four dead is called a “massacre”? The following post refers to national guardsmen as “droolin morons”?
Should protestors protesting violence who are using violence themselves (rock throwing, bottles, sticks, etc) be subject to violence themselves? Hmm, lets say for a moment that the national guard simply responded by throwing rocks back but they had been trained to throw rocks effectively and thusly did do serious injury to some students. Why are people who show up for a riot always so surprised when they get what they ask for?
Certainly there are “innocents” who don’t think it will turn ugly, but a) they should get a clue and get outta’ Dodge when the shit hits the fan or when it begins to smell violent and b) innocents sitting on the lawn are a shared responsibility between the Guard and the rioters.
If I go raise hell someplace I know two things when people in helmets carrying guns arrive. 1) I have been heard and 2) it’s time to go gome (Makins sure I have nothing like a brick or rock in my hands while walking there).
This is why I think magazines like Utne Reader while staffed by intelligent folk are complete drivel. They fail to reason that tenants valliantly facing forced evictions are crossing into the realm of violence when they begin to throw rocks onto the police officers heads. I have no problem with someone opening up a can of whupass if they thinks they are right, but don’t cray foul if said can is opened on an opponent carrying a case of the stuff. America was founded by folks willing to bite off more than they could chew, had they lost you think Britainc would have felt bad about winning?
There was no legal martial law or state of emergency in effect, and no legal order to disperse.
The day after the shootings, Governor Rhodes, according to his legal adviser, John McElroy, stated that he had cited the martial law statute “by mistake”. The proclamation of April 29 (the one that the governor testified had authorized him to call out the guard to Kent State) had failed to include Portage County, where Kent State was located. On May 5, Rhodes issued a second proclamation, which stated that it was to “supplement my Proclamation of April 29, 1970”, and did include Portage County in general and Kent State University in particular. Unfortunately, the killings had already occured the day before.
It was determined at trial that Governor Rhode’s declaration of martial law was illegal, since martial law could be declared “only when the civil courts are unable to function.” That’s why the judge instructed the jury that the students were assembled legally, no matter the actions or declarations of the Guard. But the Guard did in fact act illegally in almost every respect.
The rules of engagement in force at the time were those of the Ohio National Guard’s OPLAN-2 (revised May 16, 1969). It was based on the Army’s 1968 Field Manual 19-15 Civil Disturbances and Disasters, which had similar graduated steps, and allowed the use of full firepower only when the alternatives were “imminent overthrow of the government, continued mass casualites, or similar grievous conditions.”
OPLAN-2 proscribed a sequence of steps, beginning with the reading of the Riot Act, which in this case had been read illegally. The first paragraph under Rules of Engagement specified that: “In any action that you are required to take, use only the minimum force necessary… Your use of force should be in the sequence listed below:”
This was the sequence:
There then followed the final rule, (f) which governed the use of weapons. According to testimony at trial, the guard had already violated rules (a) (1), (a) (2), (d), and (e). The students had no avenue for escape. The crowd to which the Riot Act had been read was not the same crowd that had gathered in the Commons as classes were changing, and despite pleadings from university administration, insufficient time was given to disperse. Finally, the Guard still had chemical grenades remaining in its cache after the massacre was over.
The weapons rules were as follows:
Not one of the weapons rules of engagement was obeyed by the Guard. Other means had not been exhausted. Multiple rounds were in the chambers. Shooting was indiscriminate and random. There were no snipers, arsonists, or rioters present. (The Guard was not on campus when the unoccupied ROTC building was set ablaze two days earlier.) Automatic weapons were loaded and fired. And soldiers, having swapped arms and ammunition, had lost access to their report forms.
Darcy Bortner Geders, a freshman who was on campus at the time, described the weather as “typical of a lovely Spring day.” When Edlyn and I visited (May 4, 2000), it was about 50 degrees and sunny that morning, and probably got up into the 60s by noon. We wore jackets.
One thing that impressed us about the circumstance at the Commons was that it would have been a deathtrap for anyone there. It was difficult if not impossible for the students to escape no matter what they did. The Guard turned and fired in unison and without warning. The students were fenced in on three sides, and were trapped by the guardsmen who stood on Blanket Hill above them, shooting down into them.
Gene Williams, 21, a junior and a member of the student newspaper staff who had sought refuge in a nearby dormitory, said that bullets were ricocheting off the walls, and that “hitting the dirt” was futile since the fire was raining down from above them. He said that he saw no student snipers and that he heard no shots until the Guard opened fire.
In fairness, it should be reported that, following the events, two of the soldiers from the Guard required medical treatment: one for exhaustion and the other for shock.
With respect to the poster who doubted that Allison Krause was running from bayonets on the night of May 3, that was the evening that the Guard suddenly announced over a bullhorn that the curfew had been moved up by 2 hours, from 1:00 AM to 11:00 PM. According to the Justice Department’s summary of FBI reports, the Guard then immediately ran into the crowd of about 200 (which included Allison). At least two students, according to the reports, were stabbed with bayonets as they scrambled to get into the library and various dormitories.
