Remembering Kent State: The President as Street Thug
We all know that picture of the late Warren Gamaliel Harding Calvin Coolidge bedecked in a Sioux war bonnet. In my own youth, in late May thirty seven years ago, a rather less honorable man crowned himself with a construction helmet bearing the title Commander in Chief, a consolation prize for the honorary doctorate my Alma Mater withdrew at the last moment, after the invasion of Cambodia. Richard Nixon was king at least of the building trades, laborers in which had violently disrupted commemorations of the four students who died protesting the invasion.
I remembered the incident last Christmas. I was at the Bible museum near Lincoln Center for a wonderful lecture on Giotto with music by the Communion and Liberation choir, and took a tour of the current display. Featured was a copy of pop sculptor George Segal’s moving depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac, intended as a memorial to those students shot by the Ohio National Guard at Kent, but now in the sculpture garden at Princeton. I was haunted by this stark reminder of my first semester of graduate school, especially because I fancied the figure of Abraham had been inspired by old photographs of philosopher William James, whose deeply misguided conception of truth, which he called pragmatism, has had such a tragic effect on American life and thought.
In May 1970, I was at Columbia studying higher education, in which I hoped to make a career, and my advisor was Walter Sindlinger, a wise, gentle, and good man, from Ohio himself. Sad and bewildered, he explained to us that the riots at Kent State, with college kids turning cars upside down and setting them on fire, were an annual event which had nothing at all to do with Vietnam, Cambodia, Nixon, or Kissinger. Surely, he implied, the Governor knew this, even if the President did not. Nixon of course saw himself as the new Lincoln, Father Abraham, called to save the nation from the sin of rebellion, and the young men, the very young men, of the National Guard were ordered to lock and load. According to his henchman Haldemann, it was the beginning of the end for Nixon.
It was certainly the end of my identification with a conservative movement he had so successfully seduced, this old New Deal bureaucrat, the quintessential proto-neocon. And yet, as I collaborated more and more closely with the antiwar movement (though not the Communist, anti-American wing of it), I became more and more obsessed with the philosophy of pragmatism, and especially with Charles Peirce, who started it, and with his lifelong crusade against nominalism. Nominalism? Nominalism. Remember Richard Weaver? Ideas Have Consequences?
“Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.”
Weaver’s words, Peirce’s sentiments. Poor Willy James just didn’t get it. Or those damned Republicrats, slippysliding down the steep slope to neoconnery. But there are universal standards of human decency, and that’s what hapless George McGovern was calling us home to. But Charles Peirce knew, Richard Weaver knew, that we began to turn our back on them long before the so-called Reformation. (Dear Phil Sherrard, all too briefly my teacher in Athens, blamed Charlemagne and the filioque, but I wouldn’t go that far.)
May 4, 1970. It’s not that some frightened kid in uniform pulls the trigger. It’s not that, in the general panic and confusion, gunshot victims don’t get the prompt medical attention that might save their lives. It’s the all too general sentiment: Too bad for their parents, but those Commies had it coming — a sentiment Elton Trueblood, the Quaker Pope of the Midwest, duly repeats to a (presumably) shocked Bill Moyers, in a part of the interview that was cut from the book version. The cynical spurning of common human decency. The fruit of that systematic indoctrination in metaphysical nominalism and moral relativism known as public education.
The Ohio war protesters are shot and killed on Monday; Friday is set aside as a day of mourning. On Wall Street organized gangs of men dressed as construction workers converge on peaceful demonstrators, beating them with tools and stomping them with work boots. They attack a line of New York City police at Federal Hall, where Washington was sworn in in 1789, and proceed to storm City Hall, where the flag has been at half mast, in order to raise it, and to denounce the Mayor as a Communist.
It is lunch hour on Wall Street. A Lehman Brothers partner comes to the aid of a demonstrator and is himself attacked. So is another member of the financial community who moves to protect him. The rioters storm Trinity Church, Washington’s parish, where a first aid station has been set up, but are locked out, and must content themselves with ripping down the flag of the Episcopal Church. Many of the rioters are employed at the World Trade Center site and one or two other buildings under construction. They have been ordered to report for this duty, and their movements are directed by men in suits using hand signals.
