Who Controls the Past Controls the Future, Kent State Edition
Try as I might, I was not able to avoid entirely the media coverage surrounding the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, coverage that was particularly intense here in nearby Cleveland. I am too young to remember the shootings, but I do remember the civil trial of the National Guardsmen who fired on the student protestors, and the reactions to that trial. What I remember is the adults around me expressing sympathy for the Guardsmen and doubts, even disgust, about the student protest movement of the 1960's, of which Kent State became a symbol. This sentiment was widespread. The jury in the civil trial unanimously found for the Guardsmen. Ohio Governor James Rhodes, who ordered the National Guard to Kent, was reelected in 1974, after sitting out a term due to term limits. Ronald Reagan used popular disgust at the antics in Berkeley to become Governor of California and a national political figure, and Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972 represented a decisive repudiation of the New Left.
Those voting for Rhodes, Reagan, and Nixon likely expected that their views about the cultural revolutions that shook America in the 1960's would prevail in the future. But the coverage of Kent State 40 years later is just the latest illustration of how ill-founded those expectations were. Sentiments of the sort I remember from the 1970's have largely vanished from public discussions of Kent State. Indeed, as a former roommate of one of those wounded in 1970 told the Cleveland Plain Dealer following a ceremony on campus, “I never thought I’d see this day. Gov. Rhodes and the old Kent administration tried to bury this day. They tried to keep us from doing any kind of program in the early 1970s. Having a walking trail and plaques of historic significance like we have now would never have happened back then.”
Nor is this inversion of sentiment limited to leftist colleges and newspapers. Over the weekend, a fellow Ohioan, Robert Cheeks, put up a post on a blog at First Things defending Governor Rhodes and the Ohio National Guard. Cheeks’ post was removed by First Things, and the comments at that ostensibly conservative website indicated that Cheeks was swimming against the tide: In the brief time Cheeks’ post was allowed to remain up, I saw comparisons of Kent State to Tiananmen Square and several comments about the use of lethal force against “non-violent” demonstrators, a strange word to apply to demonstrators who had rioted in the town of Kent, burned down the school’s ROTC building, cut the fire hoses of the firemen trying to douse that fire, showered rocks on the “pigs” in the Kent police, and later threw rocks and spent tear gas canisters at the “pigs” in the National Guard, while defying a lawful order to disperse. Such violence was a hallmark of the 60's, from the Black Panthers to the Weathermen. And violence was advocated by the loftiest intellectuals of the New Left, as shown by the famous issue of the New York Review of Books featuring a diagram showing how to make a Molotov cocktail on the cover and an article extolling Mao’s dictum that "morality, like politics, flows from the barrel of a gun" on the inside.
What has happened to public discussion of Kent State is, of course, merely a microcosm of what has happened to the discussion of our past: Today, we are increasingly told that the New Left was right, and America herself is too often depicted as being at best benighted, at worst evil before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's. Those resisting this way of telling our story are themselves demonized, as those Texans who want to change the way history is taught in their state are finding out. What we can now see is that the political victories of those who opposed the New Left were largely ephemeral, while the cultural victories won by the New Left in its Gramscian march through the institutions have proved to be far more enduring. And unless American conservatives find a way of changing this, our children will be taught all about the wonders of today’s leftists, and as a result even come to think like them, no matter how many victories conservatives enjoy at the polls.
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As usual, an excellent piece Mr. Piatak.
There's no question the New Left was violent. Just a few months afterward in that same year came the bombing of Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus which killed one person. But if you would say that this was an act of murder, and you would be right even if not intentional, how is it different than what happened Kent State where one of the persons killed was an ROTC student who shot in the back? The same or different? To me they bookend each other perfectly. Radical revolutionaries kill, but so can the state too. From Ruby Ridge to Oklahoma City no different, the same line was followed.
