Kent State

Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties

Thomas M. Grace

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781613763872
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

On May 4, 1970, National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others, including the author of this book. The shootings shocked the American public and triggered a nationwide wave of campus strikes and protests. To many at the time, Kent State seemed an unlikely site for the bloodiest confrontation in a decade of campus unrest—a sprawling public university in the American heartland, far from the coastal epicenters of political and social change.Yet, as Thomas M. Grace shows, the events of May 4 were not some tragic anomaly but were grounded in a tradition of student political activism that extended back to Ohio's labor battles of the 1950s. The vast expansion of the university after World War II brought in growing numbers of working-class enrollees from the industrial centers of northeast Ohio, members of the same demographic cohort that eventually made up the core of American combat forces in Vietnam. As the war's rising costs came to be felt acutely in the home communities of Kent's students, tensions mounted between the growing antiwar movement on campus, the university administration, and the political conservatives who dominated the surrounding county as well as the state government.The deadly shootings at Kent State were thus the culmination of a dialectic of radicalization and repression that had been building throughout the decade. In the years that followed, the antiwar movement continued to strengthen on campus, bolstered by an influx of returning Vietnam veterans. After the war ended, a battle over the memory and meaning of May 4 ensued. It continues to the present day.

CHAPTER 1

The Working Class Goes to College

WHEN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Akron, Ohio, native Carl Oglesby set foot on the grounds of Kent State University in the fall of 1953, he stepped onto a campus that had changed a lot in recent years. Founded in 1910 as an institution for training public school teachers, the college, once known as Kent State Normal School, had evolved over the past four decades into a university offering a full range of undergraduate and graduate programs in the arts and sciences. By midcentury, in the wake of World War II, the student population had grown to 4,800. Seventy percent of the students were veterans taking advantage of benefits offered under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill. Enrollment dipped in the early 1950s, as the influx of vets subsided and draft calls for the Korean War spiked. But the growth of Kent State soon resumed, fueled by the demands of an increasingly complex postwar society for highly skilled and better educated workers. Across the thousand-acre campus, new buildings sprang up and old ones were adapted to new uses to accommodate the school’s expansion. During Oglesby’s freshman year, the largest dormitory to date was constructed, while the former student union, a reassembled military barracks, became home to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program.¹

Although not a veteran, Oglesby was part of an ongoing wave of working-class college students who would contribute to the transformation of the nation’s system of higher education and challenge its Cold War political culture. In time, Oglesby would go on to become both president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a major figure in the New Left, but in the early 1950s his politics were still rooted in the mainstream of the unionized American working class. He embraced his mother’s progressive attitudes on issues of race and his father’s mistrust of Akron’s rubber company bosses, counted the liberal anticommunist senator Hubert Humphrey among his heroes, and won a high school competition sponsored by the National Forensic League for a speech, “Peace or Freedom,” that argued for a more confrontational approach to the Soviet Union.²

At Kent, Oglesby’s political views and cultural values began to evolve in a new direction, one that remained faithful to his roots but was decidedly nonconformist, as was reflected in his interest in jazz, literature and poetry, and especially theater. His friends (among them his future wife, Cleveland native Beth Rimanoczy) playfully dubbed themselves the Macedonians, a reference to the ancient enemies of Greece, because they opposed the racially discriminatory policies of the Greek fraternities and sororities. These incipient radicals, whose political activities were barely visible, included veterans—and fellow Ohioans—Don Thomson from Cleveland, William Thomas Metts from Youngstown, Alex Fraser from Geneva near the Lake Erie shore, and Paul Zimmer, a poet from Canton. There were African Americans in the circle as well, such as Don Henderson from Youngstown, and Ed Gray, a native of Newport, Rhode Island. Along with Oglesby’s fellow Akronite Gabriel Kolko, who tried and failed to organize a chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (the predecessor of SDS), these undergraduates were part of the generation born before the war and not far removed from the working-class struggles of the 1930s that swept Ohio’s industrial heartland cities and even convulsed the small city of Kent.³

Scholars of 1960s America know the names of SDS leaders like Oglesby and New Left historians like Kolko, yet most of those who formed Kent’s activist cohort from 1958 to 1973 were relatively anonymous and decidedly ordinary. What distinguished them was a resolve to face the issues of their time: old issues of class and power, unresolved issues of racial segregation, and the new concerns generated by the crosscurrents of the Cold War.

