May 4, 2010
Today is-unbelievably-the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. The spring of 1970 was a tumultuous time. The Vietnam War was dragging on with no end in sight despite Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign promise that “I have a secret plan to end the war.” Indeed fighting-and casualties-on all sides of the conflict were rising alarmingly. Public sentiment was swinging against the war and the Nixon administration answered with increasingly bellicose rhetoric of its own denouncing protestors-especially students-and appealing to its core support among “the silent majority.” The mood on campuses across the nation was turning sour. The Teach-ins and peaceful protests, the hippy mood of peace and love for all, were wearing thin as frustrated students wanted to end the war now.
In addition a deep radicalism, represented by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other organizations took root across the country. Since students at Columbia University in New York staged their first building occupations, radical confrontations with schools and local authorities had spread across the nation.
It had even taken root at Kent State University, a second or third level large public university situated in conservative Ohio. It was the kind of school that was often attended by students who were the first in their families to attend college. It was not Berkley or Madison or Ann Arbor, known hot beds of radicalism. Yet radicalism and impassioned anti-war fervor had taken root even there. Around the nations demonstrations against the war were planned on campuses for May Day. Richard Nixon choose April 30 to publicly announce his previously secret Cambodian Excursion. The broadening of the war increased turn out-and militancy-at demonstrations across the nation.
At Kent, about 500 students gathered for a rally at noon on Friday, May 1. Some Draft Cards and a copy of the Constitution were burned during the short, peaceful rally. Another demonstration was announced for Monday, May 4 in the same location. Then the crowd dispersed and most were back in class by 1 PM.
That night, however, violence broke out in downtown Kent in the area of student bars. The origins of the disturbance are murky. Authorities blamed “outside agitators.” Students blamed overzealous police action against routine rowdyism that quickly got out of hand. Soon rocks and bottles were raining on police, cars were being turned over and burned and windows shattered. Police, re-enforced from surrounding communities responded with force. Most of those initially involved appeared not to be students by bikers, and local youths. When police ordered all of the bars closed, more people poured into the street, many simply swept up in action. Eventually rioters, students and non student alike, were pushed back onto the University campus. Kent was typical of the town and gown conflict of many university towns.
Mayor Leroy Satrom, responding to wild rumors circulating among local businessmen that “radical outside agitators” were planning to attack and burn the business district on Saturday night requested Governor James A. Rhodes to send in the National Guard. Rhodes, a law-and-order Republican was eager to comply. With Guard units already on duty in the state, it was easy to rapidly dispatch troops to the scene.
That night with an off campus curfew and the downtown bars closed, students stayed on campus. About a 1000 demonstrated on the commons. At some point a wooden ROTC building was set afire. No one has ever been able to find out by whom. Student interfered first with campus police and then with city police and firemen responding to the call, slashing the fire department’s hose lines. As the building roared, surrounded by cheering students, the Guard arrived about 10 PM and immediately began trying to clear the scene. They used tear gas and advanced with unsheathed bayoneted. At least one student received a bayonet wound. Dozens were arrested in the chaos that followed.
The next day Governor Rhodes poured gasoline on the explosive situation. With barely controlled rage he denounced the students as revolutionaries, "They're worse than the Brown Shirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes," he said. “They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.” In his press conference he also announced that he would seek a court injunction against all assembly and demonstrations at the university and town. But he never sought such authorization. None the less almost everyone-Guard, university authorities and students alike believed the school had been placed under some sort of martial law.
That night the Guard first broke up a rally on the commons and then dispersed a sit-in at busy intersection again using tear gas. This time more students were bayoneted and gas drifting into the dorms to which students were pushed sickened several. Student anger by then was as much about the presence of the Guard on campus and the war.
Campus authorities, believing an order to ban assemblies had come down from the Guard, circulated 12,000 flyers Monday morning announcing that the previously planned peace rally was banned. Students began to gather anyway around 11 AM. A campus officer was dispatched on a Guard Jeep with a bullhorn to warn students to disperse. He was greeted by rocks and bottles. The campus’s Victory Bell was rung to begin the rally and the first speakers began to address the 500 or so demonstrators immediately around the bell. Another 1000 or so gathered near by to “cheer” the active demonstrators and nearly 12,000 more bystanders ringed the area to watch events unfold.
Guard commander General Robert Canterbury ordered his troops to “lock and load” live ammunition into their World War II era M-1 rifles. In previous confrontations the Guard had not carried live ammunition. Ordered to sweep the Commons, the Guard advanced. Tear gas was fired ineffectively because the wind kept it away from most students. But demonstrators picked up and threw canisters back at Guardsmen, who were now wearing hot and uncomfortable gas masks. 77 troops, bayonets lowered advanced. They pushed the students around the Bell out of the Commons and past Taylor Hall. A large. Loose group retreated to an area in front of Taylor, other retreated further to the parking lot of Prentiss Hall where they intermingled with students still coming from and going to classes.
