May 25, 2009 • 25 mins
After the Kent State shootings, colleges across the country closed. However, decades later, researchers still aren't sure what actually happened at Kent State. Tune in and learn more in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, we welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandice King are joined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
Hey the Kandice High. Jane. Today, we have a topic
that doesn't come from too far back and the annals
(00:24):
of American history, and it's a pretty important topic to
discuss because it's a mystery that's been unsolved for decades
now and a pretty controversial one of that too, definitely.
And what's so interesting about this is that there's new
evidence that even emerged a couple of years ago that
threatens to change the course of how we conceive of
(00:45):
this event. And what I'm referring to rather mysteriously is
what really happened at Kent State. Kent State is actually
a university in Ohio, um the town of Kent. You
probably have heard it or rings a bell because of
this tragedy that happened in nineteen seventy and that happened
on May fourth, and it had to do with an
anti war protest. And as you probably know, the Vietnam
(01:08):
War was going on at this time and the Americans
were involved in it, and it was very very controversial. Uh.
It was an incredibly unpopular war. And one of the
reasons that Richard Nixon had been elected to the president, say,
was because he had made the promise to get the
American troops out of the war. Right. He promised Vietnamization,
which was basically the idea that he was going to
(01:30):
transfer the battle duty, the combat duty, from American soldiers
to the Vietnamese themselves. And so that was one of
the reasons why he was elected president. He was campaigning
for this, but he sort of seemed to stab people
in the back or or or go back on this
promise when he announced on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy, that
(01:50):
he was sending U. S. Troops into Cambodia, and this
really chucked people by surprise. They didn't understand the motive
behind it. And the official motive that nixt gay when
he made the announcement on national television and radio was
that there were Viet Cong headquarters and Cambodia, and by
infiltrating the headquarters that eventually be able to take down
the Viet Cong. So, by I guess that a military
(02:14):
and governmental perspective, the man you ever made sense. But
to the American people who felt they'd been duped. It
was a real slap in the face, right. It seemed
like he was escalating the war rather than um pulling
out of it, which people wanted to see, especially college
kids around the country. And they were one of the
most active anti war protesters at this time. And so
(02:34):
the next day, which would have been Friday, May one,
students in campuses all around the country, not just Kent,
were staging anti war protests. Very standard thing and very
understandable because it's happened. This is the day after the announcement,
and in Kent, the students staged at protests in which
they buried they symbolically buried the U. S. Constitution, and
(02:56):
it was it was very standard, you know, Kent was
not unlike many other campuses. And another thing they did
was planned to convene again on Monday, May fourth at
noon for another rally and Friday night, as you can
imagine this semester sort of winding down, it's getting close
to summer, students go out as usual to the bars
and they're intermingling with townspeople from Kent, and the scene
(03:20):
just escalates because anti war sentiment is running high and
things get a little bit out of control. Yeah, these
crowds start building bonfires in the streets, and the bottles
are thrown at cop cars and it just just sort
of increasingly gets more and more tense in rawity, and
coming from I went to University of Maryland and this
(03:40):
doesn't seem completely out of the ordinary. I mean, we
have a we win a championship and the kids build bonfires,
you know, but it really um made the officials of
the town of Kent very nervous, definitely, and the protesters
were having verbal conflicts and physical conflicts without the police,
and so all the Kent police were out that night,
(04:02):
police were called in from surrounding towns and cities, and
all the counties officials came out to just to you know,
show their faces and help all the crowds and even
eventually helped disperse the crowds. And things really got out
of control, and mayhem really broke loose when the mayor
of Kent closed all the bars, and what what a
(04:22):
bad move in retrospect, because people are being rowdy, but
you can imagine that there's still a good number of
people inside the bars and having their beers and carrying
on as usual. But you close all the bars, you
move all of those people into the streets. They've all
been drinking. Mayhem, What were you thinking? I think he
had good intentions, because you can understand how the presence
of the bars made made the crowds were rowdy after
(04:45):
they were drinking, but to close them during the night
just made things worse, it really did. And so and
a bit of desperation, he called Governor James Rhodes, and
those two wouldn't conspire quite yet, but then next day
they reached a decision that ultimately culminated in the tragic
shootings at Kent State. But that night the crowd was
(05:08):
dispersed with tear gas and things were calm. It was
the calm before the storm. Yeah, you know. The next day, Saturday,
May two, we're talking about now, Satram, the mayor was
still nervous about what happened the night before, but also
he was hearing rumors and supposedly threats against local businessmen.
This made him even more nervous, and so he called
(05:28):
the governor James Rhodes, as you mentioned, and at about
five that evening Saturday, he he asked the governor to
send the National Guard to Kent, and at ten pm
the Ohio National Guard arrived, and they came into a
rather dramatic scene on the Kent State campus. Someone we
to this day don't know who was burning down the
(05:49):
r OTC building there. Yeah, well there there was a
big crowd around the r r OTC building and and
the crowd was sort of cheering on the blaze. But
you know, we still haven't found out who exactly lit it.
