“Have You Bought Enough Vietnam?”: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement at West Virginia University, 1967–1970 Nora Sutton From May 5 to May 7, 1970, between one and two thousand students crowded Grumbein’s Island, a pedestrian path in the heart of the downtown campus of West Virginia University (WVU). Students were either protesting President Richard Nixon’s announcement of military operations in Cambodia and the recent killings of four students at Kent State University, or demonstrating their support for the president’s policies and publicly opposing antiwar demonstrators. What began as a vigil for the Kent State victims and antiwar march downtown devolved into a tense gathering of protestors, counterprotestors, and the National Guard. A few demonstrators broke into Woodburn Hall, the home of the university’s ROTC program, and caused a small amount of property damage. Students who wanted university president James Harlow to publicly denounce military action in Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State marched to the administration building, demanding the president hear them. Perhaps fearing an outbreak of violence, President James Harlow and West Virginia governor Arch Moore took drastic measures to quell the protests and authorized the West Virginia National Guard to break up the crowd. The May 1970 protests at WVU were tame compared to other campuses across the country, but this level of militancy surprised the university administration and the surrounding community. It was the largest and most disruptive antiwar action at WVU, but its occurrence was not an aberration—a subset of WVU students had been actively and publicly opposing the war since at least 1967. Antiwar activities at WVU before the Cambodia/Kent State protests reflect nationwide trends. West Virginia students were less militant than those at Michigan State, for example, but the absence of militancy does not equal isolation from the larger student power and peace movements. This [End Page 27] article explores the student-led antiwar activities both on and off campus and situates these activities in a national context. I focus on events occurring from 1967 up to the Cambodia/Kent State protests because resistance was the most active in Morgantown during this time. These three years were filled with cultural, social, and political strife for the United States and WVU students did not live in a vacuum. Despite Dean of Students Joseph Gluck’s characterization of WVU students as believing in “the old slogan of ‘love it or leave it,’” many felt the social and political upheaval taking shape across the country, either as bystanders or as participants.1 Early scholarly studies of the student movement focused on elite universities like Columbia and Berkeley, ignoring sleepy campuses like WVU, but more recent community-centered studies have explored how the movement played out in localities across the country.2 In Campus Wars, Kenneth J. Heineman helps reshape our understanding of the antiwar movement by focusing on land-grant campuses in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Students at these schools were primarily from working- and middle-class backgrounds, and according to contemporary stereotypes, inclined to be supportive of US military action in Vietnam. Heineman posits a formula for understanding antiwar sentiment on these campuses that connects student demographics and increased university involvement in the military-industrial complex.3 He argues that antiwar protest primarily stemmed from the unfairness of the Selective Service System and the increase in military-related research contracts at universities. Indeed, while the working- and middle-class were statistically more likely to support the war, their sons were also more likely to be drafted through the Selective Service System.4 Heineman’s framework is applicable to the study of WVU students, who Joseph Gluck described as, “first generation [college students], out of the hills and hollows.”5 There is cause for suspicion of the hawkish working-class stereotype. In Peace Now!, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones points out that “it was one thing to detest middle-class students who enjoyed draft deferments, quite another to support the war that killed one’s own sons.”6 Public opinion polls in Dearborn, Michigan, and San Francisco, California, from 1966 to 1968 demonstrated higher antiwar inclinations among the working class.7 Although economic issues were important, labor’s...