Kent State: An American Tragedy

by Brian VanDeMark

Guardsmen talked openly with students, winking and laughing with them.

Rhodes was in the final year of his second four-year term, barred by the state constitution from running again,xiii and was seeking the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in an election just forty-eight hours away. He was behind his rival Robert Taft, Jr., in the polls. He had positioned himself as the “law and order” candidate who would use “all the force that was necessary” to end campus disturbances throughout the state. Kent State officialsxiv were invited to the meeting, but Rhodes shunted them aside. He viewed academics as arrogant naïfs living in ivory towers. “You university people stay out of this,” he snapped. “We’re taking over now.” Those who understood the students’ temper and attitude best had effectively been told to shut up. At this meeting, Rhodes changed the guard’s mission from protecting lives and property to using “whatever force necessary to break up a protest on the campus.” When someone asked Rhodes to define a protest, the governor replied, “Two students walking together.” “There was no discussion,” one of those present later said, “because it wouldn’t have done any good. The governor had made up his mind.” At this point, reporters entered the room, flashbulbs popping and tape recorders turning. The situation in Kent seemed an exploitable moment. Trailing in the pending Republican primary,

Rhodes struck the pose of a take-charge leader who wasn’t going to be pushed around by a long-haired rabble.

The guard believed it had been authorized to break up any protests the following day.

But in the past three days, Nixon had labeled them bums, Rhodes had equated them with Nazis, and the National Guard had occupied their campus.

Other guardsmen picked up and hurled stones through dormitory windows at students taunting them.

More fatefully, he lacked the understanding and empathy that are antidotes to tunnel vision and awareness of one’s limitations.

The morning of Monday, May 4, 1970, was sunny in Kent, with a nearly cloudless, enamel-blue sky and a mild fourteen-mile-an-hour southwesterly breeze. There was a bit of a chill in the air, and a thin shroud of dew blanketed the Commons. Students began moving across campus. Despite all that had happened since Friday night, the university remained open with classes as usual with midterm exams beginning that day.i

but they lacked leadership and organizational discipline, creating the potential for chaos and tragedy.

Canterbury “was overtaken by the attention he was getting from the press,” concluded McManus looking back. “The mixture was there to make him a hero,” to make a desk general think “it was his moment of glory” as a field commander. Canterbury later told the FBI that the assembled students “seemed much more hostile than the crowd [on] Saturday night.” They “seemed to consist primarily of extremely vociferous agitators.” Several of Canterbury’s officers and guardsmen contradicted his assessment.

Donald Schwartzmiller, chief of the Kent State Police Department, who later recalled that “prior to the attempt to disperse this group, the gathering was peaceful; there were some jesterings and catcalls, but I was familiar with this harmless behavior from previous occasions. To my knowledge, peaceful gatherings had not been banned on campus. No Ohio National Guard official consulted with me concerning the breakup of this gathering. I saw no reason to disperse the gathering.”

(They had taped over their name tags because the night before protestors had taunted them, “I see your name, I’m gonna get you.”)

When Lieutenant General John Throckmorton took command of federalized Michigan National Guard troops during the 1967 Detroit riots, his first order to guardsmen was to unload their rifles and pocket their bullets. Asked later at a congressional hearing why he had issued this order, Throckmorton explained, “I was confronted with a group of trigger-happy, nervous soldiers.” A congressman who questioned unloading weapons amidst an urban riot asked Throckmorton how many disarmed guardsmen had subsequently been wounded. “None,” the general replied. Eight Michigan guardsmen had later been injured—seven carrying loaded rifles and another who shot himself in the foot while loading his weapon.

Canterbury failed to inform the crowd of students that the guardsmen had live ammunition in their weapons, even though Ohio National Guard regulations required this to be done as part of crowd-control strategy.

Canterbury’s failure to announce that the guardsmen’s rifles were loaded with live ammunition was a reckless judgment made by a man whose hubris, stubbornness, and narrow-mindedness blinded him to the foolishness of his actions and escalated the risk of tragedy.