Some some students were wrongly accused of of starting the fire,
and so yeah, we still don't know, but we do
know that many protesters actually cut fire hoses, which effectively
(06:13):
prevented firemen from from putting out the blaze when they
did arrive on the scene. And so that night there
were arrests made and more tear gas and just pandemonium
for for a good while. Yeah, the guards were able
to disperse them when they arrived, but the blaze had
already been said, the damage had already been done exactly
so by Sunday, May three, UM, according to your reports,
(06:33):
it was a pretty nice day in Kent, Ohio. The
sun was out, it was springtime, and even though the
guardsmen were there, you know, they didn't really damp in
spirits that much. Students were actually having conversations with them.
They were talking, they were conversing, and things were going
okay until Governor Rhodes showed up in Kent, and the
things he said just added fuel to a fire that
(06:57):
had been, you know, burning out. He essentially threatened to
get a court order putting the state in a state
of emergency, and no one actually said the words, but
it was assumed that martial law had been declared, and
understanding falsely that martial law was in a fact, all
rallies were banned, including the one that had been planned
(07:18):
for noon the next day, and they may fourth and
tensions spiked again. And one important thing also that Rhodes
did on Sunday was during a press conference he actually
called these violent protesters the worst type of people that
we harbor in America, which very uncharitable remark and not
very diplomatic for the time. I'm sure it just added
(07:39):
fuel to the fire exactly. So university officials tried to
get the word out to all the Kent State students,
don't conduct the rally, please don't meet on the commons.
Let's just scrap this whole idea. They went so far
as to print about I think a couple of thousand
and twelve thousand sot fires telling us, you don't hold
(08:00):
this rally. And the students felt on the whole that
it was their their right, you know, constitutionally, to have
this rally and to speak what was on their minds.
And so by eleven am, a couple thousand had already
started congregating, and then by noon there were three thousand.
And there's a report that was put together by UM
(08:21):
two men affiliated with Kent State University, and that is
Jerry Lewis and Thomas are Hensley, and they attempt to
break down the numbers to give us a better idea
of how many people in the crowd were actually protesters, demonstrators, agitators,
and spectators. And they estimate that of the three thousand,
five hundred were active demonstrators, about one thousand were on
(08:45):
the sidelines cheering them on, and then around the periphery
you had about more who were speculating. And I would
presume also that that number includes people who were passing
by on their way to different sides around campus US.
As we'll see, one of the the victims of the
shootings was just a passer by. Right, So you have
(09:07):
the situation where, um, you have about a thousand guardsmen
and its three thousand students who are gathered around, some
actively protesting. So I'm just watching. So you have one
of the generals in the National Guardenal Robert Canterbury, and
he tried to disperse the crowd. He tried with a
bullhorns andying like go home, h rallies are banned, and
(09:30):
he finally got around. He was driven around in a
jeep around the commons trying to get people to leave.
Finally he ordered his men to load their weapons and
start dispersing tear gas. And we should mention that their
weapons were and one rifles. And it's pretty intimidating just
from all accounts. Imagine you're a bystander. You're one of
the crowd of three thousand civilians looking on to see
(09:52):
men holding these weapons and you know that they're loaded,
even if they're locked. What a scary thought. But conversely,
for the guardsman's point of view, they were outnumbered by
about what two to one seems like, And so that's
why there's so much controversy today. As we'll see later
in the debate, who was more frightened. Yeah, well, I
(10:12):
think it's interesting to know. It was a good point.
But on the other hand, you if I were a
spectator or a protester, I really wouldn't expect the guard
to even think about shooting into the crowd, you know,
And I think that's what gave them a lot of
the I don't know what the word is, but courage
or just sort of you know, the goal to to
(10:32):
challenge the National Guard. And by challenge we should be
explicit and say that they were hurling insults, they were
throwing rocks, they were not being complacent people in a crowd.
And please don't mistake what I'm saying. I'm not trying
to defend either side here. I'm presenting the facts. But
you should know that people weren't standing by. They were
actively engaging with the guards. You know, the guards how
(10:56):
their weapons loaded. They were dispersing the tear gas, and
the crowd was fighting back eight and so when the
tear gas was dispersed, this pushed protesters passed the Commons
area and up and over a hill. Um And on
the other side you had this practice football field in
a in a parking lot, and so the crowd was
pushed back to that that area, and when the guardsmen
(11:19):
got there, they sort of realized that they were kind
of trapped because the field was was um enclosed by
a fence, right, And at that point the guard started
trapesing back up Blanket Hill, and when they got to
the top of the hill, they turned around and out
of the seventy plus guards present fired. Yeah, and we
(11:40):
should also note that not all of these twenty eight
who fired fired into the crowd. Some or most of them,
i should say, actually just shut up in the air
or shot down the ground. Seems like they were trying
to not harm anyone but just warned the protesters. But
that wasn't the case for all of the guards. So
for about thirteen seconds, they were between sixty one and
sixty seven shots fired, and as a result there were
(12:04):
four deaths. We have Jeffrey Miller, who was shot from
two hundred seventy ft away and he was hit in
the mouth. Alison Krauss was three thirty ft away and
she was shot in the left side. William Schroeder three
hundred ninety feet away was shot in the back, and
Sandy Showyer, who was a student just passing by on
her way to class was shot at three d nine
ft away as well, and she was shot in the neck.
