Our “feeling of powerlessness was very strong,” remembered a student. Eighteen-year-olds could be drafted to fight a war, but they couldn’t vote in or out the politicians who led it. The counterculture now permeated campus. Male students began sporting beards and growing their hair longer. Bruce Dzeda had the fourth pair of bell-bottom jeans at Kent State in the spring of 1969. “By the following autumn,” Dzeda recalled, “everybody had them, they were like navels.”