Some of the students who came to Kent during this period carried with them family legacies of strikes and sit-downs, as well as participation in Old Left parties and hard-fought political campaigns. A much larger number retained less stirring, but no less important, working-class allegiances and identities. By the mid-1950s, close to 95 percent of Kent State’s students came from the northeast Ohio counties of Cuyahoga, Summit, Stark, Trumbull, and Mahoning, all areas with sizable urban centers dominated by the manufacture of steel, rubber, chemicals, or automobiles: Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Canton, Lorain, Warren, Massillon, Barberton, and Alliance. Nearly 57 percent came from the region’s larger industrial cities, chiefly Cleveland, Akron, and Canton. The urban, working-class backgrounds of these students set them apart socially as well as ethnically, religiously and, increasingly, racially from the small-town and rural culture of Kent and Portage County. Their presence also reinforced in microcosm the sharp political divide between the New Deal Democrats who ruled Ohio’s industrial cities and the conservative Republicans who dominated much of the rest of the state.⁴

Battling Right-to-Work

Although a much-ballyhooed entente between capital and labor helped forge an ideology of “consensus” during the early years of the Cold War, deep-seated class antagonisms resurfaced with the onset of a nationwide recession in 1957. A year later, as unemployment spiked to the highest levels in seventeen years, Ohio’s workers were confronted with an additional test in the form of a so-called right-to-work amendment to the state constitution. Grounded in a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which had gutted national labor law by ceding jurisdiction over union security clauses to the states, the amendment would prohibit agreements between workers and management that made union membership a condition of employment. Supporters of the amendment termed this business-friendly section of the Taft-Hartley law a guarantee of the “right to work” without being compelled to join a labor union.⁵

Encouraged by the success of a similar measure in neighboring Indiana the previous year, Ohio businessmen saw a golden opportunity in 1958 to bring a right-to-work law to their own state. Although the man most responsible for enacting the original federal law, Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, had died in July 1953, his long-standing opposition to organized labor continued to influence state politics. Not only did a group called Ohioans for Right-to-Work receive the commitment of Republican governor William O’Neill, but they drew added support from conservative Democrats, such as Frank Lausche, a former governor then serving as a US senator, who termed the right to work “sacred.” Newspapers large and small backed passage of the amendment; the Cleveland Plain Dealer declared, “If you believe every Ohio worker … should not be forced to join or remain a member of any union against his will, vote ‘Yes’ on Issue No. 2.” Robert C. Dix, publisher of Portage County’s Record-Courier, agreed, calling it “a check (which we badly need) … on the absolute power of some labor leaders.”⁶

Confronted by widespread support for the amendment and believing their very survival to be at sake, Ohio unionists mounted a major counter offensive. In the heavily industrialized northeast quadrant of the state, the campaign against the amendment proved an easy sell, despite a heavily financed pro-business campaign on behalf of the measure. Larry Lamovsky, then a young Cleveland Heights resident and later a supporter of SDS at Kent State in the late 1960s, remembered watching the ads on television and thinking that “it was unfair that people who didn’t want to join a union were being forced to join.” His father, who had worked at a Fisher Body plant during World War II, “straightened me out pretty quick,” he recalled, explaining how the term “right to work” was misleading and that “the only way unions could do their job was to have 100 percent of the workers belong and have the strength of all the workers behind them.” The same argument was heard in most blue-collar households and many middle-class homes as well. Rubber workers Rocco Modugno and his wife, Irma, whose son Vince was to become a leader in the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam as well as SDS, both vocally opposed the initiative, drawing their experiences as shop floor organizers and memories of family participation in a sit-down strike at the Goodrich Tire plant during the Akron Rubber Strike in 1936. James Dyer, a former miner who had gone to jail in the early 1950s for defying an injunction to end a United Mine Workers strike, and whose son David later became a Democratic Party activist at Kent State, put an anti-right-to-work sticker on his car to ensure that his coal-country neighbors knew his position. Albert Canfora, a United Auto Workers vice president in Akron, whose children Alan and Roseann both became leading antiwar activists at Kent State, drove a sound truck through the streets of his Barberton, Ohio, hometown to turn out the vote against the anti-union measure.⁷

Debating Right-to-Work on Campus

At Kent State, the right-to-work campaign ended a decade-long dearth of public political activity. By 1958 enrollment had reached 6,700, spurred in part by the depressed job market, and political sentiment among the students was divided. One Akron-area student argued in the pages of the campus newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, that ratification of the ballot issue would “put an end to collective bargaining as we know it today.” Another from the steel city of Lorain argued on behalf of the union position in a campus debate a week before the vote. Yet others agreed with Governor O’Neill, who publicly declared that “the real issue” of the campaign was “Shall the corrupt labor bosses be permitted to take over Ohio?” Supporters on campus complained that opponents of the measure were taking direction from their unionist fathers and echoing the same pro-labor positions “we’ve been hearing day after day on the radio.” They weren’t altogether wrong. Millions of Ohioans heard and heeded labor’s message on the radio, studied it in the few newspaper editorials that were sympathetic to their cause, listened to it in union halls, or read it in flyers like those passed out in Cleveland, where members of the Young Socialist Alliance assisted with voter mobilization. “There were union people giving out literature at just about every polling place. People greeted each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’” a hopeful young socialist recalled.⁸