(12:27):
And that's what makes it more tragic. I mean, it
would have been tragic anyway, but the fact that some
of the kids who were shot or wounded were not
even involved, they didn't even want to engage in the protests,
and they were they became a victim of it. And
nine wounded um included Dean Kaylor who was permanently paralyzed
from the shot. Donald Mackenzie was the farthest away of
(12:47):
any of the victims of the shootings at seven hundred
fifty feet and another one of the students, Joseph Lewis,
who was hit. He was actually hit while he was
flipping off the guard with his middle finger. So I
remember reading about the so panic basically ensued, you know,
like I can't imagine how it would feel in the seconds,
the moments after these shots were fired. But people believe,
(13:09):
like you mentioned Lewis and Hensley right about this, and
they were a great source from for my research on this.
They they believe that things would have gotten worse most
definitely well and if you listen to I witness accounts
from Kent state that day, they say that everyone just
hit the ground. You know, shots are fired, you hit
the ground, and then people paused and stood back up,
(13:31):
and you don't realize at first who's been shot. And
then they start seeing people who aren't getting up, people
who are covered in blood, and especially in the parking lot,
it became very obvious you have blood pulling out of
victims lying on the asphalt. Um, Jeffrey Miller went in particular,
and so at least after this there was thought about
even uh provoking the guards further, and um, if it
(13:55):
weren't for Glenn Frank, who was a professor there and
he happened to be acting as a facult and marshal
to keep the peace during the protest, he started uh
pleading with the crowd just to just you know, disperse
and and let it go and don't provoke the guards
any anymore. And then you can actually hear clips of
what he said or people recounting his words. And this
(14:17):
is circtly paraphrasing, but he was very impassionately saying things like,
if you've never listened to any directions in your life
at all, you know, for Heaven's sake, listen to this
now heart wrenching, and thank goodness he was there to
say that, because a lot of people credit him for
saving some lives. That day, this news hit the national
(14:38):
scene and everyone was basically in shock. UM. A lot
of people were disappointed with the response they got from
the Nixon administration. Uh. Nixon himself said that it's merely
when dissent turned to violence, it invites tragedy. It struck
a lot of people as cold when he said that,
and he later remarked that there's a few days after
(14:59):
Kent among the darkest of my presidency. And I can
guess so if you're showing such a lakewarm sentiments is
what you come into say. Yeah, it's interesting. Actually, I
remember reading um an account of how one of the
most bizarre things of Nixon's presidencies in the days following Kent,
he actually left the White House very early in the
wee hours of the morning, UH, with I think no
(15:21):
security or maybe just very little security, and he um
engaged in conversation with some protesters who were sitting on
the steps of a monument or some such and he
told them, like, I know you probably hate me. You
think I'm a jerk. He used a little more vulgar
language than I did, but he tried to sort of
engage within the generation. But you can see the disconnect
(15:41):
between the younger college generation at this time and in
Nixon's generations. Sort of they didn't know how to connect
with each other. Definitely not and I can imagine that
that sort of generational gap would have made it incredibly
difficult to understand the sentiments of the crowd and reconcile
those with the duty of the National Guard, and that
(16:02):
became a huge debate, and trying to settle this case
in court was a nightmare, and it wasn't settled really
until January ninety nine, and eventually the courts settled with
six seventy five thousand dollars to the wounded and the
families of the killed students. And the National Guard never
even issued an apology. They only made a statement of regret. Yeah,
(16:27):
they wanted to clarify I think that that it was
not an apology because they didn't because that would make
it look like they were to blame, which they didn't
want to make it. They they testified in these trials
that they shot because they felt that their lives were
in danger and a lot of people disagree with that.
They think that they made up this excuse and that
you know, there are some even conspiracy theories that the
(16:48):
troops when they originally uh came down past the hill
into the football field, that they that these these troops
who fired had um conspired to when they play to
head sort of a premeditated murder situation where they said, Hey,
when we get back up to that hill, we're going
to turn around in fire, which would indicate that they
weren't um. They didn't feel like their loves were in
(17:10):
danger so much as they just wanted to shoot, you know,
they wanted to end this this rally, right, and other
I witness accounts say that they were very angry. I mean,
they were obviously caught in the middle of a student
protest that arguably they weren't prepared to handle. I mean,
the National Guard is obviously prepared for certain types of situations,
but a student protests may have been one that they
(17:32):
weren't trained to handle, or at least efficiently or properly. Yeah,
And what's what I find most interesting about the guards
themselves is that a lot of sources bring up the
fact that these guards were most of them not much
older than the college, because that they were they were
shooting into, you know, the and that would explain the
(17:52):
camaraderie on Sunday. That's true. That's true. And also the
fact that many of these many of these kids in
the guard, they had to the guard because they wanted
to dodge the draft themselves. So you can see that
maybe they had similar sentiment as the protesters as as
draft dodgers. Well after after the shootings, essentially life stopped
(18:14):
on the university and it was closed. Like many universities
around the country, Kent State was closed for six weeks
and I didn't reopen until the summer. But in order
to endure normalcy and the proper closure of the semester,
professors and students completed their coursework through mail and they
would have meetings in town and UM. I believe in
the and the Jerry Lewis and Thomas Henley report, they
(18:36):
described one student who was in the sciences who helped
make videos at different experiments and laboratories and mailed them
out to his his UM fellow students. So people were
obviously trying to make this work and in other campuses
were closed around the country too. It partly had to
do with the student strikes which worce on the close,
(18:56):
and also just they had to close or they felt
it was it was the right thing to do. And
I was talking to my dad about it, and he
was actually attending Georgetown at this time, and he remembers
when Georgetown campus shut down for the rest of the year.
