The Shootings at Kent State
Four months before the National Guard protest in New York, 100 Ohio Guardsmen confronted 1,500 rioting students at Kent State University who pelted them with rocks and bottles. Mistakenly believing that they were coming under gunfire, 30 Guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing 4 and wounding 9.
The Kent State killings were horrifying tragedies, and the anti-war movement portrayed them as deliberate acts of murder. They weren’t. But even if you think that those 30 Guardsmen in Ohio had been guilty of a terrible crime, the fact remains that they were only 30 Guardsmen out of 500,000 nationwide. Despite that fact, the Anti War Movement to this day uses this incident to assign collective guilt to 500,000 American servicemen.
The Kent State shootings were provoked by widespread rioting and Arson
Aside from the Vietnam War, it would be hard to think of anything that has obsessed the New Left as much as the Kent State shootings. Although it occurred in May 1970, the incident is now remembered as one of the quintessential events of the 1960s. It was famously memorialized in the Czosby, Stills, Nash & Young tune “Four Dead in Ohio ” and in dozens of other songs by performers including the Steve Miller Band.
Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, Joe Walsh, Holly Near, the founders of Dove, Dave Brubeck and Jon Anderson of Yes. Additionally, there are poems commemorating the event by Allen Ginsberg and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, numerous sculptures (including one by famed realist George Segal), five documentaries, and at least three theatrical or network television films. All these memorials toll the same story: vicious National Guardsmen, without provocation, opened fire on peaceful “antiwar” protesters. But that’s not what really happened.
Most accounts of the shootings only look at Kent State, and thus conveniently omit the wider context of the times; namely that the shootings were preceded by a spate of rioting and violence by agitators at other universities, including UC Berkeley, Columbia and Harvard. Most famously, Cornell’s William Straight Hall was taken over by black power activists who later had guns smuggled into the building. Although it is not noted by pop singers of filmmakers, these leftist radicals often left a trail of mayhem. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, researcher Robert Fassnacht was murdered by “antiwar” student terrorists who bombed the schools Sterling Hall Army Math Research Center.
Unrest first hit Kent State in April 1969, when Columbia SDS leader Mark Rudd gave a speech on campus. Rudd’s address was a standard-issue tirade that was strong on demagogy and short on love or pacifism. He called for students to fight to shut down the school’s ROTC program, its crime labs, and its law enforcement training classes. Over the next year, a faction of radical Kent State students took up Rudd’s call, issuing a manifesto echoing hi demands. Among the principal leaders was self professed Communist Robert Franklin. The agitators “occupied” university buildings by breaking in through locked doors and windows. Meeting little resistance from school authorities, they became increasingly fanatical, and their actions encouraged extremism from other student groups. The Black United Students for example, called for achieving their goals “by any means necessary”- a clear indication that violence was an option.
By Friday, May 1, 1970, the situation at Kent State was spinning completely out of control. That day, students buried a copy of the Constitution and then publicly burned a draft card. A mob set fire to the school’s Air Force ROTC building, while also torching an American flag. A student who tried to photograph the event was beaten and robbed of his camera. When fire marshals arrived to stop the blaze, the gang of arsonists attacked them and stole their hoses. The building burned into the evening.Worse was to come. That night students poured into the center of the town, starting more fires. They overwhelmed the police, who were unwilling to use their guns, and beat numerous cops as well as the town’s mayor. Local officials began asking the governor to declare a state of emergency.
Still unpunished, the student mob went further the following day. Having succeeded in torching the Air Force ROTC building with impunity, it set fire to the Kent State president’s building. Then the radicals headed back downtown and began smashing up stores. The disorder rapidly spread, eventually involving around 2,000 people. Rock-throwing mobs roamed the town. At a nearby airstrip, a truck was stolen and six planes were attacked, and another fire was started. Behind this violence was a small group of hard-core agitators whose demands ran the gamut from ending the draft to abolishing tuition.
That Monday morning National Guard troops arrived to re-take the campus from looters and arsonists. The ring leaders had organized a bigger group of students around themselves, essentially using them as human shields. After ordering the students to leave, the Guardsmen began moving towards the crowd to disperse it. Between ten and fifty students began throwing rocks at the Guardsmen, and some students reportedly attempted to throw a parking meter off a building roof at the troops. Worse, the Guardsmen became caught behind the chain-link fence of a practice football facility. They were trapped and under attack. Then something quite unexpected happend. Eyewitnesses reported that a student named Terry Norman pulled out a gun and pistol-whipped another student. He then pointed the gun at the Guardsmen and started running towards them. The Guardsmen opened fire, killing four students.
Left Wing Activists have concocted the far-fetched conspiracy theory that Norman was really an FBI agent planted at the scene by the government. As Evidence, they note that Norman, who was a professional photographer, had taken pictures for the FBI of a neo-Nazi rally in a nearby town. This indeed appears to be the case. But that’s hardly evidence that Norman was at Kent State as a government plant.
The Justice Department and the FBI repeatedly investigated this claim, going over 8,000 pages of FBI files and interviewing many witnesses. Over one hundred agents were involved in just one of the investigations, and the Justice Departments review was conducted under the aegis of liberal icon and Nixon antagonist Elliot Richardson. There were also two federal trials of the Guardsmen, one criminal and one civil, both resulting in the dismissal of all charges.There was even a further investigation of Norman’s involvement promoted by a public request from Democratic senator Birch Bayh. None of these inquiries has ever provided any evidence that Norman was a secret government agent.
Conclusion:
The tragic deaths at Kent State Included students who were innocent bystanders uninvolved in the rioting. But the rush to proclaim the victims as martyrs for the New Left, the arson, looting and violence of the “antiwar” agitators has been all but erased from history. There surely was no mention of the riots in “Four Days in Ohio”- as if the “tin soldier” Guardsmen opened fire totally unprovoked, just because they were the evil representatives of an immoral government. Needless to say, if there had been no rioting, the National Guard would not have been called, and the four students would not have been slain.
That’s to say, Guardsmen today are “trigger-happy” so to speak. They’re selfless Americans serving their country (and who, thanks to their frequent deployments overseas in recent years in the War on Terror, are far more disciplined and better trained than the Guardsmen involved in the 1970 Kent State shooting).
Sources
https://www.amazon.com/Kent-State-What-Happened-Why/dp/0449202739
https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Sixties-Guides/dp/1596985720
