Kent State: An American Tragedy

by Brian VanDeMark

it had worn a deep groove in his mind.

This was the day the Vietnam War came home and the sixties came to an end. American soldiers shot American students on American soil.

The bloodshed shocked and angered those whose childhood had been sanitized and idyllic. Many of the ideals and illusions that baby boomers had been raised with began to fall away with astonishing speed.

“The victory for the Viet Cong which Professor Genovese ‘welcomes’ would mean, ultimately, the destruction of freedom of speech for all men for all time, not only in Asia but in the United States as well. . . . Any individual employed by the state should not be allowed to use his position for the purpose of giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the state.” The writer was future Republican president Richard Nixon.

The Selective Service System retaliated by ordering local boards to reclassify draft resisters 1-A (most eligible for conscription).

“Something happened to many of us there that is hard to describe, harder to explain,” a demonstrator observed. “We went down to protest and returned ready to resist. . . . Many who were not anti-government now are; many who were committed to using legal channels to change governmental policy now have what they consider the governmental attitude—cynicism, violence, covertness—which they may use for the same end. . . . Reason is starting to slip, and like the inmates of concentration camps who gradually took on the values of their oppressors, I fear many are beginning to see violence as the only alternative to futile discussion.”

Richard Nixon tapped into growing resentment among traditional Republicans and blue-collar Americans that decency and social order were under assault.

It marked the beginning of a political realignment that would ultimately pave the way for Republican presidencies from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump (whose Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, won fewer working-class white votes than any major party presidential candidate since World War II).

the greatest danger which confronts those who struggle against violence is the danger that they themselves will become secretly contaminated by the violence they oppose.”

Fervently anti-American, the Weathermen were at the same time unconsciously America-centric, seeing nearly everything that happened in the world as a function of U.S. imperialism and the fight against it (which one could argue was an unconscious expression of imperialist thinking).

“You can catch the very disease you’re fighting—you want to stop war, you become warlike. You want to fight inhumanity, and you become inhumane.”

In Vietnam, more than a few soldiers went out on patrol that day wearing black armbands.

“We made our point without tearing things down.” They had mobilized large numbers of Americans in a peaceful expression of grief and sorrow rather than anger and rage.

Antiwar activists made attractive enemies for Nixon. He recognized the antiwar movement’s political impact—“the greatest social unrest in America in one hundred years,” he privately called it—and responded in a nationwide television address on November 3. Using his prime-time speech as a counterattack, Nixon belittled antiwar protestors as a “vocal minority” that threatened the country’s “future as a free society” and sought to “impose” its views on others “by mounting demonstrations in the street.”

By responding so forcefully against peaceful protestors, Nixon ratcheted up the social tension.

“We’ve got those liberal bastards on the run now,” he gloated, “and we’re going to keep them on the run.” To this end, Nixon unleashed Vice President Spiro Agnew, the administration’s acid-tongued attack dog, to denounce antiwar activists as “candle-carrying peaceniks” and “pusillanimous pussyfoot[ers]” whose “course will ultimately weaken and erode the very fiber of America”—red meat rhetoric to aroused conservatives.

The self-destructive nihilism reached a peak when participants denounced white American women as “pig mothers” and debated killing white babies so as not to bring more “oppressors” into the world. “Anything was applauded as long as it was against the American system, as long as it outraged middle-class morality, as long as it terrified the bourgeoisie, made them think they were next,” explained one attendee. “We psyched ourselves up with a disgusting romanticization of violence,” said another. But a third put it best: “Paranoia plus egotism plus a worldview that obliterated all subtlety combined to create an atmosphere that was insane.”

“If you think that you have the moral high-ground,” observed Flanagan in hindsight, “that is a very dangerous position. You can do some really dreadful things.”