But I mean, there wasn't a whole lot left of
the semester, like you mentioned, six weeks or so. I mean,
we're thinking May, it's pretty late in the semester. But
(19:18):
it did disrupt the entire country in that way. It
really did. And what's interesting I alluded earlier in the
podcast to the fact that there's evidence now that threatens
to shake up the verdict of the cases. We know it.
And I'm not quite sure what became of this, but
back in May of two thousand seven, story broke on
NPR that one of the wounded victims, Alan Canfora, had
(19:42):
new evidence that he wanted to see investigated. And the
day of the rally, there was a student who had
a microphone perched on the window sill of his dorm
room and he recorded everything that happened on a real
to real tape. And not until recently, with improved technology
standards and audio, was any and able to convert that
into a better sounding club And it had been stored
(20:05):
in the archives at Yale for many many years since then.
And can Flora gave an eyewitness account that he heard
someone command the shots, which obviously would have you know,
made this case very different because people say we don't
know why the guard shot. Well, if someone told them
to shoot, well, there's you know, the evidence right there.
And if you listen very carefully to the tape, and
(20:26):
you can, if you do search for it online, you
can hear it. You can sort of make out the
words right here gets set point and fire, but it's
very faint. So I'm not quite sure if this is
maybe a matter of wanting to hear something that's not
really there. Maybe maybe do they know that it would
(20:47):
have been an official who said that, or maybe it
was just because Canterbury was the officer of highest rank
among the National Guard. But is there evidence to point
to where the fact that he would have said that
he would have given the order. And I remember reading
that one of the official was after the shootings, one
of the officials came running across saying stop firing, stop firing, right,
And it could be that maybe an order got handed
(21:07):
down incorrectly to a small portion of the number of guards,
and that would have explained why only twenty something out
of seventy something even shot. That's true. So it's something
that I don't really know a lot about except for
this story, and I'm not sure if the case has
been reopened for investigation. But one thing that struck me
when I began doing research on Kent State was the
(21:27):
fact that it sounded really similar to another historical situation
that happened centuries beforehand, having to do with the Boston massacre.
And it really struck a chord with me that there
was the situation where you have armed troops and angry citizens, uh,
confronting each other and there's sort of panic and confusion
going on and somehow a fire a shot was fired,
(21:51):
and it just escalated after that. And I actually found
a scholarly article about it that describes the similarities and
the differences, and it's really fascinating. So it's interesting to
think about these situations and how there are so much
better ways to handle them, and how you know, we
need to avoid repeat of such episodes exactly. And it
really is our right as citizens to speak out against things.
(22:13):
You know, we we have that granted to us by
the Constitution. We have freedom of speech. We can protest,
and obviously there are peaceful ways to do it, more
radical ways to do it, and yet it's complicated by
the fact that it needs to be peaceful protests. And
were the protesters being peaceful? Well, you know, you could argue, well,
what the burning now of the RTC building? Maybe not?
(22:34):
I don't know. That's a question that in the report
from Lewis and Hensley they raised. They sort of leave
their summary of of the Kent State shootings with a
whole list of questions and some of the ones that
really stood out to me where how much of this
action was sort of brought on by outside agitators, non
Kent State students, what were the townspeople doing to get
(22:56):
the crowds around? And the confusion of the martial law
as well. Exactly. Marshal Law declared, was it not who
actually banned the rally? Didn't anyone have a right to
ban the rally? And in respect to the outside agitators
coming in um one of the most famous images from
Kent State shooting is a photograph taken by photography student
(23:18):
John Filo that day of um young Mary Vechio leaning
over the body of Jeffrey Miller. Her hands are, you know,
at her sides, and her face is just contorted in anguish.
Mary Vecchio wasn't a Kent State student. She was a
fourteen year old runaway who just happened to be there.
And this image is so iconic, and it's really I think,
(23:38):
how many of us remember Kent State and just a
pan ammonium and the exactly and if you haven't seen
it again, do a search for it. But Mary Vecchio
later said that she'd suffered because of the photo, and
that's a direct quote. She said that she had suffered
because of it. And I'm not quite sure what that means. Yeah,
I don't know what to be maybe would indicate that
(24:02):
she got a lot of attention because of it, and
you know, she was always attached with the with this tragedy.
I guess that's a good point, the idea of if
you witness an event like that, of course it's always
going to be with you, it's always going to be
something you remember, but eventually you overcome tragedy by coping
with it in certain ways. And if if your face
is so strongly attached to this moment, you can't really
(24:23):
ever get over it can't be hard. And that's why
it's so important to remember Kent State and remember it
not just from the perspective of of the actual events
that occurred, but from the perspective of history, as you mentioned, Jane,
bringing it into context with other events where where mob
behavior resulted and culminated in tragedy when you have someone
(24:46):
who's armed against a protester who's not in proper ways
to speak out against what you deem injustices in the world.
And as you mentioned, you know news is still sort
of mulling and coming out about this, this tragedy with
the with the real use of that audio. So if
there's any um anything the news about can't say, you
can bet that we'll be talking about it on our
blog Stuff you Miss in History Class on the website
(25:08):
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email to podcast at how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, we welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandice King are joined by staff writer Jane McGrath.