Great piece, Tom. I well remember those days and knew a number of people on the Campus Left, most of which were clueless NY Jews who really though it was 1917 all over again. What utter fools they were, and then what whining cowards whenever they got what they were asking for. If the USA was really a capitalist dictatorship worse than the USSR or China, as they claimed, then what could they possibly expect except the crackdown that almost never came. Even as revolutionaries SDS and the Panthers were pathetic losers. Let me recommend a really boring movie, Goddard's Un Plus Un or Sympathy for the Devil. Half the scenes are of the Rolling Stones rehearsing their song; the other half consists of vignettes of the "revolution"--or should I say, the revolution, man, like it's really happening. Even the great Cine-Marxiste as he called himself was revolted by the total inanity of the student "revolution." In Italy, Pasolini had the same reaction, which partly explains why he has been embraced by some conservative Catholics in Communione e Liberazione.
When I came back from San Franciso, where I had been living, I described to my father what I had seen at Altamont. I told him that all the freaks were convinced that Gov. Reagan was going to bomb or gas the place. "Would have served you right if he had," was the only reply he cared to grunt. He was perfectly correct. I am sorry for the parents of the dumb kids who got shot, most of them probably without understanding what was happening. But there is only one answer to violent anarchism, and the sooner the socialist president of Greece understands it, the sooner he will put away his water guns and reach for the real thing.
Dr. Fleming, may I ask what years were you in San Fran, and whether you were conservatively inclined at the time?
Mr. Piatak, I can confirm that your perspective on the event is almost literally non-existent in the mainstream media. I cannot remember ever having read it presented as anything other than a simplistic morality tale of evil fascists vs those who nobly opposed them.
Though Mr. Scallon makes a valid point about the similar scorn for the lives of others in both revos and federales in some cases, the cases of Kent State and Sterling Hall are not alike. At Kent, the one "shot in the back" had, before he lost his nerve and ran away, been demonstrating hostile intent toward the Guardsmen. His death came about as part of an ongoing melee in which the Guardsmen were acting in self-defence. At Sterling, the death was the result of a deliberate, unprovoked attack that showed blatant disregard for the safety of others; while perhaps not rising to the bar of murder, it undeniably constituted a serious manslaughter.
I have no time now for the subjects of Kent State's place in history and the disconnect between the will of the contemporary majority and political outcomes, except to say that if ever there was a time for mixed emotions in a young person, May 1970 was it. To some extent, this cognitive dissonance has been dogging me, and, I suspect, many others, ever since, causing indecisiveness, procrastination, and who knows what other ills.
Living in Ohio, I have never understood the 'commemorations' of the Kent State shooting. Why was protesting the US Army a good idea on a college campus in the first place? Did they really think that burning down the ROTC building WOULDNT bring out the OH NG?
Second thought: thinking that there was ever any good in the 'New Left' was one of Rothbard's biggest faults in my opinion. He was convinced they were all on the verge of advocating the defense of private property (HA!) and free market economics.
Side note: I was drafted, as a graduate student, and resigned my fellowship. When I was rejected for a potentially serious and long-term medical condition, I decided to live in SF, where I had a relative or two. At first I sought a serious job, but when one finally was offered, I had decided that I would return to school.
I was not very political in those days. I did attend, as a spectator or tourist, demonstrations, including the enormous Moratorium March in SF to end the war, but my own views were complicated. I viewed the war as unjustified and unwinable but I knew guys who had been sent to Vietnam and was disgusted by the protest movements. I had been going out with a young lady from New York and met her SDS friends, whom I found coarse and stupid to a man. In general, I found the quality of American education, culture, and literature tawdry and shoddy. The writers of the 50's and 60's were generally shallow, vain, and incompetent. Just to list some of the more popular writers should give any literate person a case of the jumps: Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, William Buckley, Truman Capote. Of these self-promoters only Capote had any talent and he ruined it. I had grown up reading the Saturday Review and The New Yorker--for the most part, mass-merchandized trash. Yes, there were good writers, but increasingly they were isolated voices drowned out by a cacophonous chorus of cretins--Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike.
On the other hand, I disliked what little I knew of the Conservative Movement, e.g. National Review, the Libertarians, and the pompous wise guys who thought all the problems of human life could be fixed by the free market. On the other hand, I had some sympathy with the critics, some of them leftist, of bourgeois capitalism, but my own opinions were more the product of a preference for rural life and, since early childhood, a hatred of everything modern. Although not a natural-born Charlestonian, I had absorbed the ancient Charleston ethos without even thinking about it. I was always astounded, though, when leftist friends called me a reactionary for preferring the ancients to the moderns or for insisting the poetry had to have rhythm and form or that women's rights was an absurdity.
