Slouching Towards Gomorrah (8 page)

Thomas Jones, an AAS leader and one of the rifle brandishers, speaking over the Cornell radio station, identified four administrators and three faculty members as “racists,” and said, “they will be dealt with.” He stated that the university had only “three hours to live.” On the advice of security officials, most of those threatened moved their families to motels and registered under assumed names. One of these was the distinguished political scientist, now my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns. At a subsequent faculty meeting, “One speaker stressed that Jones had made personal threats against seven Cornell personnel and asked pointblank what would be done about such threats. The President remained silent, and no faculty member offered a motion on the subject.” Berns, Allan Bloom, and Allan P. Sindler, the chairman of the government department, soon resigned from Cornell because the university had lost its integrity and abandoned its commitment to academic freedom and scholarly standards.

It was altogether in keeping with the spirit of the capitulation that Cornell
celebrated
the twenty-fifth anniversary of its collapse. Both Perkins and Jones returned, and Jones established a Perkins award to be given annually to a person who had done the most to foster racial harmony on campus. The message appears to be that barbarism and surrender to it are to be viewed as expressions of idealism. In a variant of Marx’s maxim, tragedy was remembered in farce.

The U.S. invasion of Cambodia in order to deny the North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops a sanctuary from which to attack our troops in South Vietnam made the spring of the 1969-70 academic year intensely violent. About a thousand demonstrations erupted on more than two hundred campuses. Arson, bombings, and window-smashing wreaked damage in the millions of dollars. Hundreds of students, police, and others were injured, and at least seven students were killed. But it was at Kent State that the inevitable tragedy immanent in the many violent confrontations between radicals and the forces of society was played out. On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen fired at student rioters, killing four and wounding ten.

Kent State was hardly a placid campus before the Cambodian operation. The university had 21,000 students, and a sizeable SDS chapter devoted to making trouble. In November, 1968, for example,
charges were brought against 250 members of SDS and the Black United Students who had demonstrated against police recruiting on campus. The charges were dropped when about 300 black students left campus demanding amnesty. On April 8, 1969, SDS led a demonstration that resulted in clashes with university police. The demonstrators demanded that the university abolish the Reserve Officers Training Corps, a crime laboratory, and a school for law enforcement training. State police were called in and quelled the disruption. SDS was then banned from campus, thirty-seven students were suspended, and five were charged with assault and battery. Worse was to come.

On the evening of May 1, 1970, a day after Richard Nixon announced an American counter-attack into Cambodia, students rioted in the main street of town, broke windows, set fires, and damaged cars. On May 2, a crowd of about 800 assembled on campus, disrupted a dance in a university hall, smashed the windows of the ROTC building, and threw lighted railroad flares inside. The building burned to the ground. A professor who watched the arson later told the Scranton commission, which investigated the shooting and the events leading up to it, “I have never in my 17 years of teaching seen a group of students as threatening, or as arrogant, or as bent on destruction.”
⁸
When firemen arrived students threw rocks at them, slashed their hoses with machetes, took away hoses and turned them on the firefighters. The police finally stopped the riot with tear gas. The National Guard was called in by the governor on May 2 and student rioters pelted them with rocks, doused trees with gasoline, and set them afire. Students attempted to march into town on May 3 but were stopped by the National Guard, the Kent city police department, the Ohio highway patrol, and the county sheriff’s department. The protesters shouted obscenities and threw rocks.

From May 1 to May 4 there were, in addition, riots in the town’s main street, looting, the intimidation of passing motorists, stoning of police, directions to local merchants to put antiwar posters in their windows or have their stores trashed, and miscellaneous acts of arson. All of this occurred before the shooting.

On May 4, a Monday, about a thousand students gathered on campus. Guardsmen arrived and, probably unwisely, ordered the crowd to disperse. The order was predictably ignored. The Guard
fired tear gas canisters into the crowd. The Guard, consisting of a hundred men surrounded by rioters shouting obscenities and chanting “Kill, kill, kill,” were under a constant barrage of rocks, chunks of concrete and cinderblock, and canisters. Fifty-eight Guardsmen were injured by thrown objects. Several of them were knocked to the ground. They had little tear gas left, and the gas had, in any event, been made ineffective by the wind. The Guardsmen retreated up a hill, appearing frightened, and then some of them suddenly turned and fired for thirteen seconds. The firing was apparently spontaneous rather than ordered.

