Minnesota Now and Ohio Then: This Time, the Public Isn't Buying It
I have no idea why, but lately I find myself thinking about May 4, 1970. On that day, four young Americans were killed when government troops fired indiscriminately into a crowd of protesters. Why would that pop into my head this week? And other people seem to be talking about it as well. Strange.
Perhaps sarcasm is an inappropriate response to the latest horrors in the United States, but I cannot think of what would be appropriate. In any event, I do think it is worth thinking about Kent State in today's context, because there are even more unpleasant/scary similarities than the obvious one. More importantly, there is a massive difference that people are rightly taking as a possible reason for some hope in this darkest of hours in the United States.
For those who were not alive at the time or who (like me) had simply forgotten most of the details, anti-Vietnam War protests were ongoing in 1970, especially on college campuses. At Kent State, a relatively small regional campus of Ohio's state university system, days of protest ended in the senseless murder of four unarmed student protesters.
One of the enduring cultural touchstones that came out of that tragedy is the song "Ohio," by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (with its repeated line: "Four dead in O-hi-o"), which would be a hauntingly great song simply as a musical masterpiece, even if it had no connection to anything in the real world. The other important cultural touchstone is the searingly painful Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a young girl kneeling over the body of one of the four victims.
I hope that readers will forgive me for indulging myself by sharing some personal observations here. I was eleven years old at that time, but given how important the Vietnam War was, and given that some of my loved ones were old enough to face being drafted and sent to fight and die there, being aware of the outside world was thrust upon middle schoolers early. And because I was growing up in Ohio, the events there seemed more salient. Even so, I have never been to that campus, and it would require looking up the city of Kent on a map for me to know where it is. It was "close," but the entire incident still seemed unreal in most senses.
The one thing I knew for sure about the killings was that the "tin soldiers" were sent in (with live ammunition) by Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes. Rhodes was a Republican at a time when that party included some non-hardliners, but he was most definitely a hardliner. He was a lifelong politician, and at that time he was in his last year of his second term as governor. He was running for the US Senate in 1970, and he lost the primary (to a member of the then-latest generation of Ohio's Taft political dynasty) two days after the Kent State murders.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, right? Right? Sadly, no. Ohio's constitution limits governors to two consecutive terms, but it allows a two-term governor to run again after four years out of office. Rhodes decided to run for governor again in 1974. Incredibly, he won. I say "incredibly" both because he should have been completely toxic politically and because 1974 was one of the worst years ever for the Republican Party. A huge congressional Freshman class of Democratic "Watergate babies" swept into office that year, only months after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. But Rhodes somehow eked out a win by 0.37 percent of the vote.
There was also a slightly more personal connection for me. In the summer of 1976, I was selected to participate in Buckeye Boys' State, which is Ohio's version of a several-day conference for high school kids that is held in states around the country every year. (There are also Girls' States.) When we arrived, the staff excitedly told us that the keynote speaker on the last day of the event would be Governor Rhodes. I remember thinking: "Wait a minute. How could I have forgotten that he's governor again? How did that happen? And why is everyone so happy about this?" But given that the event was sponsored by the American Legion, the politics there were rather unmistakably right-wing -- and certainly unsympathetic to anti-Vietnam War protesters.
Not that it is directly relevant here, but I will note that Rhodes's speech was an absolute joke. He stood in front of over a thousand sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys and began by saying something like this: "The most important thing that you boys obviously care about is ... jobs." He then delivered a standard, stale stump speech that could have been (and surely was) what he delivered at every campaign stop. I guess we were all going to be of voting age by the time he ran for re-re-reelection in 1978 (when he won again), so why not?
So this was the man who ordered the National Guard to attack protestors at Kent State in 1970. Unashamed, unmoved, scowling, angry, detached from reality. A political hack of the worst kind, in a state that later elected as one of its Senators JD Vance, who walks in Rhodes's footsteps.
I recently learned that there was an attempt to prosecute the troops who fired on the students at Kent State, but the prosecutions were dismissed by the trial judge as insufficient at the conclusion of the (federal) government's evidence, so the case never went to a jury. If I were less depressed by thinking about this, I would check to see whether that was because the judge in the case was an anti-anti-establishment hawk (a la the judge in the Trial of the Chicago Seven), or perhaps because the prosecutor mailed it in on purpose.
In any event, based on what we know about juries and trials of any kind of law enforcement officers -- and given that Rhodes was able to make a political comeback in Ohio -- it is difficult to imagine that there would have been convictions had the case gone to the jury.
The historical parallels here are, therefore, hardly limited to "government agents killed innocent protesters," as if that should not be enough to disturb us. In his first term, Donald Trump's response to the George Floyd protests reportedly included this:
According to CNN, Trump highlighted footage of confrontations between law enforcement officers and protesters and said: “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people. Crack their skulls!”
Trump also reportedly told law enforcement and military leaders he wanted the military to “beat the fuck out” of protesters and said: “Just shoot them.”
Bender [of the Wall Street Journal] reports that in the face of opposition from [General Mark] Milley and the then attorney general, William Barr, Trump said: “Well, shoot them in the leg – or maybe the foot. But be hard on them!”
Referring to Trump's infamous walk to stand in front of a church (holding a Bible upside down), Milley later said this in a talk to students at National Defense University: "[M]any of you saw the results of the photograph of me in Lafayette Square last week, that sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society. I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics." Trump has rid himself of Milley and all possible future Milleys.
Trump, like Rhodes, will surely never feel remorse about what he set in motion. As such men always do when faced with opposition, he shows no comprehension as to why anyone would even be unhappy about his actions. The big difference today, however, is that the killings in Minneapolis have caused immediate public revulsion and rejection of what the government is doing. Polling shows, for example, that the public is very much not on board -- and those polls were taken even before this past Saturday's murder in broad daylight of Alex Pretti (but after the murder of Renee Good).
That was not at all the public's reaction in 1970. The "Kent State shootings" Wikipedia page notes: "A Gallup poll taken the day after the shootings reportedly showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard, and 31 percent expressed no opinion.[87]" Of those who expressed an opinion, that is more than a 5-to-1 split in favor of the government's story (which is another reason to think that no jury would have convicted the shooters).
None of which is to say that things will suddenly take a turn for the better. It is, however, at least a start when the American public shows that it is willing to set aside its long-inculcated belief that armed agents of the state are all but above the law. Even so, it is a long journey from here.
- Neil H. Buchanan