The influence of Sophocles and Shakespeare and Cicero had already left an impress, and I was already pretty well convinced that there were only two kinds of human life worth having: the first, the life of the creative mind, is available to few, while the life of the economically independent yeoman farmer or craftsman or shopkeeper with a family, living in a settled community, and shaped by the rituals of his religion, was possible for nearly everyone. In 40 years I have worked out this feeling systematically but it has been with me for as long as I can remember. I became a conservative when I believed, somewhat mistakenly, that there was room-- in a movement that tolerated Kirk and Weaver and pretended to celebrate Chesterton and Davidson--for a defense of the fundamentals of human life. Perhaps there was room in the 1960's, but not since the early 1980's. Sorry for the distraction. Graceful bow, exit stage right.
Mr. Piatak,
Why on earth would you be surprised about First Things removing a column that was against the tide? I once asked one of their senior writers why they never lifted a finger in defense of Pat Buchanan when he was being drawn and quartered by organized character assassins and he replied, "Because Pat knew the rules and violated them!" A simple rule of thumb to gage the seriousness of most writers today is to ask how intense the organized vitriole leveled against them really is. If it is high, they are probably keen, insightful, honest, talented and courageous. If they write GOP swill, support endless war, less government and can banter; they might have a future with Hannity, Limbaugh or a column in First Things. If they are leftist pretending to juke right while heading further left and reaching across party lines, they might have a future in public service, government or law. However,if they are polite, intelligent, civilized and tenacious,chances are they might have written for Chronicles, entered the witness protection program, or are enjoying early retirement while being considered unpatriotic threats to only God knows what!! You are young, talented and courageous I can hear the ink pots filling. Do you know the prayer to St. Michael?
The radical left always tries to re-write history. I was a freshman in college when the Kent State shootings occurred. I supported Rhodes and the Guardsmen. I had hoped things would not come to what happened at Kent State, but I am amazed that it hadn't happened before. It was a bit amusing listening to all the idiots rant about "the Revolution," then began whining when they started getting shot at. Yes, revolutionists (real ones, that is) run the risk of getting shot. I remember a meeting held on my small college campus in Indianapolis where the "leaders" of the meeting solemnly urged upon us that NO uniforms should henceforth be allowed on campus. My question: "Does that include the basketball team?" Not appreciated at all.
Is there a parallel relevance to discussing the Christian drift -- perhaps over the same time period to present -- in (mis)understanding of both Christian Just War theory and the sentiment of "turn the other cheek" based on the Scripture passage? Seems like each has taken on an opposing extreme more often than not.
Don't want to distract, just couldn't help thinking about it.
Thanks to all for your kind words.
With respect to Mr. Scallon's comment, I agree that the shootings at Kent State were tragic, a tragedy heightened when one considers that two of those killed were innocent bystanders. But the moral blame for the deaths rests with those who rioted and refused to obey a lawful order to disperse. There is no moral equivalence between rioters and the state, because the state performs the vital function of maintaining order and rioters perform no vital function at all. Of course, the fact that the state has a legitimate role in maintaining order does not give its agents carte blanche in performing that function--far from it--but there is a difference between a reasoned debate over whether the force used at Kent State was excessive and the sort of lionization of the demonstators we have today.
Let us not forget that "the FBI had its own informant and agent-provocateur roaming the crowd, a part-time Kent State student named Terry Norman, who... was armed with a snub-nosed revolver that FBI ballistics tests, first declassified in 1977, concluded had indeed been discharged on that day," according to this Washington Times report -- New light shed on Kent State killings.
The report informs us that an ROTC cadet "heard one round, a pause, two rounds, and then the M-1s opened up." He "stated that the first three rounds were definitely not M-1s" [and] "could possibly have been a .45 caliber."
The '60s radicals said you could always spot the agent-provocateur because he was the one urging on violence. Just as the Feds used agents-provocateurs against the Left in the '60s, with a third of some organizations being FBI infiltrators, so they were used against the Right in the '90s and again today. Let's remember that if and when the Tea Parties turn violent.
