Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Abstract

The grassy hill sat empty and an eerie silence hung over the grounds. Every year for the past half-century, hundreds had gathered in mourning and commemoration, speaking the names of those who had died or suffered wounds. In these remembrances often rang a call to action, to continue the struggle for a better world. However, this day, those voices did not echo through the campus or roar through the crowds. This year, despite all the planning, logistics, and anticipation, a global pandemic had made public gatherings dangerous and forced the commemoration to move online and in this virtual world Kent State remembered and the world remembered Kent State.It should come as little surprise that in the fiftieth year of commemoration several new books on Kent State and the tragedy of May 1970 would appear. Susan Erenrich's The Cost of Freedom, James A. Tyner and Mindy Farmer's Cambodia and Kent State, and Howard Ruffner's Moments of Truth add new perspectives and interpretations that help to flesh out a sprawling historiography. With so much written about May 4, it seems fair to wonder what new questions can be asked, what new lessons can be learned, and what is left to reflect upon that we have not ruminated on before? The works contributed here shed new, different, and compelling lights on the story of Kent State, the Vietnam War, and the tragedy of spring 1970 that both scholars and the casual reader will find worthwhile.In 2015 a PBS special declared May 4, 1970, as “The Day the 60's Died.”1 For many in the baby boom generation, this was the day “the war came home,” and the tumult of the preceding half-decade reached its apex. Assuredly, antiwar protest did not end that spring day in Kent, Ohio. We tend to see moments such as this as break points in history, dividing time into “pre-event” and “post-event” constructions. In doing so, they create a false sense of definition that serves to frame later understandings. The tragic events whereby members of the Ohio National Guard fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds on student protesters at Kent State in May 1970 did not end one era and usher in a new; they serve as a bridge between times drifting apart from each other.Sixties student activism was multifaceted and cross-causal in its construction and actions. Attempting to talk about student antiwar activism without linking it to the struggle to end in loco parentis or various forms of discrimination (both on and beyond campus) fails to acknowledge the breadth and depth of student engagement. Most of the earliest scholarship on Sixties student activism came from participant narratives, especially from the white, male, middle-class students who populated New Left organizations at elite universities and focused on individuals like themselves. The memoirs of Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—the quintessential New Left student organization of the 1960s—reinforced this basic narrative of an explosive, radical Sixties.2 As scholars pushed beyond these limiting frameworks, they sought to incorporate new actors and new locales, finding that students around the nation engaged in a wide range of activism. Kenneth Heineman's Campus Wars (1992) serves as model for many of the studies that came after, as he shifted the historic gaze toward non-elite state universities (including Kent State) and demonstrated that the lived experiences of millions of Sixties college students may have differed from those at UC, Berkeley, and Columbia but they were not bystanders to the tumult of the day.3Heineman's Campus Wars also stood at the crossroads of scholarship on the events of Kent State. Campus Wars connects the accounts written by participants and contemporaries with those works created by historical scholars. Several books appeared very quickly after the events of May 1970, offering ways of framing and understanding what had happened. They served to focus the shock, anger, and despair of the moment toward action—either in the sense of ending the war or punishing those responsible for the events that day.4 Scott Bills's Kent State/May 4: Echoes through a Decade, though published in 1982, still carried the primacy of participant voices like the texts from the immediate aftermath. Bills had been an active student demonstrator at West Virginia University and had been part of the Morgantown 7—a group accused of organizing a protest to destroy school property in the wake of the Kent State killings. Bills went to Kent State as a graduate student and his book is as much a reflection of his own activist spirit as an attempt at historical contextualization. Thomas Grace's Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (2016) serves to link Kent State's tragedy to the wider historiography of student antiwar activism. While he was a wounded survivor of that day, Grace's monograph offers a degree of academic detachment and analysis that many of the more personal accounts dominating the scholarship have lacked. Rather than tell his truth in a memoir, Grace used the tools of a professional historian to contextualize the tragedy and help his reader better understand how it fits within this period of protest and social unrest.Even as Heineman's work served to move the event from memory to history, oral history served as the central pivot point for the bulk of the scholarship. Scholars in recent years have benefited greatly from the wealth of sources available through Kent State University's May 4 Collection within the university's Special Collections and Archives, the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, and the very active May 4th Task Force composed of survivors and supporters. Recently, Craig Simpson and Gregory Wilson's Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings (2016) has mined these resources as well as adding to them to gain a deeper insight into the events of that day. Their work draws together the memories of that day with the analytical tools of academic historians to produce an excellent example of the power of oral history as a method of historical scholarship. Further, their book explores the creation of Kent State commemorative efforts, connecting the history of the events with their memory.If the stories and memories of the event are the key factor in how scholars write its history, the central questions that organize much of the