On May 20, a grateful President receives a delegation from the leaders of New York’s construction unions, accepting from them the “hard hat” of Commander in Chief. He tries it on, grinning for a photograph in the National Archives, though not for the press. One of union leaders, James Brennan, becomes Secretary of Labor after the 1972 election.
These people are shameless: they glory in their very shamelessness; they expect Americans to abase themselves before it. Burke saw it in France long ago: “All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”
I did not then use the F-word, Fascism, and rather despised those who did. Moreover, the interwar European right had had, if not a certain grandeur, a certain aspiration to grandeur, or at least a nostalgia for it. Mussolini had had his Pound, Franco his Roy Campbell. And our Nixon? He had… Elvis!
To be a Burkean conservative at a small Quaker college in the swinging Sixties was a bit of an affectation, and, to tell the truth, perhaps more than a bit. On Morningside Heights in the wake of the Cambodian Incursion Burke’s moral imagination was an urgent necessity to be clung to with passion. I kept coming back to Burke’s furious indictment of Warren Hastings for the crimes of imperialism, his ringing defense of Natural Law, upon which my own Republic, not so incidentally, had been founded:
“He to have arbitrary power! My lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the King has no arbitrary power to give him; your lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is the thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give away. No man can govern himself by by his own will, much less can he be governed by the will of others. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to our very being itself, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir. This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have; it does not arise from our vain institutions.”
My friends on the Left despaired at the thought of rebellion against the seemingly omnipotent State. The poor fools could not imagine that it was — it is — merely a matter of refusing to take part in a doomed rebellion against the truly omnipotent Creator of the universe:
“Every good gift is of God, all power is of God; and He who has given the power, and from whom it alone originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. Therefore, will it be imagined, if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine wisdom and justice?”
“Blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation… feeble, contemptible, ridiculous...” The Left had its own words for Mr. Nixon and I had mine, borrowed from the best. Apply them as you will to his successors How sad that some today, who were young then, or younger, at any rate, grow rich, or richer, by vilifying their own resistance to this usurpation. To be sure, their opposition was too often justified, if not entirely motivated, by a system of belief as blasphemous, absurd, feeble, contemptible, and ridiculous as that of the Republicans, if, indeed the Republicans had anything consistent enough to be rightly called a system of belief — or do now. I like to think that common human decency played its part in the antiwar movement as well, even though the Marxists leading it, or pretending to lead it, affected to scorn all such bourgeois sentimentality.
For Burke there is of course a duty to resist: “Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal, and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world. Nothing but absolute impotence can justify men in not resisting it to the best of their power.”
But there is no duty to be successful, or to appear to be successful. Our impotence may not be absolute, but our potency is sometimes pitiful. Burke himself failed to stop the Jacobins of his day, much less the Napoleonic, the Bolshevik, the Bushite armies of liberation, or even the somewhat kinder and gentler British Raj. Indeed, he is vilified to this day for taking his stand, as those of us who stood up for America against an unjust war and a corrupt administration are condemned as traitors by those whose only abiding loyalty is to an alien power in the Levant.
The work of resistance God demands of us takes many forms, according to our personal powers and opportunities. For the philosopher and the educator it is an unceasing struggle to recover the cultural sanity of the West, the appreciation that this universe of ours, mathematical, physical, vital, mental, spiritual, is the manifestation of Mind and to be understood by mind. That universals are real. That the law of nature and of nations has unconditional authority over our actions whether our masters acknowledge it or not.
May 1970 was a turning point in what Yale law professor Charles Reich would call, in his runaway best seller of the end of the year, The Greening of America. The bewildered elder generations reluctantly concluded that those young people they saw on the television were on to something. (The protesters, I mean. A greater number of the young were still getting shot at in the jungle in a war we had neither the will to win nor the decency to end.) Whatever the military necessity or geopolitical prudence of the Cambodian incursion, events were surely out of hand.