The point of my blog on the Postmodern Conservative (First Things) website was to show that former Gov. James Rhodes had acted properly in calling out the National Guard at the request of the Kent, Ohio mayor. That he had correctly acted to protect human life and property against the rioters and arsonists at Kent State.
This is what apparently ignited a firestorm of Leftist commentators whose remarks indicate a severe lack of cognitive skills.
Agreeing with Mr Piatak, I hate to complicate the discussion, but the Western Confucian is right. I wonder how many agents provocateur were operating back then, not just in the FBI, but in the radical left as well, and who was behind them. Dr Wilson's telling of his father's experience as a firefighter in Asheville comes to mind here, as does those murders that happened in the South. How many were set up?
How many martyrdoms were done by agents provocateur? It seems that this is more common than we think.
I hate to delay this post with a link, but look at this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/world/europe/27germany.html
I don't wish to lionize rioters either (otherwise we might as well be celebrating the French Revolution, rule by mob) and I can understand the frustrations one might have to see former Weathermen treated like peers of the realm. However, I have also heard, from those who call themselves conservatives "Love my Country, Fear My Government" and one fellow particular, who has a radio show, talk about shooting federal agents in the head with a gun. This does cause confusion because some of the protesters were saying the same things in 1970 that Mr. Liddy said 25 years later when he was no longer working for the man. It doesn't take much for the rhetoric to switch sides depending on where you are at what time. But if you want an answer to your question Mr. Piatak, then it's the generation that strongly supported law and order back then has passed on the torch of leadership to those who were in the demonstrations. And they have a different perspective on things.
A very good column. I was a college sophomore at the time. I too thought it was tragic because of the innocent bystanders. I often think back to that time and compare it to the present and reflect how the culture has changed in the long run.
One day, I happened to come across in Cleveland State Library the Oxford Dictionary of Terrorism. I looked up the SDS. The entry said that for the first year, it was a student organization, but later taken over by Maoist Intelligence. Likewise, it is a well known fact that the Soviet Union provided $1 Billion to the US anti-war movement. Let us take control of the language as the left-Meta Marxist have done and in the future refer to all Vietnam Anti-War Demostrators as Cambodian/Vietnamese Genocide Collaborators.
I happened to be best friends with the owner of the Kent Book & Tobacco Store at the time of the shootings. He told me that the reason the National Guard had to be called in because 45 deputy county sheriffs had been injured in the preceeding riots. He also said that the Anti-War agitators were not members of the student body, but were from out of town. They had just previously been stirring up trouble at John Carroll University, about 20 miles west of Kent State in an eastern suburb of Cleveland.
"Mixed emotions", in my post above, is the type of understatement that used to be called very British, before the Brits lost their minds and became Pakistanis.
Yes, it was a time of confusion for most young persons, but for none more so than a 20 year-old just ten months returned from the Nam. Shaken to the core is more accurate in my case. Though it had escaped my notice that a forty year anniversary was upon us, that date, May 4th, like the refrain "four dead in O-Hi-O", has never entirely slipped from memory. It marks a point, for me, when an unravelling, which had begun the previous summer with the Chicago Seven trial and the counterculture apogee/tribal birth-rite of Woodstock, began to pick up steam. Under the shock of seeing youngsters of my own age getting shot by young men wearing the uniform I had so recently shed, I began to lose my grip on my identity, values, sense of history, definition of America, perhaps on reality itself. Some twenty-odd years of of wandering many strange and perilous paths - no doubt too much of that time passed at Narcissus's pool, and in staring at shadows on the cave's wall - were necessary for me to find my way back to Our Lord's castle and some understanding of where I'd been and why. I can also take a pinch of pride in eventually picking out my way to that welcoming glimmer of light on the dark heath outside of Chicago, which emanates from the abbey run by the good friars of the Rockford Institute.
