Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory

Preface

Preface vii vii Preface carole a. barbato and laura l. davis On May 4, 1970, an international spotlight focused on Kent State University after a student protest against the Vietnam War and the presence of the Ohio National Guard on campus ended in tragedy. Twenty-eight guardsmen fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds. They killed Kent State students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder and wounded nine other students, permanently paralyzing Dean Kahler. The demonstration at Kent State marked a climax of the student activism and protest of the 1960s, a historical period encompassing the shootings at Kent State. The student protest movement was rooted in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.1 On college campuses, the generation gap—the divide between generations in lifestyle, culture, politics, and values—of the 1960s also was strongly felt. Those in positions of authority—parents, campus administrators, politicians, and law enforcement officials—squarely lined up on one side of the divide, with rising numbers of students on the other. On May 4, the Ohio National Guard, called into town by Kent’s mayor, literally lined up on campus on one side of the grassy central area known as the Commons. StudentsgatheredfivehundredfeetawayatthecampusVictoryBell.Moststudents wereobservers;manyfeltalignedwiththegeneralcounterculturemovement;some werecampusactivists.ManystudentswereconsciouslyexercisingtheirFirstAmendmentrightsof freedomof assemblyandfreedomof speechastheygatheredforthe May 4 rally. In a statement read by press secretary Ron Ziegler, President Richard Nixon responded to the shootings by commenting, “This should remind us all once again thatwhendissentturnstoviolenceitinvitestragedy,”anassertionof authoritarian values seen by many as lacking in sympathy.2 For a large proportion of Americans, viii Preface from members of Congress to the average citizen on both sides of the generation gap,theshootingsconstitutedawatershedmomentthatchangedtheirperspectives on the war in Vietnam. May 4, 1970, became the day the war came home in the American imagination, the day that American soldiers killed American children on U.S. soil.3 For college students, the shootings at Kent State spurred the largest nationalstudentstrikeinU.S.history.“Morethanhalf thecollegesanduniversities inthecountry(1350)wereultimatelytouchedbyprotestdemonstrations,involving nearly60percentof thestudentpopulation—some4,350,000peopleineverykind of institution and in every state of the union.”4 What Nixon failed to see, his staff recognized: the shootings at Kent State became one of the major symbolic events of the Vietnam War as well as the 1960s era, marking the beginning of the end of Nixon’s presidency, as his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, noted.5 “By January 1973, when Nixon announced the effective end of U.S. involvement,” Vietnam War historian Mark Barringer writes, “he did so in response to a mandate unequaled in modern times.”6 During these years, the legal aftermath of the events of May 4, 1970, was well on its way to becoming, as KentStatelegalscholarThomasHensleyexplains,“oneof thelongest,costliest,and most complex set of courtroom struggles in American history,” setting civil rights precedent in the U.S. Supreme Court.7 In 2000, on the thirtieth anniversary of the event, Kent State University established an annual Symposium on Democracy. The symposium was founded as a living memorial to honor the memories of the four students who lost their lives in the May 4 shootings, with an enduring dedication to scholarship that seeks to preventviolenceandtopromotedemocraticvaluesandcivildiscourse.Thisvolume presentsacollectionof essaysbasedonandrevisedfrompresentationsatthe2009 symposium.Througharangeof disciplinarylenses,theseessaysexplorethecomplex relationships among experienced events, memory, and portrayal of those events in order to probe the deepest questions of human experience. While connections among the essays cross over from multiple directions, they have been gathered in threegroupingsthatofferonesetof possibilitiesformakingmeaning.Essaysinthe first group move from the particular history of May 4, 1970, to eternal concerns of peace and violence, silence and giving voice. Those in the second group address the part played by corporate—and noncorporate, if you will—media in shaping public memory and raising public consciousness. The essays in the final grouping examineactsof remembranceandreconciliationwithinlocalcommunitiesandthe long history of discrimination existing within the national American community. Like the first two groups of essays, this group directly and indirectly proposes ways in which we can move toward social justice. Ontheoccasionof thetenthannualsymposium,historianJayWinteraddressed the Kent State community as “the silence-breakers, who recognize, with Joseph Preface ix Brodsky, that ‘the past won’t fit into memory without something left over. It must have a future.’” Winter noted of the Kent State community that it is our “achievement to shape that future through framing of active knowledge in this place and at this time about the injustices that occurred here.”8 Formorethanfortyyears,theKentStatecommunityhasansweredtheclaimthat otherhumanbeingshaveonus,sothatwepreservethestoriesof thosewhohavebeen lost—bothtohonorthelostand torevealuniversalmeanings...