historiography are: what happened and why? This was the directive at the heart of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, which published its conclusions in a report only a few months after the tragedy. Despite its flaws, the report offers scholars a thorough starting point to retrace the events of early May 1970 in Kent. It remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this moment, although it is incomplete without the vast scholarship that has grown up over the past five decades. A handful of later books attempted to fill in the gaps of the report or offer competing theories, sometimes exonerating but most often geared toward asserting blame for the shootings squarely on the shoulders of the Ohio National Guard.5As Simpson and Wilson have shown, if one stops with the actions on May 4, 1970, one gets only a limited view of the importance of this event. The commemorations, which began in 1971, represent an important part of the Kent State story and scholars should not overlook them when attempting to wrestle with and contextualize the tragedy. Through yearly observances, both public and private, the memory of May 4 continues to grow. Maggie Anderson and Alex Gildzen edited an anthology of commemorative poetry, A Gathering of Poets (1992), which anticipated in some ways the collection put together by Susan Erenrich. Another way in which people have commemorated, analyzed, and attempted to make sense out of the 1970 tragedy is David Hassler's May 4th Voices (2010), a play written using the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project and exploring the lived experience of May 4 and its aftermath. Fifty years after the shooting stopped, people still return to that same hill, walk the same grounds, and try to find meaning and purpose.Howard Ruffner's Moments of Truth: A Photographer's Experience of Kent State 1970 does not offer any new or pathbreaking interpretations of the events of early May 1970; however, his images offer an eyewitness view of the tragedy. Ruffner's photographs, many never published before, help provide visual context for the growing number of scholarly works that seek to explore the many unanswered questions surrounding the events of May 4, 1970. Through Ruffner's work, readers gain a sense of his view of the days leading up to the shootings and the immediate aftermath. Ruffner situates the images among a narrative retelling of his experiences, offering up his recollections and memories. In all, the book is a highly personal memoir of an individual reflecting on his connection to a moment that touched the lives of a generation. His story is one of hundreds from that day and offers readers a unique perspective. However, the work's single most important contribution is without question the images.Ruffner provides over 150 images, the majority of which deal with the events in and around May 4, 1970, at Kent State University. Ruffner had secured a National Guard press pass and worked both as a photographer for the Daily Kent Stater and a stringer for Life magazine. The President's Commission on Campus Unrest used some of his images in their investigation into the shootings at Kent State as well as in two different civil trials brought by survivors and family members against the Ohio National Guard. The images are powerful and provocative. They transport viewers into those chaotic moments as Guardsmen advanced on the students, fired, and the aftermath as individuals lay dead and bleeding. The images evoke a strong emotional response, even from those who are not members of this generation. They capture and document the experience of those moments with such abruptness and clarity that viewers feel themselves a part of that moment, not simply viewing it from beyond.James Tyner and Mindy Farmer set out an ambitious project in Cambodia and Kent State: In the Aftermath of Nixon's Expansion of the Vietnam War. They want to have people recognize the connections between events at Kent State in May 1970 and those in Cambodia. The concept of this book is phenomenal: a globalized context of the Kent State shootings. The authors' contention that many Americans do not have strong grounding in what happened in Cambodia before or after America's invasion seems warranted. Furthermore, linking discussions of how America remembers this moment—through the tragedy at Kent State—and Cambodian memory construction is a fascinating juxtaposition. However, the execution here misses the mark substantially and never fully delivers on the thought-provoking ideas it initiates. The faults of this book arise from one central flaw that the authors do not address: why is it so short?Cambodia and Kent State is roughly sixty pages of text, which severely limits detailed discussions of the book's key ideas. While brevity can be good and can help hold the attention of a general reader, there is simply too much left out of this narrative. Many questions go unanswered, thoughts not followed to logical conclusions, and details missing about events in Kent, the antiwar movement more broadly, as well as about Cambodia and the tragedies they faced. Stronger use of explanatory footnotes would significantly improve the quality of this text.The ultimate result is a book that does not help specialists in any particular field and is of limited use to a general audience. The discussion of Sixties activism, drawing on none of the vast amounts of scholarship on the topic, not only does not offer new understandings, it also does not effectively relate existing understandings. A general reader attempting to figure out what happened in the Cambodian genocide must seek out random passages and footnotes and stitch together the narrative for themselves, as the authors offer no coherent singular narrative.The authors argue that the Cambodians failed to achieve reconciliation through their memory construction; however, they never really demonstrate how American efforts at memorializing the May 4 shootings have generated reconciliation. There is still a great deal of debate and antagonistic sentiment regarding the events of May 4; reconciliation has been, at best, incomplete. Yet, the authors do not dwell on this, rather, they focus on the political nature of Cambodian memory construction. They lament the commercialized nature of the Choeung Ek site (that represents one of the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge) without even a