Blue-collar workers and middle-class conservatives saw nothing of themselves in the Weathermen, whose actions as reported in the media led conservatives to generalize about all antiwar protestors. Conservatives were not waiting to be enlightened by a radical vanguard. What moved them, what their attitudes were, could not have been more different. They decorated their hard hats with flag decals and the motto, “FOR GOD AND COUNTRY.” They built the schools that protestors wanted to burn down. They felt deep antipathy toward elites, especially radical elites with college draft deferments. Many of them had served in World War II or Korea and viscerally despised antiwar protestors. They watched family, friends, and neighbors drafted to fight for America in a vicious and unpopular war, only to see such service demeaned by what they considered a bunch of pampered, overprivileged, flag-desecrating snotnoses. To working-class whites, antiwar protestors were poseurs who never toiled, just looked for trouble. “A working-class father who may have sacrificed for years in order to send his son to college cannot remotely comprehend why middle-class youths cry that ‘the system’ is rotten,” observed Time magazine. “To him, they are all spoiled brats to whom everything has been offered and from whom nothing has been demanded.” “All I can see,” said one electrician, “is a lot of kids blowing the chance I never had.”

Like the radicals, conservatives created a divide between “Us” and “Them.” Fear and demonization stiffened backs and intensified hostility. Calls for “law and order” grew louder and more insistent. Unnerved by the unprecedented challenge to their creedal values of family, religion, and patriotism and a growing sense of crisis in the nation, conservatives resolved to protect the status quo.

Each side refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other and believed that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, if not part of a sinister conspiracy. It was a tense, suspicious, and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy.

that time, the purchase of dynamite—but not firecrackers—was legal in New Hampshire.

The school’s nickname throughout the Midwest was Apathy U, characterized by careerism and conformity.

A campus poll that year revealed students supporting the war outnumbered those opposing it nearly four to one.

By the end of 1968, fewer than one in four students still supported the war—a dramatic and telling reversal from the year before.

At the building entrance, they encountered jeering students and campus police, who blocked them from entering. Ernie Ames, a university police officer who had been a lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, held his position just inside the doors. An eyewitness stated that “Ames easily sustained the assaults on his huge frame by several members of the Kent SDS who had marched into the hallway and now were beating wildly on his chest, arms, legs, and whatever else they could reach—his privates.” David Ambler, the balding, mild-mannered assistant vice president for student affairs, tried to calm things by telling protestors, “If you behave in an orderly fashion, three of you may enter the building and present your petition to whatever authorities you wish.” To this reasoned appeal, SDS chapter president Ric Erickson, the son of a former Akron mayor, responded, “We all come in or none of us do!” SDS members then began shouting obscenities and resumed brawling with police. University police “were shoved and kicked, but they kept their cool. The police held their ground but never used their fists, clubs, mace, or guns.”

SDS and the Weathermen did not radicalize Kent State students in the months leading up to May 1970—America’s continued involvement in Vietnam did.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, in February, four days of protest resulted in one student killed, two shot, and more than one hundred fifty arrested. At the State University of New York at Buffalo in March, twelve students were shot and fifty-seven others injured during a clash with police. At the University of California, Berkeley, in April, four thousand students stormed the ROTC building and kept up an hours-long fight with police. That same month several thousand students occupied Harvard Square, battled police, burned cars, and vandalized local businesses.

Eighteen-year-olds could be drafted to fight a war, but they couldn’t vote in or out the politicians who led it.

Rhodes’s instrument for maintaining law and order would be the Ohio National Guard.x Ohio ranked fifth among states in number of civil disturbances but first among states in mobilizing the guard to deal with those disturbances. The Ohio National Guard had been called out thirty-one times in the two years since Rhodes had become governor. It had been called out five times during the preceding five years. Many guardsmen felt Governor Rhodes viewed them as his personal army and called them out too frequently.

“If Rhodes’s toilet wasn’t working, he’d call out the Guard,” they grumbled. The 145th Infantry Regiment was mobilized more frequently than any other guard unit in the state.

One student remembered seeing a photo of “an American GI posing with a dead Vietcong, hanging by his feet, like he’d just shot a deer. And there were other scenes of them standing with their feet on piles of bodies of Vietnamese, posing proudly like they’d been out hunting.” His brother serving in Vietnam had written him, “I cry every day. And I tell my men to cry. Because that’s the only way we’ll get through this thing without going crazy.” He died only nineteen days after arriving in “Nam.” Because of such things, many students felt little patriotism for their country. Few favored violence, but many had become deeply disillusioned and inclined toward angry, direct confrontation. They hated the war so passionately that any level of disruption now seemed justified to end it.

‘People have got to listen to us. They’ve got to try to understand how we feel or everything will blow up.’