Major John Simons watched from the center of the Commons. A thirty-nine-year-old with an ash-colored crew cut, Simons was the rector of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights and a chaplain for the guard. The son of a retired career U.S. Army colonel, he had served three years as a military policeman at a U.S. Army base in West Germany. Simons was blunt and outspoken. He had had a run-in with top brass the year before, when Tough Tony Del Corso pressured guardsmen under his command to support Nixon’s Vietnam policy and sent them form letters to sign and send to the White House. Simons felt Del Corso had no right to do this and confronted the general. “I asked him why did he use guard stationery and guard letterheads? He said he wasn’t ordering anybody to do it, he was just giving the men an opportunity to show their support. Then why, I asked, weren’t the men given an opportunity to show their dislike for the war, too? Why weren’t antiwar forms provided as well? The general didn’t have much to say. Our dialogue had ended.” Now, Simons believed Canterbury was crossing a line, too. He thought, “That silly Canterbury; they’re supposed to disperse the crowd, the crowd is dispersed, where in the hell is he leading those men?” Simons would later say that Ohio National Guard leaders “apparently feel that every campus disorder is another Normandy invasion, so you go in with the weapons loaded with rounds.”

“Kent State is not Iwo Jima.”

Watching nearby, a student and former marine silently called cadence as they returned up the hill. “I thought it was humorous because they had a hard time keeping formation,” he said.

Canterbury’s failure of leadership and of the fire-control discipline that was an integral part of it would encourage frightened guardsmen to take matters into their own hands with tragic consequences.

In fact, National Guard regulations prohibited warning shots. “In order to avoid firing which creates a hazard to innocent persons,” the relevant regulation stated, “warning shots will not be employed.”

The martial law statute had been illegally applied because civil courts, which must be incapacitated before martial law can be imposed, remained in operation in Kent and elsewhere throughout Portage County. Rhodes later admitted in a sworn deposition that he signed the proclamation (drafted by his top aide and chief legal advisor, John McElroy) without carefully reading it.

Their commander, Major Donald Manly, who had written the Ohio State Highway Patrol manual for riot-control procedures and taught civil-disturbance control at its academy, walked up to General Canterbury and said, “You’re no longer in control. My men are taking over now.” Manly then walked over to Professor Frank and calmly said, “You take all the time you want.”

Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl must be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?!”

Art “loved, cherished, and understood [Allison] much better in death than in life,” admitted a family friend. This truth cut Art to the bone. It—and his remorse—devastated and changed him.

“I do not think there is a God,” Art said, “but the myth haunted me.”

“FLOWERS ARE BETTER THAN BULLETS.”

President Nixon was “very disturbed” when his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, brought him the news. He was “afraid his [Cambodia] decision set it off and that is the cause of the demonstration there,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. The White House issued a statement. “The president shares the sadness of the parents involved and that of all Americans over their unnecessary deaths. This should remind us all that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.”

To Elaine Miller Holstein, his words of condolence rang hollow. “Nixon acts as if the kids had it coming. But shooting into a crowd of students—that is violence,” she told the press.

Nixon had helped set the stage for the tragedy. Labeling protestors “bums” had been “foolish rhetorical self-indulgence,” as The Economist noted. His inflammatory words, combined with his repeated “assurances that peace was on the way,” had contributed to the “outburst of rage” at Kent State. According to Bob Haldeman, Nixon “obviously realize[d]—but won’t openly admit—that his ‘bums’ remark [was] very harmful.”

He wanted to tell them not to let their hatred of the war—which “I could well understand”—become hatred of their country and everything it stood for. Instead, the socially awkward Nixon rambled on about subjects like sports and international travel. “I hope it was because he was tired, but most of what he was saying was absurd,” a Syracuse University student who talked with him told a reporter. “Here we had come from a university that’s completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team.”

These differing reactions reflected a country torn between opposing outlooks, a profound dislocation in the American system. Predictably and regrettably, both sides rushed to judgment. To those on the Right, the shooting represented a grimly satisfying, overdue “law and order” response to years of student unrest. They blamed the victims and believed the guardsmen had not reacted harshly enough. Four students dead in Ohio? More than a dozen young American servicemen who hadn’t dodged the draft died in Vietnam every day. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students; only 11 percent blamed the National Guard. Ohio National Guard headquarters received 10,089 letters in the weeks after the shooting; only 454 were critical—a ratio of 22 to 1. Conservative Kent State students spread malicious rumors that Allison Krause had been “the campus whore,” that her body had been found ravaged by syphilis, that “when they got her to the hospital, they found she was carrying hand grenades,” and that she had met with Communists a week before the shooting. One student’s mother “had a neighbor who actually said to her that if the National Guard could shoot into a crowd of three hundred people and only kill four, they should be on a target range.” When another student returned home after the shooting, his mother told him that “it would have been a good thing if all of them had been shot.” “Mom,” said the student, “that’s me you’re talking about.” “It would still have bee...

