Last week was the anniversary of the Kent State massacre.
The division of history into distinct decades is somewhat arbitrary—the ‘80s, for example, spilled over into the early ‘90s because the Reagan-Bush era ended in '92. The ‘60s as we think of them—turbulent, vivid, urgent and dangerous—didn’t really kick off until late ’63, after the Kennedy assassination and right around the time the Beatles arrived in the States.* And when did the ‘60s end? Four days in May, on a grassy campus in northeast Ohio, when activists at Kent State, angered by Nixon's escalation of the war into Cambodia on April 30, set off a weekend of protest that ended when the Ohio State Guard shot into a crowd of unarmed students, the culmination of what Todd Gitlin called “The Days of Death.” May 4 1970 was when the war came home.
I was only vaguely aware of the shootings until in college** I stumbled across James Michener’s book Kent State: What Happened and Why—probably the first volume on the topic, it was written and published in early 1971.
Michener’s text is absolutely fascinating, and very, very contemporary, so much so that he assumes knowledge of then-current terms, like "straight" and "drop out" and "outside agitators," which have since become dated. One phrase, one reference in particular stood out--Michener and the students constantly talked about "the revolution." Not a, but the.
I wasn’t sure what this meant but my mother set me straight—she explained to me that in those strange days, people believed that a by-God REVOLUTION was imminent, that all the rhetoric and violence was all leading toward a forcible overthrow of “the system.” I responded “Oh, like Helter Skelter” [Manson’s term for the race war he was trying to ignite with the murders he ordered—he picked up the phrase from the Beatles’ White Album, released the previous year. Needless to say, the White Album does not endorse murder]. As a child of the post-‘60s, the mindset is a little difficult to grasp at first—the US really did undergo a revolution but it was more metaphorical than literal, an open challenge to the system of white patriarchal privilege rather than a literal coup d'etat.
Michener’s text is dated in another way—without exception, every female student is described in such glowing terms as “a leggy blonde co-ed” or “one of the prettiest of the activists." It reads as though Austin Powers were the ghost writer! Perhaps the most sadly hilarious example is during an interview with a black student, one Cindy Sudberry.
It was pathetic for a black like me to watch the nice white boys and girls growing up so fast. "Are the guns loaded? Are they using real bullets?"...You didn't hear any blacks asking damn-fool questions like that...And I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying "I knew when I was born. The guns are always loaded."Cindy's rueful take on the shootings would have more impact if Michener hadn't introduced her with a long, lingering description of her "superb figure" in its "open midriff dress" and a detailed rundown of her cosmetic regime. ["A touch of rouge and eye makeup" and an "intelligent" use of lipstick, for the record.] Down, boy.
As I read the book, I kept coming back to that famous picture, the one that won the Pulitzer, the one snapped right after the shooting had stopped and a 14 year old runaway was screaming over Jeffrey Glenn Miller, who’d been shot in the head.
If you examine the photo, you can see the many of the students nearby don’t realize yet what has happened—several of them are clearly still on their way to class, unconcerned with what must have seemed like just another protest on a sunny spring day. Like Michener’s text, the picture is caught in time—everything has started to change, the deluge is just outside the frame of the shot, about to overwhelm everyone. The girl’s body language is so anguished, so fraught; she is an hieroglyph of shock and horror. When you look more closely you can see what must have been obvious to her—that she is standing over, and perhaps in, a river of Miller’s blood.***
I used to listen to the musical Godspell [which premiered off-Broadway a year after Kent State] as I was reading the book—the ballad “On the Willows,” with its mournful, delicate guitar riffs and that sliding cadence from major to minor on the last phrase, seemed especially appropriate.
But how can we sing
Sing the Lord’s song
In a foreign land?
As I pored over the grainy pictures in the book, I kept imagining that song playing over the sounds of the shooting, the cries, the agonized breathing as Alison Krause and William Schroeder and Sandy Scheuer fought to stay alive [Jeffrey Miller of course died immediately].
For our captors there required
Of us, songs
And our tormentors, mirth...
Little enough grace to ease their passing. In the aftermath of the shootings traditionalist Americans who were frustrated by the student movements of the ‘60s rose up in condemnation against the four dead students. Rarely has the generational divide been so starkly revealed. Many older Americans said things like "those kids got what was coming to them" and "students get away with too much today [sound familiar?] and they should be shot" and most shockingly "Any student who was on campus that day should have been shot down." One mother heartbreakingly told her daughter, an honors student and an RA who had barely missed being shot, that if a bullet had found her "you would have deserved it."
William Schroeder was an ROTC cadet, a "straight." Sandy Scheuer was on her way to class. They were not protesting--but even if they had been, like Allison Krause and Jeff Miller, these are First Amendment rights. They are constitutionally protected. If this country can tolerate neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, we can tolerate a few long-haired students flipping off armed Guardsmen.
Even in the face of parental alienation and the hatred of conservatives and even death, the students wouldn't back down--there were campus strikes all over the nation in protest to the shootings [760 according to Michener]. I rather love this NYU student's bravado:
But in the end, perhaps the students did win--as I've argued before, nothing galvanizes a movement like excessive force and it seems that eventually parental love won out over politics. The war that Nixon escalated, the war for which he won re-election by promising a "secret plan" to end, the unpopular, endless quagmire for which students were dying in droves, both in Vietnam and now on their own campuses, finally, finally, crept to a halt five years later--poetically on April 30, 1975.
*I read a fascinating theory speculating that the reception to the Beatles was so ecstatic in part because of the Kennedy assassination—that after six weeks of sustained national mourning, the nation seized the opportunity to forget their grief for a while.
**I discovered this book carelessly tucked away in one of the student lounges at my alma mater, Sweet Briar. For some reason this lounge was full of hidden historical treasures—I also came across a copy of James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society here. Fantastic! Like Kent State: What Happened and Why, Silver’s book is another examination of a campus uprising (the violent resistance to the integration of Ole Miss in 1962), and was written during the last fall of the Kennedy administration—but it was published in early 1964 and so it was dated as soon as it came out. Things had a way of changing very quickly in the ‘60s—the center wasn’t holding. Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall apart...
***If you want to see Miller's body at another angle to appreciate exactly how horrific his shooting was, you can search for the pictures on Google images. Warning: They are very graphic, why is why I didn't host them. Head wounds bleed quite heavily--according to Michener "No one, not even veterans from Vietnam, could believe that so much blood had come from one human being."