Albert Canfora was jubilant when the November 1958 totals came in, remembering it years later as “the biggest battle since the thirties.” He saw the vote as a multiple victory, “for not only did we beat the issue more than 2 to 1, we also elected a Democratic governor, [Michael] DiSalle—and the senator [Stephen M. Young] too.” The outpouring of unionists and African Americans not only crushed the amendment by nearly a million votes out of some three million cast, but also swept Governor O’Neill and Republican senator John Bricker from office. Like Canfora, DiSalle was the son of a union member and the child of Italian immigrants. Raised in Toledo, he became mayor of that city and later headed the Office of Price Stabilization during President Truman’s administration. He had lost a number of earlier bids for office, including an ill-timed run for governor in the Republican landslide of 1956. DiSalle’s opposition to the right-to-work amendment finally made the difference in securing his election to statewide office. The sixty-nine-year-old Young, who had battled conservative Martin Davey Sr., a former mayor of Kent, for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1936, also won a stunning victory over Bricker, a fixture in Ohio politics since 1938. One political reporter described Young’s win as being “in line with the leftward drift of his party.” The defeated O’Neill had warned that DiSalle and Young were “obligated” to the powerful labor leader Walter Reuther and aimed “to build [Ohio] in the image of Michigan where the labor bosses dominate the state.”⁹

The 1958 vote heralded the promise of a social breakthrough in a state where traditionalists had held a grip on power for over half a century. DiSalle’s administration would introduce a series of legislative changes benefiting education, racial minorities, and the aged, as well as labor. While Ohio, like other states, had benefited from national New Deal legislation, the fight against the right-to-work amendment installed a state government willing to defend labor and allowed union members to maintain and improve their standard of living, which enabled many blue-collar parents to afford college tuition for their children. The battle also underscored a point once made about Walter Reuther’s beliefs that social boundaries could be extended if unions tied “civil rights … to the fortunes of the labor movement.”¹⁰

While they could not have known it then, fathers such as James Dyer and Albert Canfora and mothers like Alma Oglesby and Irma Modugno were serving as political models whom their children would both consciously imitate and unconsciously follow as activists at Kent State. “Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclin’d” observed Alexander Pope long ago. Sometimes the progeny of these working-class parents would be inclined in political and, more often, cultural directions that their parents neither approved nor comprehended. Even so, class loyalties remained a part of the makeup of Kent’s budding activists. These working-class parents who had helped defend Ohio’s unions and bring to office a New Deal–style governor were, in a way, responsible for spawning the Sixties as well, with their offspring, in the years to come, confronting the persistence of conservative strains: McCarthyism, racial inequality, and third-world military intervention.

A Regroupment of the Left

The defeat of the right-to-work amendment energized unionists, New Deal Democrats, African Americans, and committed leftists. During the anti-amendment campaign, a pair of such leftists, Richard and Jean Tussey, also worked to organize a “National Conference of American Socialists” to be held in Cleveland. Veteran Cleveland radicals associated with the Socialist Workers Party’s paper and causes, the couple aimed to revive the local fortunes of America’s left. Buoyed by the campaign against the amendment, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and independent socialists began publicizing the late November conference in October 1958. Although the Socialist Workers disdained the Democratic Party, they did see in the fall elections the promise of “new opportunities for promoting socialist unity and revitalization.”¹¹

The conference drew one hundred leftists, with the Socialist Workers Party represented by the Tusseys, Jerry Gordon from Cleveland, who later headed the National Peace Action Coalition, and Sam Pollock, of the Meat Cutters union in Cleveland and a veteran of the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike. Ideological rivals from the Communist Party attended, as did independently minded radicals from the National Guardian and labor leader Jack Spiegel. Like Gordon, Spiegel would play a prominent role in the movement against the Vietnam War, as the codirector of the Chicago Peace Union. Members of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party also participated.¹²

Although falling well short of a desired left-wing “regroupment,” the conference did succeed in making socialists visible again in Cold War America. Saul Landau, the future filmmaker and journalist, was one of a dozen student registrants; he called for “effective opposition to the dynamic ideology of the American ruling class.” Gordon, who later would politically counsel student activists at Kent State, addressed the importance of holding more “forums, [and pursuing] cultural activity creating a new democratic image of what socialists stand for which will … attract youth.” Within a few years, the first of many Kent political activists would begin confronting the ills they perceived in Cold War America.¹³

Class, Race, and Hierarchy in Small-Town Kent

By the time Kent State approached its semicentennial in 1960, the town of Kent had grown into a small city of about seventeen thousand people. Settled in the early 1800s by Congregationalist migrants from Connecticut, the town, initially known as Franklin Mills, steadily grew as westward expansion and industrialization brought German American migrants from Pennsylvania, Irish canal workers, southern European immigrants, and African American railroad workers to northeast Ohio. In the early decades of the twentieth century, after the founding of Kent State Normal, it began to take on an additional personality as a college town. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, a violent confrontation between strikers and strikebreakers convulsed the town, but afterward city fathers moved quickly to restore the image of Kent as a bastion of tidy provincial order rather than labor-inspired chaos. At the center of much of the labor strife was Ohio governor Martin L. Davey Sr...