"When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."
Kent State and Columbia, protest and response, then and now.
Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Today, you’re in the steady hands of This Day historian Nicole Hemmer, who adds more worthy context to conversation around protests—on campuses and elsewhere—following our episode earlier this week on 1968’s clashes at Columbia.
But first, a quick look at the week ahead in American history…
May 2
1847: A US military ship, the USS Jamestown, loaded up with food and other relief, is sailing to Ireland to help with the famine in that country
1957: Senator Joseph McCarthy dies at Bethesda Naval Hospital, possibly due to alcohol withdrawal. He was 48
1972: J. Edgar Hoover dies of a heart attack at age 77
1992: 3,500 federal troops arrive in Los Angeles to reinforce National Guard soldiers responding to massive civil disruption after a jury acquitted four LAPD members charged in connection to the beating of Rodney King
May 3
1802: Washington, D.C. is incorporated as a city
1921: West Virginia imposes the first state sales tax
May 4
1886: A deadly riot between police and protesters breaks out in Haymarket Square in Chicago
1970: Four unarmed students are killed by the Ohio National Guard and nine more are wounded on the Kent State University campus during a rally opposing the US military’s incursions into Cambodia that was also a protest against the National Guard’s presence on campus. President Richard Nixon responded by saying the deaths “should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.”
May 5
1886: The Bay View massacre, coming after a strike of building-trades and Polish laborers in Milwaukee, leads to the death of seven people, including a 13-year-old
May 6
1935: The WPA (Works Progress Administration) is established
1937: 36 are killed in New Jersey after the LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire in its second season of operation
May 7
1718: The city of New Orleans is founded by the French on land inhabited by the Chitimacha tribe
1994: During a town hall airing on MTV, President Bill Clinton is asked whether he wears “boxers or briefs”
May 8
1945: Victory in Europe (V-E Day) — Germany unconditionally surrenders
1970: President Richard Nixon defends the invasion of Cambodia in a news conference
1980: The World Health Organization announces smallpox has been eradicated
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more.
It was nearly 10 p.m. on Saturday, May 2, 1970, when members of the National Guard arrived at Kent State University, a public school in the small city of Kent, Ohio. The city’s mayor had asked for the Guard’s support after an evening of clashes between students and police following an anti-war protest on campus the day before. The students, like their counterparts on other campuses, were protesting Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia and widen U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. When students re-assembled on Monday, May 4, for a second protest, they encountered around 100 armed members of the Ohio National Guard and a notice that all protests had been banned.
The members of the Guard were outnumbered — nearly 3,000 people were on the campus Commons that day — but not outgunned. After a few rocks were thrown, the Guard shot tear gas at the protesters, followed by gunfire. They killed four students and wounded nine others in one of the deadliest school shootings of the pre-Columbine era.
More than a half-century later, the shooting remains at the forefront of the public consciousness, especially this week as university leaders are calling in armed officers to confront anti-war protesters at colleges across the U.S. Some things are different now. The militarization of police — spurred in part by the L.A. uprisings, which ended on May 4, 1992 — means police have more firepower now than the National Guard did in 1970. But much remains the same, including efforts to shut down protests, rampant misinformation (early reports from Kent State falsely stated that there was a sniper on campus shooting at members of the National Guard), and the spread of protests to other campuses across the country.
Those rallies did not immediately change U.S. policy — Nixon came out on May 8, 1970, to defend the decision to invade Cambodia — and the vast majority of Americans blamed the students for the massacre. But over the years, Kent State has come to represent extreme state suppression and violence in the face of anti-war protests.
On the state suppression front: This week also marks the day, May 2, when Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died (in 1957 and 1972, respectively). The two men were, in their own ways, architects of political repression in the United States. McCarthy, aided by university administrators, orchestrated a purge of leftist professors from universities across the country. And Hoover, during his lengthy tenure at the FBI, created a bureaucracy that surveilled, infiltrated, and disrupted protest movements from anti-war protests to gay rights organizations to the Black freedom struggle.
Though we don’t tend to associate the Red Scare and FBI surveillance with the deadly violence at Kent State, they are all part of the same mechanism of state control and suppression. As we contemplate the current protests, those are dots worth connecting
— Nicole Hemmer
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