the following summary of events: ‘In May 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen confronted student antiwar protestors with a tear gas barrage. Soon afterward, with no provocation, soldiers opened fire into a group of fleeing students. Four young people were killed, shot in the back, including two women who had been walking to class.’ (Norton et al., 1994, p. 732) Unfortunately, this short description contains four factual errors: (1) some degree of provocation did exist; (2) the students were not fleeing when the Guard initially opened fire; (3) only one of the four students who died, William Schroeder, was shot in the back; and (4) one female student, Sandy Schreuer, had been walking to class, but the other female, Allison Krause, had been part of the demonstration.” Here is what I remember: the killings necessarily added to the intense campus hostility to the Cambodian incursion, as it was then called, and provoked a national student strike. In the course of that strike, a student at my college somehow contacted a student from Kent State, who had seen the shootings, and whom she invited to address us. Who were we? My college, at that time a small, elite and until a few months back women’s college in the Northeast, was famous in those days, whether rightly or not, as a school full of upper class Bohemians, Left, arty, brainy, in many cases patrician. Kent State was famous for none of these things. The Kent State student, introduced by one of our radical leaders, was, on her account, to rouse us with an eloquent tale of unprovoked political murder and repression, and he would draw sharp lessons from the event. He didn’t—he had no gift as a demagogue, and apparently no interest in being one. He was ill at ease, possibly because he was addressing an audience most of which was, in several senses of the word, out of his class—that was an interpretation some of my classmates offered at the time—but more probably, I now think, because he was still greatly affected by something awful he had very recently seen, and because he was an honest man. A portion of his audience wanted him to make a very particular and politically useful sense of the events he had witnessed, but he was disinclined to cooperate; more precisely, he didn’t seem to understand that this was the reason he was there; he thought we wanted to know what had happened, and how it felt. On his account it had been first frightening and then horrific, and in immediate retrospect it was sad and almost stupefying; twenty-year-olds were dead. The shootings were unprovoked, our leader prompted him, the reports of violence by the crowd were lies, this showed what the government was prepared to do, and we would now know then for what they were. No, he said, people were throwing stones and other things, and there had been violence over the past couple of days. He was, as an agitator and propagandist, a very poor specimen. At the time, that seemed a pitiable shortcoming, and an irritating one, since it diffused our anger, whereas the point of having him speak had been to keep it white-hot. In retrospect, I think it makes him admirable, and perhaps more interesting. He may not have lacked the wit to rouse a mob; he may rather have lacked the will. Some people are strongly inclined to find the true, sinister, and concealed meaning of ugly things. They are not necessarily the sanest among us.
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