The arson at Kent called for the apprehension and conviction of the arsonist, not the slaughter of peaceful demonstrators in order to intimidate dissent. The rioting of the the construction workers may have been understandable if regrettable, but the hearty commendation of the rioters by a national administration was nothing to be proud of. On the younger generations the intimidation worked, but in an ultimately counterproductive way. Many of us concluded that we were better off in the hot tubs and encounter groups than in the streets. Some of us, for a brief moment, even thought we were better off in the classrooms and libraries. But the scholarship we produced, and the teaching we undertook, did not serve the Nixonian vision of America, to say the least.
This May I remember the dreams of our youth, the radical dream of peace, freedom, and justice, the conservative dream of order, decency, and grace. I invite all who were young then, of either persuasion or both, to cry out with Tennyson’s Ulysses,
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Shall we not say to all who marched against the war in Vietnam, but also to all who labored silently, tirelessly, thanklessly to preserve what of Western civilization is left to us, shall we not say
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Frank Purcell is a teacher and scholar of philosophy living in New York City.
Comments
It was Calvin Coolige, not Harding in the headress.I stand with the hardhats, as one myself.We were sick of the left desroying the culture. We saw what they did in Madison when they blew up the math center and killed a young man.The new left were children of the old left and they were drenched in the blood of millions killed by the communists.I believe in peace, but the new left please.
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I stand corrected — as regards Hoover and Coolige, two men who should never be confused! But I am too much of the Old Right not to see the New Left as largely right, and to greatly deplore their eclipse by the Marxist element.
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Coolidge, I mean. While I am at it… Last I heard, Madison was in Wisconsin. The kids in Ohio had nothing to do with that. And, come to think of it, that was a year or two later, wasn’t it? And as far as I know the Mayor didn’t blow anything up. He did nominate Mr. Agnew for Vice President, though.
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It was later I believe,but the new left loved toltalitarians like Ho Chi Mingh, Mao and,Castro.I was there in Wisconsin with the new left showing it’s true colors.They were in no way pacifists in most cases, but in love with violent revolution.Much of the conservative working class were repulsed by what the new left stood for.Thats why Hixon got that huge landslide in 1972.
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Nixon won in ‘72 because his operatives secured the Democratic nomination for a notoriously weak candidate, though one who looks good in retrospect. And Nixon himself was one of our most intelligent and best informed presidents, who surrounded himself with men of real stature, at least on the cabinet level, though we now know he ignored them. But he had what I can only call flaws deep in his character, and by this time he was a bitter, bitter man. The sad thing is, he would have made a very good president eight years earlier, maybe even a great one.
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“ On Wall Street organized gangs of men dressed as construction workers converge on peaceful demonstrators”
Do you mean they were thugs (I suppose under the control of some Dark Authority) just dressed as construction workers or that they were construction workers?
This sort of phrasing is typical of writers with Marxist tendencies. If they were construction workers, even unionized ones, so be it. Maybe they were just fed up after watching years of riots and murders and destruction and schools being taken over and general social upheaval organized by people with more than peace on their minds, but social upheaval for its own sake.
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I think you will agree that the Maoists were never truly part of the New Left, but a remnant of the Old. They did manage to drive the democratic elements out of the Students for a Democratic Society about the same time that the lovers of liberty were purged from the Young Americans for Freedom. And the only mainstream politician to embrace Mao was… Oh, never mind.
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Yes, they were construction workers — dressed up as construction workers. I’m afraid I had the Village People in mind when I wrote that phrase, not Marx or Engels, with the thought that these folks were acting out a role. I recall that the costumes were worn with particular pride because many union jobs were still reserved for workers of European complexion.
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The riots, the college takeovers, the burning of the flag, and draft cards. I worked construction for 40 years we were sick of it.The guardsmen at Kent state were working class kids who panicked when some idiot fired the first shot.Like I say i am for peace but sensible argument, like Ron Paul’s, not idiocy like the new left.
