40 YEARS AFTER THE KENT STATE MASSACRE

By R. A. Pearson

May 4, 2010, marked the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre where four students were shot and killed and nine others were wounded by the Ohio National Guard under the command of Brigadier General Robert Canterbury. The incident marked a turning point in the American attitude toward the War in Vietnam.

The events leading up to the Kent State Masscare begin on April 30, 1970, when President Richard Nixon announced the U. S. was invading Cambodia as part of the war in Vietnam. Students across America rose up against the news. At Kent State, a typically peaceful school about 45 miles south of Cleveland, the protests quickly took a dangerous turn. The campus building for the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program was set ablaze on Saturday, May 2. When the municipal fire department arrived to put it out, protesters attacked the firemen, slashing their hoses with machetes and throwing bricks at them. The firemen retreated and the local mayor called in the National Guard. The fire trucks returned with a military escort. By this time the ROTC building had burnt to the ground; however, the Guardsmen, mostly young, part-time soldiers, remained in place.

Over the weekend the campus remained generally quiet. On Monday, May 4, the day of the Massacre, student leaders called a noon-hour rally to protest the military presence. This was to occur on the Commons, a field adjacent to the smoldering ruins of the ROTC building. The Guard leadership, however, declared a curfew. Whether this was sanctioned by civil authorities remains a contentious issue even today.

When the students began to gather they started to ring a historic bell on the Commons, at this point General Canterbury decided a show of force was necessary. 96 Guardsmen and seven officers assembled on the Commons in a skirmish line. Armed with their M-1s the guardsmen loaded their rifles, fixed bayonets and began marching across the field to disperse the crowd, estimated at perhaps 2,000 students.

The soldiers marched up a small rise beside the Commons called Blanket Hill. They had on gas masks and launched tear gas at the crowd. The students threw the canisters back. Then upon reaching the top of the hill the guardsmen blindly marched down the other side of Blanket Hill. The trek ended when the soldiers arrived on a practice football field with fences on three sides. Behind them was a student mob at the top of the hill throwing rocks and bottles. Without any clear objective in mind, the Guard had marched themselves straight into a box.

The problem for General Canterbury and the guard was they had not scared the protesters off, and the only thing the Guard could do was to march back up the hill through the gauntlet of rocks and angry students. Once the Guard got back to Blanket Hill the soldiers once more shouldered their weapons: however, this time 61 shots rang out in 13 seconds. Four students died, and nine were wounded.

There have been numerous investigations in the 40 years that followed the Kent State Masscare. Still no officer has ever admitted to giving a fire order. Whether it was a spontaneous reaction to the harassment, a misheard directive, or a deliberate action that was later covered-up, someone, either the officers or enlisted men, lost control.

But did the Masscare have to happen at all? Why was the National Guard on campus at all on Monday, May 4, 1970? By all accounts the campus was quiet, the ROTC building fire was out, and their presence only provoked the protest which led to the Massacre. Another problem was the declaration of the curfew by the Guard leadership and the attempt to disperse the crowd which met to protest the Guard’s presence at Kent State. Had General Canterbury and the Guard stayed put at the ROTC building and simply guarded the smoldering ruins, probably nothing would have happened. However, like the Grand ol’ Duke of York, he marched his men up and down the hill into the teeth of the protest and invited a confrontation. Finally, when the guard lost control of the confrontation, and the only weapons they carried that day were M-1 carbines, bayonets, and tear gas. Like the proverd indicates, when the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems look like a nail. The only solution the Guard had at Kent State was to fire and fire they did.

The incident at Kent State has been immortalize in the Song “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The four dead from that day, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer, are remembered at a local memorial on the site where the Massacre occurred. Today there is talk about putting the site on the National Registry of Historic Locations even though it has only been 40, not the usual 50 years, since the tragedy occurred.

The terrible thing is the Kent State Massacre did not have to happen. The National Guard did not have to be there. General Canterbury did not have to confront the protesters, and the Guard did not have to have loaded M-1s to aim and fire at the protesters. Of the four students to die that day, the closest student to the Guard on Blanket Hill was Jeffrey Miller, who was shot in the mouth while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot, a distance of approximately 270 feet. In all the hearings and court cases concerning the events of that day, the National Guard has never really convinced anyone they were in real danger from the student protestors at Kent State and really needed to defend themselves.