The strife and fighting continue into the night. The mechanical birds sound of death As they buzz overhead spitting fire Into the Doomed towns where women and children Run and hide in the bushes and ask why, Why are we not left to live our own lives? In the pastures, converted into battlefields, The small metal pellets speed through the air, Pausing occasionally to claim another victim. A teenager from a small Ohio farm Clutches his side in pain, and, As he feels his life ebbing away, He, too, asks why, Why is he dying here, thousands of miles from home, Giving his life for those who did not even ask for his help. The War Without a Purpose marches on relentlessly, Not stopping to mourn for its dead, Content to wait for its end. But all that the frightened parents who still have their sons hear is: “The end is not in sight.”

In the early 1950s, the university had about five thousand students. Less than twenty years later, it had nearly quadrupled in size to just under twenty thousand.

“The university had grown in what seemed a few short years from the polite, sometimes rambunctious boy next door into a hulking, snarling teenage neighbor from hell,” in the words of one long-timer.

Earlier in the year, Kent police chief Roy Thompson had said, “They got a lot of people over on that campus who I don’t suppose are plain Communists, but an awful lot of them are pinkos.”

Thompson warned the mayor that his force of twenty-one officers could not defend the town against the Weathermen, and the Ohio National Guard should be called in.

The local paper, the Record-Courier, announced that the National Guard had been put on standby alert if needed. If the guard came in, it would take “complete control” not only of the town but of the campus as well. University officials were nervous. Their riot contingency plan called for using university police, then county sheriff’s deputies, then the Ohio State Highway Patrol as a last resort—not the National Guard.

Rumors that a car with Illinois plates loaded with Weathermen armed with shotguns had been spotted in town and that they planned to poison the municipal water supply with LSD that night fueled fears and paranoia.

Under pressure from constituents and feeling his police force ill equipped to deal with the potential unrest, Satrom called the governor’s office about 5:30 p.m. and asked that the National Guard be sent to Kent.v Satrom did not inform university administrators of his request, perhaps because he knew they would oppose it.

The most visible symbol of the military on university campuses, nearly two hundred ROTC buildings around the country came under attack during the 1969–1970 academic year.

“I knew they had been on duty in Akron at a Teamsters strike and would probably be exhausted. And I told her so. ‘They’re probably frightened and nervous,’ I said, ‘so keep out of trouble and stay away from them.’ ”

Around 9:30 p.m., a long line of armored personnel carriers, jeeps, and trucks carrying Ohio National Guardsmen from Companies A and C of the 145th Infantry Regiment based in Wooster and Troop G of the 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment based in Ravenna rumbled into Kent.

Some joined the Ohio National Guard because they wanted to serve their communities. Many others joined for the same reason that many students attended Kent State—to avoid the draft.

“Regardless of the actions and taunts of the rioters, you must remain the well-disciplined soldier,” “exercise soldierly restraint under all conditions,” and “the temptation to use high-handed methods may be great, but you must remain calm and retain your good judgment in order that you may act wisely regardless of personal feelings or beliefs,” “using only the minimum force necessary.” The message was clear: “Good judgment may prevent [a] situation from getting completely out of hand” and “Use common sense and do only what is necessary to do and can be justified afterwards.”x Yet guardsmen were also taught to use their rifles as lethal weapons, not as nonlethal control instruments, and that “in any instance where human life is endangered by the forcible, violent actions of a rioter, or when rioters to whom the Riot Act has been read cannot be dispersed by any other reasonable means, then shooting is justified.”

“I got about five and a half hours’ sleep out of [the] seventy-two hours we were in Kent,” remembered one.

When McManus finished, Corporal Dale Antram came up to him. “Sergeant McManus, we’ve got a euchre game going on out on the [Commons] with some of the students. Can you come and join us? We need a fourth person.” McManus agreed. He, Antram, and two female students played game after game of euchre sitting on the grass beneath oak and maple trees from late morning to late afternoon while, nearby, other guardsmen joined touch-football games with students. “It was a nice day,” recalled McManus. “Just young people having fun—not keeping score or worrying about who won or lost.” They played cards, watched the touch-football game, and talked.

The mood on the Commons that afternoon was relaxed and tranquil.

Most guardsmen strongly supported the constitutional right to dissent. “I believe in dissent,” said one, “because it’s healthy for society.”