Hey the Kandice High. Jane. Today, we have a topic
that doesn't come from too far back and the annals
(00:24):
of American history, and it's a pretty important topic to
discuss because it's a mystery that's been unsolved for decades
now and a pretty controversial one of that too, definitely.
And what's so interesting about this is that there's new
evidence that even emerged a couple of years ago that
threatens to change the course of how we conceive of
(00:45):
this event. And what I'm referring to rather mysteriously is
what really happened at Kent State. Kent State is actually
a university in Ohio, um the town of Kent. You
probably have heard it or rings a bell because of
this tragedy that happened in nineteen seventy and that happened
on May fourth, and it had to do with an
anti war protest. And as you probably know, the Vietnam
(01:08):
War was going on at this time and the Americans
were involved in it, and it was very very controversial. Uh.
It was an incredibly unpopular war. And one of the
reasons that Richard Nixon had been elected to the president, say,
was because he had made the promise to get the
American troops out of the war. Right. He promised Vietnamization,
which was basically the idea that he was going to
(01:30):
transfer the battle duty, the combat duty, from American soldiers
to the Vietnamese themselves. And so that was one of
the reasons why he was elected president. He was campaigning
for this, but he sort of seemed to stab people
in the back or or or go back on this
promise when he announced on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy, that
(01:50):
he was sending U. S. Troops into Cambodia, and this
really chucked people by surprise. They didn't understand the motive
behind it. And the official motive that nixt gay when
he made the announcement on national television and radio was
that there were Viet Cong headquarters and Cambodia, and by
infiltrating the headquarters that eventually be able to take down
the Viet Cong. So, by I guess that a military
(02:14):
and governmental perspective, the man you ever made sense. But
to the American people who felt they'd been duped. It
was a real slap in the face, right. It seemed
like he was escalating the war rather than um pulling
out of it, which people wanted to see, especially college
kids around the country. And they were one of the
most active anti war protesters at this time. And so
(02:34):
the next day, which would have been Friday, May one,
students in campuses all around the country, not just Kent,
were staging anti war protests. Very standard thing and very
understandable because it's happened. This is the day after the announcement,
and in Kent, the students staged at protests in which
they buried they symbolically buried the U. S. Constitution, and
(02:56):
it was it was very standard, you know, Kent was
not unlike many other campuses. And another thing they did
was planned to convene again on Monday, May fourth at
noon for another rally and Friday night, as you can
imagine this semester sort of winding down, it's getting close
to summer, students go out as usual to the bars
and they're intermingling with townspeople from Kent, and the scene
(03:20):
just escalates because anti war sentiment is running high and
things get a little bit out of control. Yeah, these
crowds start building bonfires in the streets, and the bottles
are thrown at cop cars and it just just sort
of increasingly gets more and more tense in rawity, and
coming from I went to University of Maryland and this
(03:40):
doesn't seem completely out of the ordinary. I mean, we
have a we win a championship and the kids build bonfires,
you know, but it really um made the officials of
the town of Kent very nervous, definitely, and the protesters
were having verbal conflicts and physical conflicts without the police,
and so all the Kent police were out that night,
(04:02):
police were called in from surrounding towns and cities, and
all the counties officials came out to just to you know,
show their faces and help all the crowds and even
eventually helped disperse the crowds. And things really got out
of control, and mayhem really broke loose when the mayor
of Kent closed all the bars, and what what a
(04:22):
bad move in retrospect, because people are being rowdy, but
you can imagine that there's still a good number of
people inside the bars and having their beers and carrying
on as usual. But you close all the bars, you
move all of those people into the streets. They've all
been drinking. Mayhem, What were you thinking? I think he
had good intentions, because you can understand how the presence
of the bars made made the crowds were rowdy after
(04:45):
they were drinking, but to close them during the night
just made things worse, it really did. And so and
a bit of desperation, he called Governor James Rhodes, and
those two wouldn't conspire quite yet, but then next day
they reached a decision that ultimately culminated in the tragic
shootings at Kent State. But that night the crowd was
(05:08):
dispersed with tear gas and things were calm. It was
the calm before the storm. Yeah, you know. The next day, Saturday,
May two, we're talking about now, Satram, the mayor was
still nervous about what happened the night before, but also
he was hearing rumors and supposedly threats against local businessmen.
This made him even more nervous, and so he called
(05:28):
the governor James Rhodes, as you mentioned, and at about
five that evening Saturday, he he asked the governor to
send the National Guard to Kent, and at ten pm
the Ohio National Guard arrived, and they came into a
rather dramatic scene on the Kent State campus. Someone we
to this day don't know who was burning down the
(05:49):
r OTC building there. Yeah, well there there was a
big crowd around the r r OTC building and and
the crowd was sort of cheering on the blaze. But
you know, we still haven't found out who exactly lit it.
Some some students were wrongly accused of of starting the fire,
and so yeah, we still don't know, but we do
know that many protesters actually cut fire hoses, which effectively
(06:13):
prevented firemen from from putting out the blaze when they
did arrive on the scene. And so that night there
were arrests made and more tear gas and just pandemonium
for for a good while. Yeah, the guards were able
to disperse them when they arrived, but the blaze had
already been said, the damage had already been done exactly
so by Sunday, May three, UM, according to your reports,
(06:33):
it was a pretty nice day in Kent, Ohio. The
sun was out, it was springtime, and even though the
guardsmen were there, you know, they didn't really damp in
spirits that much. Students were actually having conversations with them.
