perfidy

I can't believe I forgot about this. Tomorrow is the 35th Anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Although police had killed eleven black students at an Alabama university earlier that spring, well... back in 1970 it took four blue-collar white students to capture the nation's imagination. Wizbang (linked above) has links to several good informational resources about May 4, 1970 as well as a priceless photo and quote from KSU Prof. Glenn Frank urging the crowd to disband before more people get killed.

I'm from just outside of Kent. Growing up I could see, across the lake and over the woods, the tall tower of the University library from our front picture window. There's something mentioned in none of the histories of the KSU shootings that means a lot to me. My grandfather died seven years ago, before I had a chance to really talk to him about his life. You know; you just figure they're going to be around forever. There are a million things I wish I'd asked him about. Like the time he and my dad loaded up the Ford with crates of polio vaccine in Akron and drove it back to Portage County to set up a clinic in his office. Or all the times he flipped his car over cutting across fields on the way to deliver a baby or treat a farmer with a broken leg. He was a country doctor of the old school, trained to handle everything from cancer to obstetrics, and he was a trouper.

Or the times in 1970 when that semiretired doctor would come home shaking and furious from his work as a staff doctor at Kent State University. Sometimes student protestors would lock their limbs together in such a way that the police would have to dislocate a joint in order to break up the line; they were not shy about doing so. My grandfather was 'asshole' to the students, in his nice brown suit and tie, and to the cops he was a 'goddamn pinko fag sympathizer' - all because it was part of his life's work to reset a dislocated shoulder. He was a gentle man and a gentleman, and it no doubt cut him deeply.

My grandfather died before I could ask him about that hideous day in May when as the staff doctor on call he pronounced four young men and women dead and treated the bullet wounds of the survivors.

I miss my grandpa.

[wik] If you want a real head-trip, there is no better drug then the Portage County (Ohio) Record-Courier from the first five months of 1970. Without getting too deeply into it, here's the basics. Kent State was a practical school where mill and factory workers sent their sons and daughters so they would have something more waiting for them than a rivet gun at Lordstown or a stamping machine in Canton. Most Kent State students in 1970 were from this blue collar background, and nearly all of them were first-generation college students. Therefore, the understanding from their parents, speaking generally, was that they were there to better themselves.

Moreover, Kent the town in 1970 was an insular place. According to one book on the shootings, written in 1970-71, the only place you could by a Washington Post or New York Times in town was at the drugstore on the corner of Water and Main (it's still there.) If you got there early, that is, for one of the two copies they got in each day. News of war protests, student uprisings, and the like came to Kent filtered through the intensely conservative viewpoints of the editorial pages of the Record-Courier. Naturally, the good people of Ohio felt that war protesters were acting in irresponsible and un-American ways. Remember, this was well before any concensus of any kind had formed about Vietnam being a "quagmire."

When protests broke out on the campus of Kent State, the town was positive that outside agitators (from the Yippies and Black Panthers) had infiltrated the student body (this wasn't particularly true, by the way). As the protests grew in intensity, the irritation of the town grew more quickly. The sons and daughters of GM and Goodyear were smashing windows and singing songs and having group sex rather than studying. The diseases of the liberal East Coast seemed now to infect the heart of Middle America. James Michener's investigative book, Kent State: What Happened, and Why fanned these flames in the aftermath of the shootings with portraits of irresponsible, drug-addled losers sucking on daddy's money to blow off class and have dirty sex, all exemplified by a hippie-infested "House on Ash Street." (For what it's worth, there is no Ash Street in Kent.)

The "Letters" page of the Record-Courier tells the story first hand: the students deserved to be shot; the dirty hippies are a cancer to be cut out; why did the National Guard stop at four?; kudos to the Guard for keeping the peace; it's about time these punks were taught a lesson. As understandable, though chilling, as these letters might be, the sickening ones are from local people who put a dollar value on human life. In the days before May 4, students had smashed some windows downtown and graffitied and defaced some storefronts and public areas. One letter, I remember, put the $11,000 pricetag for some of the repairs as a fair price to pay for four lives lost.

Richard Nixon found his support among the "silent majority" he hailed as true Americans. The history of that majority has been written out of the popular recollection of the Vietnam era, as most of the "silent majority" went on with their lives without bothering to make lavish documentaries about them. Peace, love, hippies, Hendrix, and Easy Rider make it through to us, but my former neighbor spoke for a much larger part of America when she wrote in her letter to the paper that the "poor lambs" got what they had coming.