I have to admit, though, that the wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie is at times nearly countermanded by the urge to kick one of them across the room. Just now - on my honor, this is true - a woman of my age, peeping over my shoulder, saw a famous Kent State campus photo on my screen, and said "I went to Kent State. Is there something going on? Did something happen?" Her clothes, the look on her face, her reverential tone, all bespoke someone who would visit that "walking trail and plaques of historic significance" and feel nothing but sympathy for the students and nothing but contempt for the soldiers of "Nixon's army". I might not want to kick old ladies, but here is a taste of the males of that stripe, in the full flower of their hatred for Amerika and all things good and true, excerpted from "An Account of the Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial of 1969-70":
[Abbie]Hoffman and [Jerry] Rubin continued, over the next several months leading up to the ['68 Chicago Democratic Party] Convention, to propose ever more wild plans for the Festival of Life. Rubin announced plans to nominate a pig, Pigasus the Immortal, for President. Hoffman talked about a demonstration of public fornication, calling it a "f!!k-in." A Yippie Program, distributed in August of 1968, urged Festival attendees to bring "sleeping bags, extra food, blankets, bottles of fireflies, cold cream, lots of handkerchiefs and canteens to deal with pig spray, love beads, electric toothbrushes, see-through blouses, manifestos, magazines, and tenacity." The program promised poetry readings, mass meditation, "political arousal speeches," fly casting exhibitions, rock music, and "a dawn ass-washing ceremony." There were also activities mentioned in the program that were somewhat problematic for the alleged conspirators' trial defense:
"Psychedelic long-haired mutant-jissomed peace leftists will consort with known dope fiends, spilling out onto the sidewalks in pornape disarray each afternoon....Two-hundred thirty rebel cocksmen under secret vows are on a 24-hour alert to get the pants of the daughters and wifes and kept women of the convention delegates."
Fellow citizens of our "Chronic home" (as it's named on my bookmark bar): pray for me should I ever meet one who tells me "I went to Chicago in '68 for the Festival of Life .
A very powerful essay, Mr. Piatak. Sam Francis would have been proud to have written, I feel sure. One of the great differences between true conservatives and those on the Left is how each treats the past. Conservatives respect and, occasionally revere, the past, the inevitable warts and all. The Left hates almost everything about the past, especially anything that happened before the fabled 60s. Notable exceptions are the French Revolution, FDR's New Deal, the Attlee Government of 1945-50 if you're British, the Progressive Era and, for some lefties, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions and that spendid humanitarian and far-reaching thinker Leon Trotsky. Come to think of it, the neo-conservatives fancied Trotsky too.
Fellow citizens of our “Chronic home” (as it’s named on my bookmark bar): pray for me should I ever meet one who tells me “I went to Chicago in ‘68 for the Festival of Life."
During graduation at our Alma Mater, the ROTC units were attacked with bottles, debris and shouts from those subcultural creatures like Jerry Rubin and his crowd. The Officer of Cadets instead of ordering, "Every man for himself!!" so as to allow natural justice to run its course, ordered instead,"About Face" and marched them back out of the stadium. In those days there were still a few professors who said it was the prudent thing to do because the poor creatures suffering from their drug induced hysteria and paranoia, were not worth the blood and bullets it would take to end their misery. I think by now, however, some of those old protestants have acquired mortgages and are now department heads and deans at the college they once attempted to destroy.
In 1973, I attended the University of Michigan, and hated it. Around January 1975, I read in the Detroit News' Sunday magazine a story about Hillsdale College. A few weeks later, my parents and I went there to check it out. A pretty co-ed gave us a tour of the campus.
She pointed out that Hillsdale had no campus protests in the 1960s and early 1970s because the administration let everyone know that any student protesting would be immediately expelled. I transferred there and graduated in 1977. My teachers included Russell Kirk, Gerhardt Niemeyer, Madson Pirie and John Willson. I loved it.
If Kent State and other schools had implemented similar policies beginning with the Berkeley "Free Speech" (really dirty speech) movement in 1964, there would have been no tragedy at Kent State. So those ultimately responsible for the Kent State killings were not Nixon, or Gov. Rhodes, or the Guard, or the Guardsmen, or even the student protesters, but the administrators of Kent State, Berkeley, Michigan, Harvard, Columbia, etc., who refused to expel unruly students. They failed their responsibility to protect their institutions.
The unruly students eventually took over the university asylums, leading to the politically correct hellholes we now have, which impose their own leftist conformity with Stalinist rigidity.
