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Kent state dangerous democracy { May 5 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/134689237_kentstate05.htmlhttp://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/134689237_kentstate05.html
Monday, May 05, 2003 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.
Close-up
Legacy of Kent State: Course, film explore era
By John Woestendiek
The Baltimore Sun;
KENT, Ohio -- Sun plays off the streaks of gray in Alan Canfora's ponytail as he strolls the same green hills where he and 12 other Kent State University students were shot by National Guardsmen in 1970.
He was a longhair then, too -- opposed to the Vietnam War and the invasion of Cambodia; opposed to how, after student rioting, rifle-toting National Guard units had been called onto campus; opposed, like many of his generation, to a lot of things, including what they liked to call "the system."
On May 4, 1970 -- a day as springlike as this one -- Canfora took a bullet through the wrist, one of 67 shots guardsmen fired during a 13-second barrage that killed four students, injured nine and sparked revolt on campuses nationwide. Some say it was the end of youthful innocence. Some say it cemented mistrust of the government, if not among a generation, at least among millions of its members. Some say that by galvanizing the peace movement, it changed the course of a war.
More than three decades later, Canfora is part of the system he once fought -- chairman of the Democratic Party in his hometown of Barberton -- but he still fights to keep the memory of May 4 alive, still is opposed to war, still visits the campus frequently.
Free speech
Rounding Taylor Hall, the building on the hill where the shootings took place, Canfora encounters student Abby Slutsky on a smoke break. A discussion ensues.
Yes, Slutsky said in answer to a question from Canfora, she does believe in free speech. She is a reporter for the Daily Kent Stater, after all. Students have the right to protest the war on Iraq, she says. And she has the right to consider them both wrong and obnoxious.
Besides, the senior from Cincinnati notes, the majority of Americans support the war.
"How long do you think that majority will last?" Canfora fired back.
Canfora talked about dissent, about the idealism of students in his day, about how protests -- as he insists they did with Vietnam -- can help end a war, all, in his view, parts of the legacy of May 4.
"This might be the wrong thing to say, especially to you," Slutsky said, "but those protests didn't change things. The deaths changed things."
Taken aback, Canfora asked, "Isn't it OK for protesters to exercise free speech?"
"Exercise away," Slutsky responded, "but don't tell me that just because I don't, I'm selfish or don't care about the world. ... The reason a lot of students have time to be activists is because they don't work. Mommy and Daddy are paying their bills."
Working two jobs
And on that point, Canfora can't entirely disagree. When he was in school, his summer job more than covered the $450 he needed each year for in-state tuition at Kent State, then a working-class school viewed as one of the most affordable in the state. Today, at more than $3,000 a semester, its tuition is the third-highest in the state.
As much as the world might need to be changed, working two jobs while going to college leaves little time to do it.
"Some of these people are facing the equivalent of a small mortgage when they get out," said Jerry Lewis, a Kent State sociology professor who saw the 1970 shootings and still cries at the commemorations held here each year.
Today's students, he said, often work one or two jobs while going to school, or, in some cases, join the National Guard or ROTC to help with tuition. Worse yet, the payoff they expect their college education to lead to after graduation often isn't there.
Lewis, as he was in the 1970s, is a faculty monitor at student protests -- the biggest of which here came March 20, the day after the invasion of Iraq. About 200 protested the war, prompting about 50 other students to demonstrate in support of the troops.
Despite its reputation, Kent State was not then -- and is not now -- a nexus of student protest.
"International journalists come here and ask, 'Where are all the protests and peace signs?' One I talked to called it 'the ground zero of protest,' " Lewis said. "It's not."
Parallels
But if the '70s spirit has faded -- and there are plenty who would argue that it hasn't -- the memories of May 4 have not.
There are memorials and an annual commemoration, organized by the May 4 Task Force, a student group. All new students, starting this year, view an Emmy Award-winning documentary on May 4 as part of orientation. There is even a semester-long class on May 4 and its aftermath. And more than a few faculty members were here then -- either as professors or students.