The Guard did not follow the students but proceeded down the hill until they found themselves partly hemmed in by a chain link fence of a practice athletic field. They turned and faced students at Taylor and as rocks and teargas canisters continued to be thrown at them, most falling well short of their marks. At one point a line of Guardsmen knelt in firing position but did not shoot. They were clearly confused about what to do, but did not want to go out they way they came, fearing it would look like a retreat. After milling around for ten minutes or so, they turned left to march back up a hill passed the students at Taylor, who followed them at a distance.
At the crest of the hill, next to a pagoda structure, 29 guardsmen suddenly wheeled and fired at the protestors. They got off 67 rounds in about 13 seconds. As in most uses of military firepower, most of the Guardsmen shot into the air or ground, others fired indiscriminately into the crowd, at least a few picked their targets. No order to fire has ever been identified, although an officer is clearly shown aiming his pistol in concert with the volley. General Canterbury would later spuriously claim that the men came under sniper fire. The Guardsmen themselves claimed that they acted in “fear of their lives.”
In all four students were killed and nine wounded. At least on victim may have been targeted. Joseph Lewis was about 60 feet from the troops defiantly holding his middle finger up when he was wounded in the abdomen and leg. Two of the dead were active participants in the demonstration. Jeffery Miller the closest, about 270 feet from the line when he was shot through the mouth. Allison Kraus received a lethal chest wound about 340 feet away. The other two victims, Sandra Scheuer and ROTC member William Schroeder caught in the Prentiss Parking lot walking to classes. One of the wounded, Dean Kahler, was shot in the back at 300 feet and paralyzed by a severed spinal cord.
After firing, the Guard retreated back behind the hill but was preparing to march again. As the dead and wounded were evacuated many enraged students seemed ready to attack the Guard. Faculty marshals pleaded with them to evacuate the area telling them that the Guard was prepared to “slaughter” them. And indeed General Canterbury may have issued explicit instruction to fire “if threatened” on a second sweep. After about 20 tense minutes students left the Commons area and the Guard withdrew.
Word of the shootings electrified the nations. First reports were wildly inaccurate claiming as many as 40 were dead-the result of a simple wire service typo-and that Guardsmen had come under attack and were wounded and killed. In fact only one Guardsman was treated all day, Sgt Lawrence Shafer, who was hit by a rock. Shafer was later quoted by friends as claiming that he intentionally took aim on Jeffery Miller. Official inquiries “could not confirm the claim,” but years later he told ABC News that he did, in fact, intentionally target Joseph Lewis, who was hit by three rounds.
As word spread campuses across the nation erupted into strikes and demonstrations. Over 900 universities, colleges, and even high schools were closed by strikes and demonstrations across the country and an estimated 4 million people took part in demonstrations in the days that followed. An iconic photo of a 14 year old run-away Mary Ann Vecchio anguishing over the body of Miller helped fuel public rage. A banner hung from a building at New York University summed up the defiant mood on most campuses-“You Can’t Kill Us All.”
On Friday May 8 building trades union leader Peter Brenner organized counter demonstrators to a protest at New York’s Federal Hall the resulted in the Hard Hat Riot as workers attacked protestors while police stood aside. Nixon pointedly rewarded Brenner later with an appointment as Secretary of Labor.
On Saturday, May 9 massive demonstrations were held in city’s across the country. 100,000 mostly peaceful demonstrators turned up in Washington, but there were scattered instances of violence in the city. Thoroughly frightened, Nixon had been evacuated to Camp David and was under heavy military guard. Members of the 101st Airborn division waited in the basement of the Executive Office Building to be unleashed on demonstrators. Nixon ordered a draconian plan for domestic surveillance and political suppression known as the Huston Plan put in operation, but was stopped by J. Edgar Hoover of all people, mostly because it would be largely out of his hands and conducted by military intelligence. Frustrated, Nixon turned to creating his own private intelligence operation and “dirty tricks” crew which would lead to the Watergate Scandal.
Just as the crisis of Kent state seemed to be subsiding, National Guard troops at all Black Jackson State University in Mississippi opened fire on unarmed students killing two and wounding 12, but the killing failed to re-ignite a new wave of protest either because campuses across the nation were simply exhausted, or because the deaths of black students didn’t strike home in the same way.
There have been many investigations into the shooting. Guardsmen were cleared in a criminal trial without even having to present evidence. The State of Ohio agreed to a paltry $670,000 cash settlement with the surviving victims and the families of the dead-the amount it figured to save by not appealing a lower court decision-without ever accepting responsibility. Independent investigations and several researchers are split about whether there was an order to fire. Some even claim the shootings were “unfortunate but necessary to restore order.” Some are convinced to this day that the Guardsmen acted under orders.
A new People’s Tribunal is convening at Kent State now to investigate this and other matters. A possible break came when a taper recording of the shooting was uncovered recently with what sounds like an order to fire. What ever happened that day, so many lives were changed forever.