The Guard should not have been called in, thats correct. The ROE were not followed either once they were called in. But to decry the intelligence of the guard because they either panicked or responed to what they believed to be legal orders (they WERE issued live amminition and told to charge weapons) while not at least noting the stupidity of someone hanging out during a violent protest is trite as all hell.
There were over 1000 students masses there, how could the bystanders not know it was about to drop in the pot? “Hey look, the National Guard is here with guns! Oh, and my fellow students are throwing rocks. I’ll stay here and finish lunch because they are all going to start hugging in another few minutes.”. Not to mention those with the rocks. How can you blithely ignore the out and out stupidity of participating in this kind of action? If I go punch someone bugger and better trained than myself and end up getting what I will likely end up getting even if that person “should” have behaved in another manner I should not be the recipient of any sympathy. If you think that you are safe to act like a bastard and therefore go ahead and act like one I for one am happy when it blows up in your face.
You keep calling this a massacre as if that makes it have more meaning when all you are doing is lessening the merit of the term.
Zen101, Maybe the students there thought that the Guards would protect them and allow them to go about their rightful peaceful assembly. They were not rioting then and it was not the same group that had rioted previously.
In my personal experience, when military guards, visibly under arms, were nearby, I felt safer and more free to continue my assmbly, because they were there to protect me. But then, they were Air Force personnel apparently lead by someone competant.
There was no violent protest that day. According to both Judge Edwin Jones of the Ohio Court of Common Pleas in Ravenna and Federal Judge Don J. Young of Toledo, the students were assembled legally and in accordance with the law. The students who threw rocks did not begin throwing rocks until they were herded against the fence and were unable to escape. When the guard retreated to the hill, the rock throwing ceased. No guardsman was treated for any injury from a thrown rock.
Photographs show (and eyewitnesses attest) that the guardsmen, when they turned and fired, were not in any danger from students, who were by now too distant even to throw rocks. According to the judges’ interpretations of the United States Consitution, people have the right to assemble to protest and express grievances, even if those protests are lively and involve shouting. The purpose of police and national guard at such demonstrations is expressly to protect the right of the protestors to protest.
Having national guardsmen on campuses was routine at that time. In Ohio alone, the Guard was called out ten times in 1970 and eleven times the year before. No one had any reason to suspect that there would be murders that day, just as today you would not expect armed agents at airports to begin firing indiscriminately into a crowd of people at a terminal. You expect them to be there to protect you.
The American Heritage dictionary defines “massacre” as “To kill indiscriminately and wantonly; slaughter”.
This is not the first time that the National Guard Riot at Kent State University (and I use that phrase advisedly) has come up on this board. Every time I see it I have some concern that we are not dealing with some one’s attempt to get information to answer their own question but with an attempt to revise history. At the out set let me say that I was not there and I do not know anyone who was there. At the time I was out of the country playing soldier. When the news broke on Armed Forces Radio and in Stars and Stripes and in the International Herald-Tribune, the almost universal reaction among my friends and associates, all active duty army types, was that there had been a hideous loss of control and discipline but that a fiasco is what should be expected of the NG. An unfair characterization, no doubt, but still the reaction in the active duty military.
The whole thing has to be put in context to be understood. Richard Nixon had campaigned for President claiming that he had a plan to end the war, a plan much better than Johnson’s plan of simply shoving more troops into Vietnam. Nixon’s plan however was a secret. When it became publicly known that Nixon’s secret plan was to carry the war into Cambodia and that Nixon had already done it (as was typical of the man) in secret, college students who were already agitating for an American abandonment of the war increased their demonstrations. Nixon at this point went out and made a speech characterizing the demonstrating students as bums. At some schools the antiwar demonstration became, if not violent, destructive. At Kent State someone set fire to the ROTC building–just who is not officially known but there is some indication that it was a high school student not associated with any of the antiwar groups at that somewhat passive and conservative university. At my own university there were demonstrations but since the ROTC drilled at the field house and shared quarters with the athletic department, the freshman English building was torched. How’s that for a symbolic statement? The real trouble came after the Kent State shootings. The police riot at Jackson State has already been mentioned. At my university the student union became the focus of mob action. It was surrounded by a cordon of state and local police who did not club anyone let alone shoot them. The University president climbed in the back of a pick up with a bull horn and defused the situation.
It seems to me, based on what I was able to read at the time, what I have read about the trials that followed and most especially on Four Dead in Ohio by William A. Gordon[ (ISBN 0-937813-05-2, 302 pages, paper) originally published in a hardcover edition by Prometheus Books in 1990 under the title The Fourth of May: Killings and Coverups at Kent State (243 pages), paperback edition, published by North Ridge Books on the 25th anniversary, revised and updated] the university, the Governor and Attorney General of Ohio and the Ohio Army National Guard commanders up and down the chain of command made the wrong decision at nearly every turn. It’s a good book. You ought to read it.