They were talking, they were conversing, and things were going
okay until Governor Rhodes showed up in Kent, and the
things he said just added fuel to a fire that
(06:57):
had been, you know, burning out. He essentially threatened to
get a court order putting the state in a state
of emergency, and no one actually said the words, but
it was assumed that martial law had been declared, and
understanding falsely that martial law was in a fact, all
rallies were banned, including the one that had been planned
(07:18):
for noon the next day, and they may fourth and
tensions spiked again. And one important thing also that Rhodes
did on Sunday was during a press conference he actually
called these violent protesters the worst type of people that
we harbor in America, which very uncharitable remark and not
very diplomatic for the time. I'm sure it just added
(07:39):
fuel to the fire exactly. So university officials tried to
get the word out to all the Kent State students,
don't conduct the rally, please don't meet on the commons.
Let's just scrap this whole idea. They went so far
as to print about I think a couple of thousand
and twelve thousand sot fires telling us, you don't hold
(08:00):
this rally. And the students felt on the whole that
it was their their right, you know, constitutionally, to have
this rally and to speak what was on their minds.
And so by eleven am, a couple thousand had already
started congregating, and then by noon there were three thousand.
And there's a report that was put together by UM
(08:21):
two men affiliated with Kent State University, and that is
Jerry Lewis and Thomas are Hensley, and they attempt to
break down the numbers to give us a better idea
of how many people in the crowd were actually protesters, demonstrators, agitators,
and spectators. And they estimate that of the three thousand,
five hundred were active demonstrators, about one thousand were on
(08:45):
the sidelines cheering them on, and then around the periphery
you had about more who were speculating. And I would
presume also that that number includes people who were passing
by on their way to different sides around campus US.
As we'll see, one of the the victims of the
shootings was just a passer by. Right, So you have
(09:07):
the situation where, um, you have about a thousand guardsmen
and its three thousand students who are gathered around, some
actively protesting. So I'm just watching. So you have one
of the generals in the National Guardenal Robert Canterbury, and
he tried to disperse the crowd. He tried with a
bullhorns andying like go home, h rallies are banned, and
(09:30):
he finally got around. He was driven around in a
jeep around the commons trying to get people to leave.
Finally he ordered his men to load their weapons and
start dispersing tear gas. And we should mention that their
weapons were and one rifles. And it's pretty intimidating just
from all accounts. Imagine you're a bystander. You're one of
the crowd of three thousand civilians looking on to see
(09:52):
men holding these weapons and you know that they're loaded,
even if they're locked. What a scary thought. But conversely,
for the guardsman's point of view, they were outnumbered by
about what two to one seems like, And so that's
why there's so much controversy today. As we'll see later
in the debate, who was more frightened. Yeah, well, I
(10:12):
think it's interesting to know. It was a good point.
But on the other hand, you if I were a
spectator or a protester, I really wouldn't expect the guard
to even think about shooting into the crowd, you know,
And I think that's what gave them a lot of
the I don't know what the word is, but courage
or just sort of you know, the goal to to
(10:32):
challenge the National Guard. And by challenge we should be
explicit and say that they were hurling insults, they were
throwing rocks, they were not being complacent people in a crowd.
And please don't mistake what I'm saying. I'm not trying
to defend either side here. I'm presenting the facts. But
you should know that people weren't standing by. They were
actively engaging with the guards. You know, the guards how
(10:56):
their weapons loaded. They were dispersing the tear gas, and
the crowd was fighting back eight and so when the
tear gas was dispersed, this pushed protesters passed the Commons
area and up and over a hill. Um And on
the other side you had this practice football field in
a in a parking lot, and so the crowd was
pushed back to that that area, and when the guardsmen
(11:19):
got there, they sort of realized that they were kind
of trapped because the field was was um enclosed by
a fence, right, And at that point the guard started
trapesing back up Blanket Hill, and when they got to
the top of the hill, they turned around and out
of the seventy plus guards present fired. Yeah, and we
(11:40):
should also note that not all of these twenty eight
who fired fired into the crowd. Some or most of them,
i should say, actually just shut up in the air
or shot down the ground. Seems like they were trying
to not harm anyone but just warned the protesters. But
that wasn't the case for all of the guards. So
for about thirteen seconds, they were between sixty one and
sixty seven shots fired, and as a result there were
(12:04):
four deaths. We have Jeffrey Miller, who was shot from
two hundred seventy ft away and he was hit in
the mouth. Alison Krauss was three thirty ft away and
she was shot in the left side. William Schroeder three
hundred ninety feet away was shot in the back, and
Sandy Showyer, who was a student just passing by on
her way to class was shot at three d nine
ft away as well, and she was shot in the neck.
(12:27):
And that's what makes it more tragic. I mean, it
would have been tragic anyway, but the fact that some
of the kids who were shot or wounded were not
even involved, they didn't even want to engage in the protests,
and they were they became a victim of it. And
nine wounded um included Dean Kaylor who was permanently paralyzed
from the shot. Donald Mackenzie was the farthest away of
(12:47):
any of the victims of the shootings at seven hundred
fifty feet and another one of the students, Joseph Lewis,
who was hit. He was actually hit while he was
flipping off the guard with his middle finger. So I
remember reading about the so panic basically ensued, you know,
like I can't imagine how it would feel in the seconds,
the moments after these shots were fired. But people believe,
(13:09):
like you mentioned Lewis and Hensley right about this, and
they were a great source from for my research on this.