hint of the commercialization of American historical sites. Furthermore, there is absolutely no mention of the politicized nature of America's Civil War history in its many Confederate monuments and statues; rather, they leave the reader with the impression that America does not politicize its history.This book has great potential, yet the authors squander much of it. Restructuring the text and expanding its page count would greatly improve this work as it would afford space in which to develop the authors' ideas more thoroughly. Rather than three chapters with various subsections, they could make each subsection a chapter and flesh them out with additional details, analysis, and sources. The structure and length of this book make it very difficult to achieve what is a much-needed component of America's discussion of the Vietnam War era: actively linking the domestic with the global.In The Cost of Freedom: Voicing a Movement after Kent State 1970, Susan Erenrich brings together a wide panoply of different cultural products that demonstrate the ways in which people have attempted to wrestle with the realities of the Kent State tragedy. The volume contains stories, images, poems, songs, memories, and so much more. It is alive with the voices of those directly and indirectly affected by the bloodshed and carnage. In some of the passages and images, readers gain a sense of the agony and pain so many survivors and family members walk through each day carrying with them. In others, there is a calmness, a feeling of resolution, or a near-cathartic expression of one's journey to find peace. Other works on the Kent State tragedy have lifted up the voices of those there that day, such as Simpson and Wilson's Above the Shots, which also focused attention on the commemorative aspects, yet Erenrich's volume makes this its central theme. Through Erenrich's edited volume readers gain access to a wider set of voices that carry us beyond the moment of chaos and into the long moments after the shooting has ended and people are left to deal with its impact.Erenrich entered Kent State in 1975 and joined the May 4th Task Force while still a student. One of the Task Force's central goals is to commemorate the events of May 4, 1970, the people who died, and the lives shattered that day. Through her years with the Task Force, Erenrich forged connections with many people who were attempting to address their trauma and grieve through creative means. By collecting several of these constructions together in a single volume, she demonstrates that there is no “right” way to process tragedy and that through commemoration comes peace and renewed purpose. Many of the pieces in this collection leave the reader/viewer with a sense of mission to continue to struggle for justice and a better society. It is a powerful anthology for those interested in social justice and peace studies, while also demonstrating to all the power of memory and for historians a reminder that the aftermath of an event can be as important, thought-provoking, and worthy of study as the event itself. As time pulls us further away, the commemorative efforts such as those provided in The Cost of Freedom keep us tethered, able to connect our past and present.Together, these three texts highlight the benefits and issues that come from memory. Tyner and Farmer offer up a reminder that as long as the collective memory focuses on the tragic deaths of four (white) students in America's heartland it misses a significant portion of the story surrounding the Cambodian Invasion. They demand of us to remember that local and national events exist within an international context, that we cannot separate the deaths in Ohio from the deaths in Cambodia. Furthermore, they demonstrate the political usage of memory construction and how quickly individuals can manipulate (or commercialize) an event and its memory.Erenrich's collection and Ruffner's memoir demonstrate the many ways that individuals construct memories. Their works raise an interesting question about commemorations in general, as to whether they are cathartic, allowing one to come to terms with past trauma, or whether such actions keep the trauma present and prevent healing by locking people into reliving those moments repeatedly. These two volumes also provide researchers with a wealth of sources, voices, and ideas that can help to flesh out the existing narratives as well as point to new questions for research.Moments of Truth offers up some of the clearest examples of the potential problems with memoirs. It seems that Ruffner did not keep a diary or journal during May 1970 or in subsequent months or years. His photographs serve as a visual diary of sorts; however, as Ruffner describes the photos, the events, and his views it is hard to tell whether these memories represent what he was thinking at the time or based upon his years of reflection. Ruffner became one of the chief witnesses in the civil trials against the National Guardsmen who fired on the students. He tells his readers quite clearly that he believes the justice system should hold them responsible for their actions that day. Furthermore, he tells his readers that he has studied his images, contemplating them and their meaning for many years because of his participation in these trials. As a result, how much have his later views influenced his memories of May 1970? Obviously, the photographs themselves represent what he thought was worthy of capturing in the moment and as the individual curating the images that appear in the text, Ruffner controls the editorial construction thoroughly. Thus, we are left with the realization that memoirs are not histories, but intentionally constructed reflections.“Inquire. Learn. Reflect.” These words appear engraved in the stone walls that make up the May 4 memorial outside of Taylor Hall on the Kent State University campus. The memorial calls on visitors to remember what happened and find whatever meaning they can in the tragic and chaotic events of spring 1970. Over the years, participants have recounted their lived experiences while scholars have written a growing litany of articles, chapters, and monographs attempting to wrap our collective arms around those brief moments when, for many, the Vietnam War came home. The works of Erenrich, Ruffner, and Tyner and Farmer have expanded the existing scholarship, yet there are still many more voices calling out.