Above the Shots

An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings

Craig S. Simpson

• Éditeur: The Kent State University Press
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781631012341
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia nordamericana

A deadly confrontation at Kent State University between Vietnam War protesters and members of the Ohio National Guard occurred in the afternoon on May 4, 1970. What remained, along with the tragic injuries and lives lost, was a remarkable array of conflicting interpretations and theories about what happened—and why.

Above the Shots sheds new light on this historic event through the recollections of more than 50 narrators, whose stories are unique and riveting: the former mayor of Kent a witness to the riot in town a few nights earlier a protester who helped burn the ROTC building a Black United Students member who was warned to stay away from the protest a Vietnam veteran who deplored the counterculture yet administered first aid to the wounded a friend of one of the mortally wounded students, who died in his arms a guardsman sympathetic to the students a faculty member supportive of the Guard an outraged student who went to the state capital to make a citizen's arrest of Governor Rhodes a pair of former KSU presidents who, years later, courted controversy by how they chose to memorialize the tragedy. From the precipitous cultural conflicts of the 1960s to the everraging battle over how to remember the Kent State incident, the authors examine how these accounts challenge and deepen our understanding of the shootings, the Vietnam Era, memory, and oral history. Spanning five decades, Above the Shots not only chronicles the immediate chain of events that led to the shootings but explores causes and consequences, prevailing conspiracies, and the search for catharsis. It is a narrative assemblage of voices that rise above the rhetoric—above the din—to show how a watershed moment in modern American history continues to speak to us.

PART ONE

“The largest unknown
university in the world”

Kent State and the 1960s

Examining even briefly the Daily Kent Stater (DKS)—Kent State University’s student newspaper now for nearly a hundred years—from 1960, it is difficult to imagine all that would come in the following decade. Eisenhower was still president and in many respects, 1960 seemed much like 1950. It was Kent State’s semicentennial that year and—reflecting the general optimism in much of the nation—coverage of the festivities brimmed with self-assurance and hope. It was journalism professor William Taylor who directed the campus observance and for whom the future Taylor Hall would be named. The student editorial on the semicentennial celebration boasted that “successful progress in becoming a great, established institution of higher education seems almost inevitable.”¹ In his history of Kent State written for the occasion, historian Phillip Shriver boasted that Kent State was “entering its second half-century, confident and unafraid.”²

The political situation seemed fairly mainstream as well. In April, the student mock-Democratic convention nominated two-time former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and not John F. Kennedy. The student Republicans lined up behind Richard Nixon. Regular announcements in the DKS came of speakers and forums on the perils of Communism.³ Glancing through issues of the DKS also reveals the gender divide quite readily. Kent State had a dean of men and a dean of women, and housemothers (officially called resident counselors) supervised the female dorms. The semicentennial celebrations included a campus day queen and her four attendants. Female students were called “coeds” and “girls,” and they could still major in home economics. And the dean of women announced a new dress code that regulated when and where Bermuda shorts could be worn; skirts were the standard for most areas. Men could wear Bermudas at their discretion, since there were no set regulations for them regarding attire.⁴ The festivities ended in May with a campus day dance, music provided by orchestras led by Sammy Kaye and Billy May. The need for two bands came after a heated debate on campus between the “squares” who “wanted the more conservative strains” of the 1940s (as played by Kaye) and the “cools” who preferred the “frantic, way out sounds” of the 1950s as done by May.⁵ Indeed, when it came to music, student writers could still marvel that “stereophonic” equipment and records were here to stay—whether one liked it or not.

Aerial view of campus, 1969. The Commons and Taylor Hall are visible in the center of the photograph. Just to the left of Taylor Hall are Prentice Hall and the parking lot where four students were killed. By 1970, the university’s footprint had expanded and enrollment reached some 21,000 students. (Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives.)

As Kent State celebrated its past and looked to a bright future, the campus continued to grow to meet demand. In 1960, construction was nearly done on the Music and Speech Center, which would be the site of a major confrontation between students and police in 1969. That same year, construction began on two new dormitories—Lake and Olson Halls—near what would be Blanket Hill. Like many institutions of its kind, Kent had grown tremendously in the decade before as baby boomers made their way from high schools to colleges. The university began as a normal school (a college that trained teachers) in 1910 with a tent and 47 students; by 1960, it had some 7,500 students enrolled in a full range of graduate and undergraduate programs; the campus maintained twenty-one buildings and was in the midst of expanding to meet soaring demand. Indeed, by 1970, enrollment had reached some 21,000 and about 80 percent of the students came from Ohio.⁶