The students who were killed and wounded were not at the time involved in any destructive or threatening action. As has been pointed out the NG decided to move a crowd of students out of the center of campus at noon while classes were changing and forced a fair number of students into a corner. As the Guard fell back a squad of Guardsmen turned and fired. While there were initial reports that someone had been shooting at the Guardsmen, those reports have never been confirmed. What has been confirmed is that the Guardsmen involved removed their name tapes from their uniforms and swapped weapons with other Guardsmen. The post shooting actions by the Guardsmen, the Ohio Atty Gen, the US Justice Department and the FBI raised the specter of a conspiracy first to use unlawful violence against the Kent State students so that the powers that be could proclaim that they had gotten tough with those pinko chicken hawks who try to take over our public colleges and of an extensive cover up to conceal the facts from the public and the courts. Gordon’s book is to a great extent devoted to showing that the events arose not from conspiracy but from incompetence.
Regarding what Spavined Gelding said, it’s true that there was plenty of incompetence to go around all throughout the state government and its quasi-military adjunct, the Ohio National Guard. No outright conspiracy was ever proved, but various “secret” meetings and letters did point to at least some good-ol’-boy collusion from the highest powers. And they were powers that were very tough to get at through the courts.
Some people have wondered why the families didn’t sue until 1975. But in fact, they sued first in the summer of 1970, but those suits (claiming civil rights violations) were thrown out by the Federal District Court and by the Circuit Court of Appeals, both of which reasoned that, because Governor Rhodes was a named defendant, the suit was against the State of Ohio.
It wasn’t until a Supreme Court ruling (a unanimous opinion) in the spring of 1974 that the suit was remanded to the Federal District Court in Cleveland for trial. As Spavined explained, the context of the times figured prominently, since the justices just happened to be dealing with another famous case of appeal to executive immunity — Richard Nixon. It was a bad time for a governor to be claiming that he was above the law.
Hey, common guys! I know that if I was a Guardsman during the Vietnam war, bravely defending Ohio from the Viet Kong, I’d be pretty upset if a bunch of dirty hippies were throwing rocks at me!
Not about Kent but it’s close enough. AFAIC it doesn’t matter if the protesters were shouting, throwing rocks etc. I still haven’t seen a cite to show all the poor injured NG. They opened up on students protesting. They were wrong, very wrong.
There has been talk about Bloody Sunday being about sending a message to the protestors. Let them know that the powers that be are serious. Is there any element of this in this case?
Following the events, two guardsmen required medical attention: one for exhaustion, and the other for shock. No one was treated for any injury from thrown rocks.
At trial, a tape was played of Governor Rhodes during a May 3, 1970 press conference (the day before the murders). His voice was characterized as “loud and angry”:
At trial, he testified that, in his view, there was a “state of war”.
Returning to the OP, I think the guy at fault was whoever decided that the guardsmen whould have ammunition.
I consulted a witness, and while the 101st Airborne had bayonets at Central High in 1955, they did not have ammunition despite the fact that someone had thrown explosives at Ms. Bates house.
The order to lock and load the weapons was given by General Robert H. Canterbury, assistant adjutant general of the ONG, and the highest ranking officer present. But he apparently did not give the order to fire. When the shooting began, he was headng down the far side of Blanket Hill toward the Commons. He was about 35 yards away, and immediately turned and ran back up the hill screaming for a cease fire, but he could not be heard until he reached the top of the hill, which took about 10 seconds.
He was out of uniform that day, wearing a business suit with a gas mask perched atop his head. He was the person who ordered campus policeman Harold Rice to read the Riot Act as they rode around in a jeep. He testified that he took his authority to act from a letter written by the university Vice-president for Student Affairs, Robert Matson, and Student Body President, Frank Frisna. It has come to be known as the Matson-Frisna Letter. It stated that there was a state of emergency, when in fact there wasn’t.
Actually, the exact same ONG units that were dispatched to Kent State University had been called out on April 30, a mere 5 days before, to a wildcat Teamsters strike. Testimony at trial stated that at that event, the guardsmen did not load their rifles despite that they had actually been fired upon.
Still, I’m not so sure about placing all the blame on Canterbury. It is almost believable that, had Canterbury refused to give the order, Governor Rhodes would have driven to the campus and given it himself. There were very strong political undercurrents and enormous pressure from both Rhodes and Del Corso (Canterbury’s superior) to use maximum force.
For what it’s worth, the families themselves blamed Rhodes primarily. Remember that his proclamation of martial law was illegal. His statements were inflammatory and full of rage. He had an agenda and a lot of power that he wasn’t afraid to use and abuse. And he thought that the students were worse than Brownshirts and Communists.
