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Kent State history lost in time
(by Dave Lange - March 17, 2010)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Kent State history lost in time
Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause are history. So says the National Register of Historic Places, which last month added the location on the Kent State University campus where they were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen's bullets on May 4, 1970, to its registry.
According to the university's application to the Ohio Historic Site Preservation Advisory Board, which led to the designation, the events in Kent 40 years ago resulted in "the largest student strike in United States history, increasing recruitment for the movement against the Vietnam War and affecting public opinion."
That may be true, to a point.
But until that fateful day in May, Kent State was better known for beer drinking than for war protesting. There were many larger protests against the Vietnam War on college campuses across the country, and some of them turned violent. Like at Kent, student protests elsewhere were met with heavy-handed responses by a government that was supported by the general population. Many anti-war demonstrators were injured, some of them seriously.
But never before had the American military been dispatched by politicians to execute a deadly assault on a peaceful student demonstration against government policy. That is the historic significance of Kent State, which suddenly became synonymous with the anti-war movement. It was the killing of four students, not the demonstration itself, that caused numerous other colleges to close for the remainder of the school year.
American involvement in the Vietnam War lasted five more years, and nearly 10,000 more U.S. troops died before it was all over. Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes, who sent the National Guard to Kent as a show of strength in a futile attempt to resurrect his faltering campaign for the U.S. Senate, nonetheless came back later for two more terms as governor. President Richard M. Nixon, whose announced incursion into Cambodia inflamed protesters at Kent and elsewhere, was re-elected in a 1972 landslide. His so-called "silent majority" spat upon the slain students' memories with relentless vitriol.
As for Kent State University itself, the administration rejected a memorial to the slain students created by famed sculptor George Segal in 1978. Amplifying its disrespect for the dead, the university bullied up an ugly gymnasium annex at the edge of the massacre site. It wasn't until 1990 that even an unassuming memorial was permitted on the campus.
History is not what we make of it but what it makes of us.
The baby boomers who fought to end the war and stop their American brothers from dying senselessly in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia settled into lives of consumption and self-interest. While applauding similar military misadventures that have followed, many from the generation that set out to change the world have forgotten history instead. Unlike the revolt for democratic ideals in Boston Harbor over two centuries ago or the demonstrations for peace on college campuses four decades ago, today's protests are for greed, corporate profits and the politics of fear.
Kent State University, which tried so hard and for so long to forget what happened on May 4, 1970, belatedly has embraced its history. But its historical context for the nation is buried along with Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause.
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