Expansion of the university, combined with suburbanization, led the town of Kent to grow as well, from 8,581 in 1940 to 17,836 in 1960 and 28,183 in 1970. The university increasingly shaped the city. By the mid-1960s, 21 percent of its paid labor force worked for KSU. In the process, Kent became the largest city in Portage County, which, given the modest size of Kent, indicates the rural, small-town profile of the area surrounding the city and the university. Many local residents and officials relished the “self-image of a non-industrial, semi-pastoral environment.”⁷ The city and Portage County remained fairly homogeneous: by 1969, 3.1 percent of Kent’s population and 2.1 percent of the county’s was African American.⁸ The city’s newspaper, the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier reflected the values of its owner, Robert C. Dix, a staunchly anti-Communist conservative who also served as president of the Kent State Board of Trustees from 1963 to 1973.

Many narrators stress the sense of quiet conformity on campus and in the town. Kent State’s image during the 1960s—a selling point in the eyes of the community—is that it was an unremarkable campus in an unremarkable town. Yet administrators worked to build its reputation for research. Outside the region, it is safe to say that the university remained like much of the Midwest for so many—flyover country, a bland place referred to as the heartland.

John Peach, who in the 1980s became KSU’s chief of police and then director of public safety, began as an officer there in the 1960s. “It was a very quiet campus; it was somewhat conservative. When I say conservative, there wasn’t anything to look at it being any different from a college or university anywhere.”⁹ David Hansford, who was a “townie”—a senior at Kent Roosevelt High School in 1970—agreed that “town involvement with the University was special events, sporting activities. It was a big school, but the city of Kent and Kent State, I think, in my opinion, got along pretty well. There was good rapport between the both of them.”¹⁰ John Guidubaldi, an undergraduate at Kent in the 1960s who returned to teach there in 1969 after earning his doctorate at Harvard in psychology, felt vastly more at ease on the former campus than the latter. “When I was here in the mid-sixties … it was a very peaceful place. Beautiful campus. A lot of good relationships with the town members; town-gown relations were great…. At Harvard, I was [a] witness to the Harvard demonstration, was in fact what I consider to be a victim of it, because they shut down the university when I was doing my dissertation.”¹¹

James Mueller was a University of Akron student in the 1960s and often visited Kent; he later became involved in the May 4 Task Force and often speaks at the annual commemoration.

I remember actually sitting out there at Main and Lincoln on that bench one time with a friend and we were trying to collect our thoughts before we drove back to town being responsible drinkers, if you know what I mean. And I was saying … I had read somewhere that Kent was the largest unknown university in the world. I said here’s this university with all these thousands of students and I said—this was maybe about 1964—other than people in northeastern Ohio, nobody even knows where it is because we didn’t really have premier sporting teams. I think this was before the fashion school had come into its full blossom. So it just wasn’t really that well-known a place.¹²

Even those who considered themselves activists remember feeling shocked that the protests and shootings occurred at a place like Kent. Here is Diane Yale-Peabody, interviewed in 1990:

I’m a 1972 graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. I was a sophomore at the time of the shootings. I can remember all through my years at Kent being very active and socially aware in politics. And I had gone to peace rallies and candlelight marches, and peace vigils at Catholic churches for a long time. I marched on October 15th in 1969 at the peace march here on campus. I went to Washington, D.C. in November 1969. And we always—I guess we thought we had to go away someplace to show our protest. We never thought Kent would be the center of something like this. So when it happened in May, we were just astounded.¹³

Ellis Berns was an eyewitness to the shootings. When asked about Kent’s activism, he compared it to his experience with visiting friends who attended the University of Wisconsin, which had a long history of activism and became famous for large demonstrations in the 1960s.

I had friends who used to go to Madison, Wisconsin. I had a friend at UW; I used to go up there on weekends. There were people protesting, it was very active. And compared to University of Wisconsin, Kent seemed like just small potatoes. It really wasn’t the kind of activity—although you knew there was a bit of an undercurrent that was going on. But nothing like how it crescendoed out of control, but not expecting anything severe or anything that eventually happened on the May 4th weekend.¹⁴