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The truly sad thing about the Kent State massacre is that you had draft dodgers on both sides of the dispute. It normally required considerable political clout to get into the National Guard and Reserves in those days. Miraculously, children of the elite like Richie Daley in Chicago, and George W. Bush of Kennebunkport, wound up in the Marine Reserves and the Air National Guard, respectively. I always have thought that Dan Quayle got a bum rap. With his family’s status he probably had to beg and scream to even get into the National Guard. If he had actually gotten into the infantry, like so many of the rest of us, this would have threatened the entire system of exempting the sons of the elite from combat service. The elite were largely ignored, or put into safe places, the rest of us traded our blue collars for green ones. It is not true that the New Left and the 1960s anti-war movement were all leftist. I was involved in the anti-war movement, then after being drafted by the minions of Lyndon Johnson, I was shipped over to Viet Nam by that Great Leader and proto-neocon Tricky Dick Nixon. As I remember, I was hardly the only one in my little recon/heavy weapons infantry unit to have been involved in anti-war activities. Many of us continued in these after escaping from military servitude. In my junior college days, our Veterans Club held a peace rally. If you really think about it clearly, the Kent State incident was bungled by inexperienced and frightened troops. Had they been experienced, the casualty count among the demonstrators would have been far higher. The appropriate way to handle a mob scene like that would be to fix bayonets and charge. If you see anyone with a gun on the way while charging the mob, you shoot them, not a bunch of fools in their midst. (In defense of the troops, it is truly foolish to mess with armed soldiers.) Such a charge would have dispersed the mob, and most likely the only casualties would have been people tripping and falling on one side or the other.
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I hate to be a nag, but…
“Yes, they were construction workers — dressed up as construction workers.”
“I recall that the costumes were worn with particular pride...”
Please.
They were construction workers. Not construction workers in costume, disguised as construction workers, they were construction workers. And like a lot of people who work to pay the bills for both the government and themselves, they were fed up.
Also, referring to the phrasing, it is a well known technique to mitigate culpability by deflecting identity of the offending group to some other group. The implication in your original phrasing is that it was not construction workers, but unknown thugs dressed as construction workers who converged on peaceful demonstrators; this is the intended interpretation when it is written such. Thereby solidarity is maintained with both the ‘real’ construction workers as well as the ‘peaceful demonstrators’.
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“Thereby solidarity is maintained with both the ‘real’ construction workers as well as the ‘peaceful demonstrators.’” I think you are right. I am a working class Irish American; no amount of education will ever stop my betters from looking under my fingernails for the honest dirt of the railroad worker. In the ‘70s I had a strong feeling (call it illusion if you will) that working people were being manipulated into playing a public role opposed to their own inner sense of who they are. Not the quotation marks around ‘peaceful.’ Is it the implication that even a peaceful demonstration is to be treated as an act of war? That is not America. My America.
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“Note the quotation marks,” I mean. Can’t we turn on something to let you view and edit comments before posting?
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“What would help Mr. Purcell understand the construction workers more easily would be if knew they and their kin did not evade the draft and danger nearly as readily as Mr. Purcell’s set. Mr. Purcell as a smug Quaker has escaped the travails of life. A few hard smacks on the noggin would help him adjust his thinking.” Smug or not, I am not a Quaker, nor do Earlham and Swarthmore represent the same sect of the Society of Friends. Like Burke I was educated by Quakers but maintained a Catholic formation. I was fortunate to escape some of life’s travails, and perhaps fortunate not to have escaped others entirely. I was the first of my family to be graduated from high school. Indeed, I was the first on my father’s side to attend high school. I would like to think that both intellectual folk and nonintellectual folk see me as a reasonably sympathetic outsider, but then you seem to know my “set” better than I. I take it you think you at least would feel better if you could beat the sh*t out of me; I doubt I would find it much of an improvement. But thank you for helping me make my case.
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In defense of the troops, it is truly foolish to mess with armed soldiers. Indeed. I find that people from Massachusetts when I point out to them that Crispus Attucks and the other victims of the Boston Massacre were not so much martyrs for liberty as morons who were competing for the Darwin Award for 1770. On the other hand, the men of Baltimore who behaved similarly on April 19, 1861 (and actually managed to kill a few of the Massachusetts militiamen), were similarly bucking for the Darwin Award of that year. People in Massachusetts talk about how those attacking their troops were an unruly, lawless mob--which they were--but somehow don’t seem to realize that the victims of the Boston Massacre were pretty much the same thing. And while Marylanders may like to sing about avenging “the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore,” I can’t help thinking that a smarter course of action would be, next time, not to throw rocks at kids who are scared out of their wits but happen to be carrying firearms--and who lack the discipline of combat-experienced troops.