They they believe that things would have gotten worse most
definitely well and if you listen to I witness accounts
from Kent state that day, they say that everyone just
hit the ground. You know, shots are fired, you hit
the ground, and then people paused and stood back up,
(13:31):
and you don't realize at first who's been shot. And
then they start seeing people who aren't getting up, people
who are covered in blood, and especially in the parking lot,
it became very obvious you have blood pulling out of
victims lying on the asphalt. Um, Jeffrey Miller went in particular,
and so at least after this there was thought about
even uh provoking the guards further, and um, if it
(13:55):
weren't for Glenn Frank, who was a professor there and
he happened to be acting as a facult and marshal
to keep the peace during the protest, he started uh
pleading with the crowd just to just you know, disperse
and and let it go and don't provoke the guards
any anymore. And then you can actually hear clips of
what he said or people recounting his words. And this
(14:17):
is circtly paraphrasing, but he was very impassionately saying things like,
if you've never listened to any directions in your life
at all, you know, for Heaven's sake, listen to this
now heart wrenching, and thank goodness he was there to
say that, because a lot of people credit him for
saving some lives. That day, this news hit the national
(14:38):
scene and everyone was basically in shock. UM. A lot
of people were disappointed with the response they got from
the Nixon administration. Uh. Nixon himself said that it's merely
when dissent turned to violence, it invites tragedy. It struck
a lot of people as cold when he said that,
and he later remarked that there's a few days after
(14:59):
Kent among the darkest of my presidency. And I can
guess so if you're showing such a lakewarm sentiments is
what you come into say. Yeah, it's interesting. Actually, I
remember reading um an account of how one of the
most bizarre things of Nixon's presidencies in the days following Kent,
he actually left the White House very early in the
wee hours of the morning, UH, with I think no
(15:21):
security or maybe just very little security, and he um
engaged in conversation with some protesters who were sitting on
the steps of a monument or some such and he
told them, like, I know you probably hate me. You
think I'm a jerk. He used a little more vulgar
language than I did, but he tried to sort of
engage within the generation. But you can see the disconnect
(15:41):
between the younger college generation at this time and in
Nixon's generations. Sort of they didn't know how to connect
with each other. Definitely not and I can imagine that
that sort of generational gap would have made it incredibly
difficult to understand the sentiments of the crowd and reconcile
those with the duty of the National Guard, and that
(16:02):
became a huge debate, and trying to settle this case
in court was a nightmare, and it wasn't settled really
until January ninety nine, and eventually the courts settled with
six seventy five thousand dollars to the wounded and the
families of the killed students. And the National Guard never
even issued an apology. They only made a statement of regret. Yeah,
(16:27):
they wanted to clarify I think that that it was
not an apology because they didn't because that would make
it look like they were to blame, which they didn't
want to make it. They they testified in these trials
that they shot because they felt that their lives were
in danger and a lot of people disagree with that.
They think that they made up this excuse and that
you know, there are some even conspiracy theories that the
(16:48):
troops when they originally uh came down past the hill
into the football field, that they that these these troops
who fired had um conspired to when they play to
head sort of a premeditated murder situation where they said, Hey,
when we get back up to that hill, we're going
to turn around in fire, which would indicate that they
weren't um. They didn't feel like their loves were in
(17:10):
danger so much as they just wanted to shoot, you know,
they wanted to end this this rally, right, and other
I witness accounts say that they were very angry. I mean,
they were obviously caught in the middle of a student
protest that arguably they weren't prepared to handle. I mean,
the National Guard is obviously prepared for certain types of situations,
but a student protests may have been one that they
(17:32):
weren't trained to handle, or at least efficiently or properly. Yeah,
And what's what I find most interesting about the guards
themselves is that a lot of sources bring up the
fact that these guards were most of them not much
older than the college, because that they were they were
shooting into, you know, the and that would explain the
(17:52):
camaraderie on Sunday. That's true. That's true. And also the
fact that many of these many of these kids in
the guard, they had to the guard because they wanted
to dodge the draft themselves. So you can see that
maybe they had similar sentiment as the protesters as as
draft dodgers. Well after after the shootings, essentially life stopped
(18:14):
on the university and it was closed. Like many universities
around the country, Kent State was closed for six weeks
and I didn't reopen until the summer. But in order
to endure normalcy and the proper closure of the semester,
professors and students completed their coursework through mail and they
would have meetings in town and UM. I believe in
the and the Jerry Lewis and Thomas Henley report, they
(18:36):
described one student who was in the sciences who helped
make videos at different experiments and laboratories and mailed them
out to his his UM fellow students. So people were
obviously trying to make this work and in other campuses
were closed around the country too. It partly had to
do with the student strikes which worce on the close,
(18:56):
and also just they had to close or they felt
it was it was the right thing to do. And
I was talking to my dad about it, and he
was actually attending Georgetown at this time, and he remembers
when Georgetown campus shut down for the rest of the year.