The Scranton Commission and outside newspapers like the New York Times reinforced this image. “Compared with other American universities of its size,” the Scranton Commission report noted, “Kent State had enjoyed relative tranquility prior to May 1970, and its student population had generally been conservative or apolitical.”¹⁵ A May 7, 1970, New York Times article by Douglas Kneeland, “Kent State in Flux but Still Attuned to Mid-America,” captured this sense of quietude and normality disrupted suddenly by the shootings. In contrast to industrial cities like Cleveland and Youngstown, Kneeland described Kent as a “a small school, little noted, caught in the rip tide of the postwar baby boom.” Its primary aim was “to provide an education for the sons and daughters of the blue-collar and white-collar middle class in this crowded, industrialized corner of northeast Ohio.” Kneeland concurred with the people he interviewed, who all suggested that most Kent students—and by extension all students in Middle America—were apathetic or career-oriented and that only a small percentage could be considered activists.¹⁶

This sense of quiet conformity may serve several functions in memory. For many narrators and others writing about the shootings, it serves as a counter to explain the shock that came with the shootings in 1970. This trope emerged in news reports after the shootings as well, emphasizing the seeming incongruity between KSU’s quiet anonymity with the sudden violence that thrust the university into the spotlight. In Guidubaldi’s case, he may be using the peacefulness of the campus in his mind to reinforce his negative views of student demonstrations at Harvard and his later comments on the events of May 4, which emphasized that students themselves not only disrupted an otherwise orderly system, but through their own violent actions brought about the tragedy of May 4.

Often among conservatives, the narrative of the 1960s is that of a negative, disruptive period that compares unfavorably to the peace and stability of the previous decade. In this section of the interview, Guidubaldi is putting together his personal memory with a historical memory of the events, bringing forward into the public his internalized interpretation that reinforces a larger historical narrative about the 1960s.¹⁷ For some, it may be they simply did not see the activism or pay attention to it, at least until the later 1960s. There does appear to be a dividing line in the memory of the 1960s between calm and chaos that falls around 1967–1968. So events and issues that many people associate with the 1960s in popular memory—tie-dye, psychedelic drugs, loud rock music, antiwar demonstrations, urban violence—derive mainly from events that occurred after approximately 1965. As Bernard von Bothmer notes, the years 1960–1963 are often the Good Sixties, associated with JFK, strong national defense, peaceful civil rights protests, and traditional social mores. The years afterward are the Bad Sixties, associated with LBJ and Nixon, urban unrest, escalation in Vietnam, and the counterculture.¹⁸

This perception of the city of Kent and KSU is in stark contrast to the image of northeast Ohio and the lower Great Lakes as a region filled with large urban areas of the industrial belt. The World War II era and immediate postwar decades witnessed the height of the region’s prowess as the manufacturing hub for the nation and for the world. Its auto plants, steel mills, and tire factories churned out the materiel for fighting fascism and for the postwar world of mass consumption. With steady employment, the region’s working-class parents could afford to send their children to college, and more and more did so. The students coming to Kent in the 1950s and mid-1960s were increasingly children of the working class, first-time college families, and overwhelmingly from the surrounding counties and their larger, urban centers, including Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Lorain, and Youngstown.

Many narrators crafted this sense of self and the student body at Kent in the Vietnam era. Rick Byrum, who witnessed the shootings, commented that Akron and Kent were—and remain—“working class schools,” with “blue collar families that are sending their kids off to college.” He added, “I am the only person in my family that’s graduated from college.”¹⁹ Many of them, especially some of the activists, came from union households whose parents had been involved in labor activism. Joe Cullum was there protesting on May 4 and is featured in a Life magazine photo giving aid to wounded student John Cleary. Cullum grew up in Canton and attended Catholic schools. He came from a “working class family” and lived in “housing for a lot of the manufacturing workers that lived in Canton.” He went on: “My father was a union supporter and had been for a long time… . My parents were both dyed-in-the-wool Democrats.”²⁰

Whether of activist backgrounds or not, these working-class students made up the bulk of the student body, but KSU’s growth also meant more students were coming from out of state as well, particularly from the surrounding region. Although the main student population could be considered “white,” that belied ethnic and class differences; there was also a growing number of African American students with about 400 in fall 1968 and 650 by spring quarter 1970. Of those in 1970, about 285 were from Cleveland or East Cleveland and another 30 from Akron.²¹ And although the city of Kent remained fairly homogenous, it remained divided along its various social classes, between blue-collar and white-collar, whites and minorities of color, townies and students.

Memory Narratives: Activism and Quiet Conformity

Our narrators’ memory of Kent and the university before 1970 is as divided as the memory of the shootings themselves. While some emphasize quiet conformity, others emphasize continuity between the confrontation on May 4, 1970, and earlier developments associated with student activism. They may still express shock, anger, and grief that students were killed, but they dispute the recollection of Kent as an apathetic campus that suddenly er...