Flashes and echoes of the 1970s still can be seen and heard -- whether it's the "No War In Iraq" banner that freshman Richard Meara has pinned to the back of his bell-bottom jeans, or the list of performers at campus concerts, among them Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Richie Havens.
There are more-ominous parallels as well.
In what some view as an attempt to stifle further dissent, Kent police are compiling information on people who took part in recent anti-war protests, and asked the student newspaper for photos of the event, and to help with identifying the participants. The newspaper declined.
Tension hardly could be described as high, but what there is of it seems more student vs. student than student vs. establishment. That, too, is unlike 1970, the year Kent State became a symbol of student dissent.
After the shootings, both the university and the town of Kent, previously best known for being the home of the nation's first tree-care company, became known primarily as "that place where the students got killed."
Scar or wound?
To some, May 4's legacy is a sad but proud battle scar; to others, a nasty, still-open wound that won't go away.
There are those who think Kent State makes too much of it, and those who think the university doesn't make enough of it. Some, like the national guardsmen there that day, based on their continuing silence, would choose to forget it. Some insist it must be remembered.
If you have to pick a clear starting point, it would be Thursday, April 30, 1970, when President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia.
"The time has come for action," he said.
Student protests were immediate. At Kent State, students held a demonstration the next day, symbolically burying the Constitution, which they said Nixon had killed. That night, protesters swept through downtown, setting a bonfire, spray-painting storefronts with anti-war slogans, breaking windows and, in the process, turning many townspeople against them.
On Saturday, protesters set fire to the campus ROTC building, then hindered police and firefighters by cutting hoses and throwing rocks.
National Guard units, ordered to the campus by Gov. James Rhodes, began arriving Saturday night and used tear gas and bayonets to chase students back to their dorms.
Guardsmen on campus
By Sunday, 1,000 guardsmen occupied the campus. Rhodes called the protesters the "worst type of Americans" and vowed that he was "going to eradicate the problem."
Throughout the day, confrontations between guardsmen and protesters continued. Students hurled rocks. About 50 were arrested. One was stabbed with a bayonet.
On Monday, May 4, a protest that was planned the previous Friday as an anti-war demonstration became more about the presence of the National Guard on campus. Despite leaflets informing students that the protest was banned, at least 2,000 showed up in the commons area by noon.
When orders to disperse were ignored, guardsmen launched tear gas, and some of the canisters were hurled back by students, none of whom was armed. At least one guardsman was hit hard enough with a rock to fall down.
Forming a wedge, the guardsmen marched up what is known as Blanket Hill, then down it and to the end of a football field, where they realized they were fenced in on two sides.
Amid chants of "Pigs off campus," they marched back up Blanket Hill, where, at the ridge, a group of guardsmen turned toward the students and, at 12:24 p.m., begin firing.
Why the National Guard started firing has never been established. Claims by some guardsmen that they were fired on first by a sniper were never substantiated.
Of the students struck, the closest was 60 feet away from the guardsmen, standing with his middle finger upraised. Most of those hit were more than 200 feet away.
Killed were William Schroeder, an ROTC student who was in the crowd but not protesting, shot once in the back; Sandra Scheuer, shot in the neck; Jeffrey Miller, shot in the face; and Allison Krause, shot in the left side.
Three investigations
In the wake of May 4, public sentiment was strongly against the students, particularly in Kent, where many residents thought the protesters were to blame for it all, or deserved what they got.
Three investigations followed. First came a state highway-patrol report, which found that the guardsmen had committed no criminal activity and that student radicals and the university administration were at fault for what happened.
An investigation by the FBI concluded that although students had committed criminal acts leading up to the shootings, the guardsmen should not have fired their weapons.
The Scranton Commission, appointed by Nixon, concluded that the decision to disperse the crowd was a serious error and that the use of lethal force by guardsmen was "unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable."