But I mean, there wasn't a whole lot left of
the semester, like you mentioned, six weeks or so. I mean,
we're thinking May, it's pretty late in the semester. But
(19:18):
it did disrupt the entire country in that way. It
really did. And what's interesting I alluded earlier in the
podcast to the fact that there's evidence now that threatens
to shake up the verdict of the cases. We know it.
And I'm not quite sure what became of this, but
back in May of two thousand seven, story broke on
NPR that one of the wounded victims, Alan Canfora, had
(19:42):
new evidence that he wanted to see investigated. And the
day of the rally, there was a student who had
a microphone perched on the window sill of his dorm
room and he recorded everything that happened on a real
to real tape. And not until recently, with improved technology
standards and audio, was any and able to convert that
into a better sounding club And it had been stored
(20:05):
in the archives at Yale for many many years since then.
And can Flora gave an eyewitness account that he heard
someone command the shots, which obviously would have you know,
made this case very different because people say we don't
know why the guard shot. Well, if someone told them
to shoot, well, there's you know, the evidence right there.
And if you listen very carefully to the tape, and
(20:26):
you can, if you do search for it online, you
can hear it. You can sort of make out the
words right here gets set point and fire, but it's
very faint. So I'm not quite sure if this is
maybe a matter of wanting to hear something that's not
really there. Maybe maybe do they know that it would
(20:47):
have been an official who said that, or maybe it
was just because Canterbury was the officer of highest rank
among the National Guard. But is there evidence to point
to where the fact that he would have said that
he would have given the order. And I remember reading
that one of the official was after the shootings, one
of the officials came running across saying stop firing, stop firing, right,
And it could be that maybe an order got handed
(21:07):
down incorrectly to a small portion of the number of guards,
and that would have explained why only twenty something out
of seventy something even shot. That's true. So it's something
that I don't really know a lot about except for
this story, and I'm not sure if the case has
been reopened for investigation. But one thing that struck me
when I began doing research on Kent State was the
(21:27):
fact that it sounded really similar to another historical situation
that happened centuries beforehand, having to do with the Boston massacre.
And it really struck a chord with me that there
was the situation where you have armed troops and angry citizens, uh,
confronting each other and there's sort of panic and confusion
going on and somehow a fire a shot was fired,
(21:51):
and it just escalated after that. And I actually found
a scholarly article about it that describes the similarities and
the differences, and it's really fascinating. So it's interesting to
think about these situations and how there are so much
better ways to handle them, and how you know, we
need to avoid repeat of such episodes exactly. And it
really is our right as citizens to speak out against things.
(22:13):
You know, we we have that granted to us by
the Constitution. We have freedom of speech. We can protest,
and obviously there are peaceful ways to do it, more
radical ways to do it, and yet it's complicated by
the fact that it needs to be peaceful protests. And
were the protesters being peaceful? Well, you know, you could argue, well,
what the burning now of the RTC building? Maybe not?
(22:34):
I don't know. That's a question that in the report
from Lewis and Hensley they raised. They sort of leave
their summary of of the Kent State shootings with a
whole list of questions and some of the ones that
really stood out to me where how much of this
action was sort of brought on by outside agitators, non
Kent State students, what were the townspeople doing to get
(22:56):
the crowds around? And the confusion of the martial law
as well. Exactly. Marshal Law declared, was it not who
actually banned the rally? Didn't anyone have a right to
ban the rally? And in respect to the outside agitators
coming in um one of the most famous images from
Kent State shooting is a photograph taken by photography student
(23:18):
John Filo that day of um young Mary Vechio leaning
over the body of Jeffrey Miller. Her hands are, you know,
at her sides, and her face is just contorted in anguish.
Mary Vecchio wasn't a Kent State student. She was a
fourteen year old runaway who just happened to be there.
And this image is so iconic, and it's really I think,
(23:38):
how many of us remember Kent State and just a
pan ammonium and the exactly and if you haven't seen
it again, do a search for it. But Mary Vecchio
later said that she'd suffered because of the photo, and
that's a direct quote. She said that she had suffered
because of it. And I'm not quite sure what that means. Yeah,
I don't know what to be maybe would indicate that
(24:02):
she got a lot of attention because of it, and
you know, she was always attached with the with this tragedy.
I guess that's a good point, the idea of if
you witness an event like that, of course it's always
going to be with you, it's always going to be
something you remember, but eventually you overcome tragedy by coping
with it in certain ways. And if if your face
is so strongly attached to this moment, you can't really
(24:23):
ever get over it can't be hard. And that's why
it's so important to remember Kent State and remember it
not just from the perspective of of the actual events
that occurred, but from the perspective of history, as you mentioned, Jane,
bringing it into context with other events where where mob
behavior resulted and culminated in tragedy when you have someone
(24:46):
who's armed against a protester who's not in proper ways
to speak out against what you deem injustices in the world.
And as you mentioned, you know news is still sort
of mulling and coming out about this, this tragedy with
the with the real use of that audio. So if
there's any um anything the news about can't say, you
can bet that we'll be talking about it on our
blog Stuff you Miss in History Class on the website
(25:08):
how how Stuff Works dot com, and Candice and I
write on this blog every day and keep you up
to date on things that are happening, things that interest us,
and we we can go interest you too, And as always,
if you have any comments, or feedback for us. You
can email us at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. And if you want to read more about
Kent stay to be sure to check out this article
on how stuff works dot com for more on this
(25:32):
and thousands of other topics. Because at how stuff works
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