When the 107th Armored Cavalry chaplain Major John Simons visited guard headquarters in Columbus the morning after the shooting, a guardsman told him “a lot of callers are telling us to go ahead and kill four more kids today.” That afternoon (it was primary election day in Ohio), Simons was leaving a voting booth in his fatigues when a big, beefy Teamster came up, slapped him on the back, and said, “As far as I’m concerned, you guys can go back to Kent and kill some more students, that’s what the country needs.” A week later, Simons spoke to a Kiwanis Club luncheon in the conservative Cleveland suburb of Parma (where 1968 right-wing populist presidential candidate George Wallace had gotten his largest vote in the state). Simons did not mince his words. They resonate powerfully across the years: I am sure that some of you in this room wanted us to kill more. . . . The younger generation is naïve, life is not that simple, but [their] elders run from change by placing the responsibility for every rocky event on some Communist conspiracy. The older generation that wields power now has sold out to its fear of Communism. Perhaps the middle generation can gain the power and achieve the maturity which is not afraid of criticism or change. If we do not, life will go on as usual—there will be more Kents and Jacksons and Vietnams and Cambodias and with each new horror the solid middle America will become smaller and smaller until there is nothing left but two unspeaking and unspeakab...

Even before Simons finished speaking, people in the audience stood up and walked out.

Nothing revealed the vicious hatred that the shooting evoked among those on the Right more vividly than a letter the Schroeders received in the weeks after their son Bill’s death: Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder, There’s nothing better than a dead, destructive, riot-making communist, and that’s what your son was, if not he would have stayed away like a good American would do. Now you know what a goody-goody son you had. They should all be shot, then we’d have a better U.S.A. to live in. Be thankful he is gone. Just another communist.

Across the country, the shooting radicalized moderate students and moved radicals toward violence.

After seeing photos of the shooting in Life magazine, Neil Young wrote the lyrics to a new song that began “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming” and had the refrain “Four dead in Ohio.” When Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded “Ohio” a few weeks later, David Crosby broke down in tears at the end of the session. Rush-released, the song got heavy radio play and became a protest anthem. A Harris survey found 58 percent of students believed the United States had become a highly repressive society, intolerant of dissent.

Encouraged by the crowd and the pointedly disinterested police, the hard hats then stormed City Hall, where liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay had ordered the flag lowered to half-mast in honor of the four killed at Kent State. One group of rampaging hard hats headed for the mayor’s office to force city employees to raise the flag back up. The other group headed for nearby Pace College. Shouting “Kill those long-haired bastards!,” they stormed into a campus building with a huge white banner draped out of a window that read “VIETNAM? CAMBODIA? KENT STATE? WHAT NEXT?,” smashed windows with crowbars, overturned desks, and clubbed any student they could get their hands on. As students fled in panic, the hard hats grabbed two professors, whom they beat with their fists. The wail of ambulances continued long after the hard hats had disbanded for celebrations and back slapping. Nixon later invited the riot’s organizer, construction trade union leader William Brennan, to the White House, where Brennan gifted the smiling president with a hard hat. Brennan was later appointed secretary of Labor.

Brigadier General Canterbury’s decisions reflected “foolhardiness and negligence”—but stupendously poor judgment was not a crime but a tragedy.

A month after the shooting, General Canterbury filed an after-action report with National Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C. The final two sections of the after-action report concerned “Problem Areas and Lessons Learned” and “Recommendations.” Beside both, Canterbury wrote “None.”

And in the end, no one was held accountable for the death of four students and the wounding of nine others.

The stonemason who installed the third marker had been a member of the Ohio National Guard on May 4.

In 1978, the Cleveland-based Mildred Andrews Fund commissioned a May 4 memorial on the Kent State campus by noted New York sculptor George Segal. Segal chose as his theme an Old Testament metaphor. Segal’s sculpture, which he titled Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac, depicted a knife-bearing father facing a kneeling youth with hands bound in front of him. “I found that sculpture interesting to do,” Segal later said, “because I thought [May 4] was far more complicated than it appeared on the surface.”

The new university president, Brage Golding, ultimately rejected the sculpture because he concluded it violated the school’s steadfast neutrality on how—and even whether—to remember and interpret the events of May 4.

He cited a passage from novelist John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row: “It’s all fine to say that ‘Time will heal everything,’ but when you are [involved], there is no passage of time, people do not forget and are in the middle of something that does not change.”

Professor Glenn Frank, who had helped avert a second tragedy on May 4, struggled to let go of that day as well. His courageous action that afternoon landed him on two assassination lists—one radical, the other right-wing.

“Kent State is not Iwo Jima”: CBS Evening News, November 3, 1970.