A state grand jury indicted 25 students, two of whom would be convicted on minor charges relating to events leading up to May 4. The grand jury concluded that the Kent State administration was mostly to blame, for fostering "laxity, over-indulgence and permissiveness within students and faculty."
A federal grand jury indicted eight guardsmen, but midway through that trial the judge dismissed the case, saying the prosecution had not shown that guardsmen intentionally had deprived anyone of their rights.
A civil trial in 1975 -- its 13,000-page transcript, 76 pages of jury instruction alone, is available in the Kent State library -- lasted 15 weeks, ending with a verdict that the guardsmen were not liable. The verdict was thrown out. A new trial began in 1978, but ended with an out-of-court settlement.
The guardsmen signed statements expressing regret over what happened, and the state paid the plaintiffs a total of $675,000. A student paralyzed by the shooting received the most: $350,000. The eight other injured students would split $165,000. To the parents of each slain student, the settlement awarded $15,000.
'Summer of love'
Earlier this semester in the honors-level class "May 4 And Its Aftermath," the two teachers -- both products of Kent State in the '70s -- spent an entire session on "The Summer of Love."
Sixties music played as students entered. A plate of "nonhash brownies" sat on the table. Each member of the class was given a flower to wear in his or her hair.
The May 4 class has been offered since 1977. It's not unusual for students, most of whom knew little about the shootings when they arrived on campus, to spend hours researching on the 12th floor of the school library, which houses the May 4 archives.
Jason Anderson, a senior from Green, Ohio, said he first heard about May 4 in a "Jeopardy" question.
Lindsey Brannon, a junior from a Cleveland suburb, said: "My parents are Republicans. We don't talk about these things. I could tell you about the War of 1812 for hours on end, but I didn't learn much in high school about Vietnam."
A few class members acknowledge their generation lacks the social consciousness of the '70s.
"Our generation is similar in a lot of ways, but I think we're a lot more complacent," said senior Mary Wagley, from the Clevelandarea. "I think we feel more of a sense of futility. Then again, how many of my parents' friends say they were big hippies back in their day, but now they've fallen into line with the minivan and the 2.5 kids?"
War hits home
Alan Canfora didn't set out to become a student radical. It just happened.
"Up until 1967, I never entertained for a moment an anti-war thought," he said. His father was in World War II and lost his right eye in the Philippines; his mother was an army nurse who tended his wounds.
"I entirely trusted the government," he said. "Then several friends were killed in Vietnam, and two cousins were injured." Questions about the war being raised in his classes, such as political science, were good ones, he realized.
Then in 1968, he watched the television in horror as, during the Democratic convention in Chicago, protesters were roughed up by police. "When I saw those thousands of students beaten on the streets of Chicago, that's when I changed," he said.
He joined Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, went to Woodstock that summer and, back on campus, learned that a brother of one of his roommates had been killed in Vietnam. "The war had come home for us when we saw that coffin at the funeral," he said.
Two weeks later, Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. "Nixon went on television announcing the war was not ending, but spreading," sociology professor Lewis recalled, "and it sent a chill through every available male.
"The draft was what hovered over everybody," he added. "Once it went into effect, every male was eligible and every girlfriend, sister and mom had to deal with the fact that her boy could go to war. That is the overwhelming, fundamental difference between the culture now and the culture then."
'Dangerous time'
Canfora, now 54, doesn't see the atmosphere as much different. "You hear a lot of people say there is so much apathy among students now. You have to remember that even on May 4 -- the pinnacle of student activism -- there was really only a core group of about 500. I'm sure now you could find 500 students equally concerned about this war," he said. "Even back then, 90 percent of the students were straight arrows, basically apathetic.
"I think, overall, the level of activism now is higher nationally than it was at the start of the Vietnam War."
He expects it to grow, and if it does, he hopes the lessons of Kent State are remembered. "Our hope is to prevent a future massacre. It's especially relevant now, when you see the country more divided than any time since the Vietnam War.
"It's a very dangerous time for democracy again."
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company
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