#18 Sean Scallon
It is simplistic and to say "It doesn’t take much for the rhetoric to switch sides depending on where you are at what time." The only similarity between the rhetoric of '60s radicals and that of today's fringe-dwellers mistakenly called "conservatives" is their call for bloodshed. There were no SDS speeches in support of Divine revelation and living a Christian life, unless it was in mockery; they did not want women to stay at home with their children; there was no recognition of the honor inherent in bearing arms for one's country in a just cause, which Viet Nam arguably was, only frenzied attempts to portray the war as the worst evil since Southern slavery, or at least since the Holocaust. And as for blaming "the generation that strongly supported law and order back then ... [for having] passed on the torch of leadership to those who were in the demonstrations." well, who else could they have passed it on to? Every generation has to entrust its legacy to the next; who could have dreamed that that the 60s generation's influence would be so strong and so pernicious? They seemed like nothing but a pathetic rabble then. It's all so obvious in hindsight; that leaders like the Rubins Jerry and Robert (no relation), who became an investment mogul and Secretary of the Treasury, respectively, would also rise to the top in other shark infested waters. It didn't look that way when they had hair down to their navels and reeked of patchouli and pot.
Back in those days, I was serving as a member of the Class of 1969 at the Naval Academy. Of course I sided with the guardsmen. Meanwhile, every day we all passed displays in Bancroft Hall that identified our alumnus who had been killed in Vietnam. Using the tactics of the student demonstrators, a large contingent of Midshipmen (and I cannot remember if it included members of all three upper classes, or only my own) assembled in front of the Superintendent’s house to demonstrate, not against the war, but for more "privileges.” The thought was that “they couldn’t ‘fry’ [punish] all of us.” We found out that they could and did fry all of us, even those who had come out only to watch the demonstration. The next weekend, everyone was restricted to their room, except to attend official activities. (We assembled as Companies and marched to the mess hall to eat every meal and went to academic classes on Saturday mornings, for example.) Want more privileges? You’ve got them!
I think this brings up some good points culturally and theoretically speaking but missed the main point I took away from the Kent State tradgedy. A total lack of leadership at the University and wrong headed decision making by political leaders. Piatak seems to be saying the guardsman fired on rioters and arsonists. Though these types were on campus most of the victims were just trying to get to class. I did not get from my extensive reading at the time or later that the guardsmen either acted vindictively or against a threat that would constitute deadly force. Rather, they responded in a super heated confused environment in what they percieved to be a deadly force situation. They were not the best trained of the Ohio NG units for dealing with riots and why Rhodes chose to send them is still a hanging question. Why the university was not closed down until order was restored is another mystery to me.
Mr. Kincaid's questions deserve answers. I do hope Mr. Piatak addresses them.
Re: who this particular unit was at KSU, it may have been because they were nearby due to a trucker's strike that had paralyzed Ohio and nearby states.
I agree with Kindcaid's comments re: the KSU administrators who were ultimately responsible for keeping classes going when the school should have been shutdown and order restored.
In the end the Left seeks to literalize the Kent State myth, a mythopoetic effort to divinize the ideological confused youth of a bygone era. I don't think so...it was just unnecessarily stupid.
I agree with Mr. Kincaid that the Kent State administration deserves blame for not having followed the wise course of action at Hillsdale, as described in Mr. Seiler's post 24, and I also agree with Mr. Kincaid that it is likely that the Guardsmen fired because they were in a "super heated confused environment in what they perceived to be a deadly force situation." The rioting that preceded their arrival certainly helped the Guardsmen to think that way, as did the rocks and spent tear gas cannisters being thrown at them by student demonstators on May 4. I do not know how well trained these particular Guardsmen were, but I do not fault Gov. Rhodes for sending the Guard to Kent, a decision that was made only after the rioting in Kent had caused the Mayor to conclude that he could not maintain order and to request assistance.
I would also pass along one interesting item I read in the local coverage relating to the 40th anniversary. The shootings are now emphasized in the KSU curriculum, by professors wholly sympathetic to the demonstators. Today's students, though, often ask why yesterday's students refused to disperse when ordered to do so by the Guard, an excellent question that their professors have some difficulty answering.