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Correction: “People from Massachusetts *tend to get annoyed* when I point out . . .”
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Bad, bad blue-collar workers, especially when they wear work clothes.
Bad, bad white workers, especially those who work with their hands.
Let us solemnly worship the piteous financial workers who got roughed up.
My, what a piece of tripe, flayed from the skin of three wars ago.
It must be exciting to attack hard-working men who finally give meaning to “return of the repressed.” Oh, may that day return and the soft-skinned snotty tellers of tales to mock our ancestors and our Republic be remonstrated with.
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I find myself amused as well as bemused by Mr. Miller’s post, though I can’t blame him much, or others who take the same tack. But when next we meet I shall perhaps speak sternly to Dr. Sarto for singling out the lines most apt to provoke, to be taken by the unwary as the sense of the whole; I have had no response at all to what I care most about. For the rest, I am not against the working man, nor was I even then, and perhaps know him a bit better than those who presume to speak for him a generation and more after the fact. But I was, and am, repulsed by the Republican trick of inciting class war (and a disguised form of race war) to cover up the failure of harebrained policies. And I feel personally betrayed by those movement Conservatives who did so much to create the neocon persuasion by furthering the Nixon agenda. It is or should be beneath the dignity of the leaders of a nation such as ours. WWBS! What would Burke say? That’s what I asked myself then, and ask myself now.
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P.S.
The title wasn’t mine either.
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Granted that the Vietnam war was badly mismanaged; that Nixon was a bad president, and far from a conservative; that in the Kent State shootings and other street violence of the period, constituted authority was largely if not wholly to blame. How does this make the “New Left… largely right”? And how could it have experienced an “eclipse by the Marxist element” when it was ab initio a creature of heterodox (i.e., not Soviet-inspired) Marxism?
Does anyone remember who Herbert Marcuse was? In the ‘sixties and ‘seventies he was well known as the guru or godfather of the New Left. Marcuse was a Frankfurt school Marxist. The Frankfurt school understood that just tearing down the private-property economy could not provide an adequate basis on which to rebuild a collectivist society. The foundation of Western civilization (and just about any other civilization), namely the patriarchal family, had to be destroyed before a new Marxist society could be built upon its ruins.
Marcuse’s “Eros and Civilization” was seminal to the New Left, and to much of the change in our social order we have experienced since the ‘sixties. “Women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” owe their birth directly to Marcuse. His concept of “repressive tolerance” underlies the present phenomenon of “political correctness.” The leadership of the New Left was drawn not from the baby boom generation, but from a slightly older group who were grad students and junior faculty members at the time the boomers were undergraduates. Many of these people were “red diaper babies” like Abbie Hoffman and the now-neoconservative David Horowitz. They took the theory learnt from Marcuse and put it into practice.
There never was a complete separation between the New and the Old Left. For example, the nomination of McGovern in 1972, the result of the New Left’s takeover of the Democratic party, placed on its ticket a man who in 1948 had supported not Truman, but Henry Wallace. Though the New Left was not directed from the Kremlin in the way that much of the Old Left had been, it still substantially served Moscow’s interests. If there was any prominent figure in the New Left who was not a Marxist of some sort, I should like to know who that was.
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I was a Kent student during those turbulent years,
graduating in 1973. While I can sympathize with some
of the observations Mr.Purcell makes, his
analysis is too simplistic. In the nearly 40
years since the May 4 incident I have often wondered
whether the student anti-war movement shortened the
war or prolonged it. By using
the war as a forum for a grab-bag of left wing causes,
and by demonstrating their contempt for American
institutions and values—the New Left polarized
the nation and caused many moderates and conservatives
—students and non-students alike—to recoil from
them. Rationally I knew the war was a
blunder and not in the best interests of the
USA, but the self-righteous sloganeering, Chairman Mao
badges, North Vietnamese flags and the labelling of
all opposing opinion as “Fascist” or “reactionary” took
its toll. Eventually, some began to question whether
the movement was really anti-war, or simply
pro-North Vietnamese. From the demonstrations I
attended, it was hard to tell.
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