Voices from Kent State: On "The Cost of Freedom"

Susan J. Erenrich, Editor | The Cost of Freedom Voicing a Movement after Kent State 1970 | Kent State University Press | April 2020 | 336 Pages

Following the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University, where four students were slain by the Ohio National guard, many survivors and the families of the four dead pledged to keep alive the memory that massacre. This group was later constituted as the May 4 Task Force, an organization dedicated to educating the public about May 4 and planning annual remembrances. Eventually, the group grew to include many other people, including younger Kent State students who did not experience the horrors of May 4 firsthand. Among them was Susan Erenrich, the book’s editor, who joined the Task Force shortly after arriving as a first-year student in 1975. In 2009, the student-led Task Force gained its first faculty advisor born after the events of May 4, 1970 in Idris Kabir Syed, who contributed to The Cost of Freedom: Voicing a Movement after Kent State 1970, a volume released close to the shooting’s fiftieth anniversary on May 4, 2020.

Years of careful thought had gone into a commemorative ceremony that, if it were not for the COVID-19 lockdown, would have been held on May 4, 2020. Less than a month after the anniversary, when America exploded over the cold-blooded killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, May 4 seems more relevant than ever as a flashpoint in this country’s history of militarized law enforcement and its destructive interactions with demonstrations of dissent.

The Cost of Freedom is a book about remembering. It is a compilation of several dozen pieces of writing, some written soon after the events of May 4, 1970, and others written years or decades later. Almost every word is based on an individual’s memory of what happened that day or of what happened in the years that followed as the university community, city of Kent, state of Ohio, and the entire country and reckoned with what happened that day. To understand what did happen on Kent State’s campus on May 4, 1970, we must first understand the sources of the social tension that erupted into violence and death in this corner of northeastern Ohio.

As France and other European powers wound down their empires in the mid-twentieth century, Cold War factions saw the map of the world as a chessboard for ideological and geopolitical maneuvers. After France abandoned its attempt to hold onto Vietnam, a former colony, the U.S. military escalated its war there throughout the 1960s as part of the global struggle. While many young Americans saw the Vietnam War as the United States’ unjust attempt to impose its will on a nonwhite nation which desired to control its own destiny, a dramatic Generation Gap emerged at home—many of the students’ parents, professors, and employers had served in or helped win WWII, and thus saw little precedent for questioning whether a war undertaken by the U.S. government was justified.

At the end of that decade, President Richard Nixon, who was elected in 1968 with the promise of a secret plan to end the war, secretly expanded bombing into neighboring Cambodia in April 1970. Nixon’s covert maneuver, a then-unprecedented act, escalated student antiwar activity on Kent’s campus in the first days of May. On Saturday, May 2, some student protestors burned down the building that had housed the campus ROTC program. On Monday, May 4, an antiwar rally convened at 12:00 noon. Members of the Ohio National Guard were present under the ultimate command of Gov. James Rhodes, who was contesting a GOP primary for the U.S. Senate the next day. Since the May 4 incident was not a time when a president had nationalized the Ohio National Guard, Rhodes, like any governor, retained ultimate command authority for these troops. Rhodes had specifically called for the Guard to be deployed to Kent State. Significantly, although troops in a similar situation would typically be deployed with blanks and rubber bullets, Rhodes approved their deployment with live ammunition. At 12:24 PM, members of the Guard knelt and fired into the crowd for 13 seconds, killing four students—Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Jeffery Miller, and Sandra Scheuer—and wounding nine others.

The actual events of May 4 are dealt with the in first 61 pages of this 318-page book. The rest of the work is about how people, groups of people, and the whole society processed what had happened. Put differently, The Cost of Freedom captures how the events of May 4 have continued to shape Kent State University’s identity ever since: it covers the leadership of Arthur Krause, the grieving father of Allison Krause, who carried the movement to remember the victims through difficult years in the 1970s; it conveys eyewitness accounts like those Rolly Brown, who observed of a 1985 reunion that a “curious number of these folks had ended up marrying the person they were with at the rally on May 4.”

Following the section on the actual events, the book covers recollections of protest actions in the period immediately following May 4, including a major March on Washington. After that, the book deals with legal maneuverings that occurred during the 1970s, such as an incident when twenty-five  Kent students who had survived the May 4 shootings were indicted by a grand jury for allegedly inciting the unrest in the first place; most of these charges were later dropped.

Another piece of Kent State’s post-1970 history covered in this book is the University’s effort to build a campus gym extension over part of the shooting site. A fascinating account is given of the successful resistance to this move to literally bury the legacy of the May 4 events. Later parts of the book track the project of remembering through challenges posed during the Reagan presidency, the September 11 attacks, the Iraq War, and finally the Trump presidency. Various sections also describe the challenging process of navigating the internet’s sea-change in history research and archival studies.

James Rhodes failed to gain the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in May of 1970, though he would later return for a third and fourth term as Ohio’s governor. White House advisor H.R. Haldeman said that “Kent State marked a turning point for Nixon— a beginning of his long downhill slide towards Watergate.”

In June 2020, amid the vital protests following George Floyd’s murder, President Donald Trump openly mooted the idea of using active-duty U.S. military troops to control the crowds. Remarkably, retired senior general officers publicly pushed back, apparently to great effect. The words of Faulkner that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past” have never seemed so relevant. With the growing movement to defund the police, a significant segment of the U.S. electorate is seriously questioning the very role of the state in using physical force to maintain norms of society. The past of 50 years ago is not past, and the 13 dead and wounded of Kent State from May 4, 1970, are us. As Mark Twain is quoted, “History does not repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes.”