[Peace-discuss] 4 May 1970: USG kills students at Kent State

[John W.]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:40 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



>
> http://chronicle.com/article/The-Times-They-Changed/65192/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
>
> I remember that evening quite well. I was in my first year of teaching at a
> large Midwest university. A friend, an American historian, and I we're
> giving a series of talks in dorms on the war and American politics.  (He was
> in fact the only other member of the university's history department who did
> not support the war in Vietnam; we were both fired within the year.)  He met
> me on the stairway to the basement room of one dorm between talks and said,
> "Have you heard? The army has killed some students at a college in Ohio."
>
> I think I responded, "That'll change everything."
>
> In fact, as Lembke explains (and I'm not sure he's mentioned all the
> mechanisms), the universities responded vigorously and in a few years were
> able to stamp out student political awareness.  They convinced students that
> they should beg for jobs and party in the meantime. Student politics didn't
> die: it was murdered like Jeffrey Miller forty years ago.


In the shorter term Kent State DID change quite a bit.  My campus went on
strike for the rest of the spring 1970 semester.  Other did as well.  There
was some partying, sure, but there were also a lot of teach-ins and
generally raised consciousness about the war and about a government that
would murder its own children.

Unfortunately human memory is extremely short.  And as I will explain in a
future epistle, there are other reasons why the peasants generally don't
revolt to any great extent.

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