The events of May 4 were viewed differently by a grand jury, which exonerated the Guardsmen as having fired in legitimate fear of their lives, and the Scranton commission appointed to investigate the shootings. The commission, which had the grand jury findings before it, concluded: “The actions of some students were violent and criminal and those of some others were dangerous, reckless and irresponsible. The indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.”
⁹
Those conclusions seem appropriate, though it should be remembered that the grand jurors, unlike the commission members, experienced at first-hand the four-day crazed rampage of the students in their town and on the campus. It tends to make a difference if you have lost property and felt fear for yourself, your family, and your neighbors. The grand jury was surely correct in laying a large part of the blame on the university administration, which had progressively surrendered control of the university to radical students and faculty. In that, Kent State behaved like almost all universities at the time.

There is no need to sort out conflicting versions of the event, whether, for example, the Guardsmen had objective reason to fear for their safety. What is undeniable is that on May 2, 3, and 4, these young men faced far greater numbers of students who were screaming threats and engaging in violence. When confrontations of that sort occur again and again, as they did across the country, it is inevitable that sooner or later a tragedy like Kent State will occur.

It should be apparent by now that the campus radicals were not by any stretch of the imagination the idealists they were painted as at the time and continue to be called now. The strong family resemblance of the New Left to German and Italian fascism
was described by the sociologist Peter Berger in 1970, when the student revolt was in full swing.
¹⁰
Berger was himself opposed to the war in Vietnam, but he could not share the radical’s “principle of selectivity in its humanistic rhetoric.” There was a complete difference, he was informed, between insurgents torturing a prisoner to death and the same act done by members of counterinsurgency forces. The first was moral, but the second was utterly immoral. The parallel to the views of radical students at Yale is precise. That Black Panthers might have (and had) tortured and murdered Alex Rackley as a suspected informer was not viewed as a serious moral offense. But it was the height of immorality for Connecticut to put the Panthers on trial.

Berger traced a number of parallels between the New Lefts ideology and that of the European fascists he had observed first hand in his youth. Both were movements that were without a positive view of the future but were simply against their society…against stability, traditional liberalism, capitalism, and intellectualism. The Nazis, like the New Left, referred to themselves as the “movement” and they hated the “system.” Both proclaimed that liberal democracy was a fraud and rationality merely a prop for the evil status quo. “[T]he emotional context within which these negations are proclaimed is one of hatred and rage.”

Both fascists and the New Left had faith in the therapeutic value of violence. Watching on television a group of students chanting “The streets belong to the people,” Berger felt almost a physical shock as he remembered a verse of the Nazis’ “HorstWessel Lied”: “Clear the streets for the brown battalions. “There was as well the glorification of youth, which was explicit in the anthem of Mussolini’s Italy.

Both the fascists and the New Left dehumanized their enemies. (It is instructive to remember that the
Port Huron Statement
abjured violence because it transformed the target into a “depersonalized object of hate,” which is what New Left violence soon did.) The Nazis referred to Jews as “pigs” which is what American radicals called the police. Finally, there was a “mystical elitism” that made the radicals sure they represented a “general will.” “This elitism is particularly repulsive in view of the democratic rhetoric” of the new radicals. Despite its democratic rhetoric, the New Left was not only contemptuous of liberal parliamentary democracy,
but “fundamentally contemptuous of
any
procedures designed to find out what people want for themselves…. What this elitism means in practice can be readily grasped by watching the manipulations of any SDS group on an American campus.”
^11
†

That was the pattern across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s: violent rhetoric and violent action from the fascists of the New Left, followed by the abject moral surrender of academic officials the public had a right to expect would defend the universities and the orderly processes of their governance. University establishments collapsed under moral, and sometimes physical, assault, and often publicly accepted the Left’s indictments of themselves and of America. In this, Yale and Cornell were entirely typical. Scenes such as these, and worse, were played out on scores of campuses. Almost nowhere did the faculty and the administration stand firm.
^††

What can account for the abject surrender of the elders? What could account for such craven responses, such self-abasement before barbarians, white and black, such willingness to jettison without struggle academic standards it had taken decades, even centuries, to establish? Fear played a part, for there was usually an implication, and sometimes the explicit threat, of violence. That need not have been a problem. The police were always available. It is true that calling in police often caused more students to join in the disruption and violence, but the issue was who controlled the universities. The price should have been paid. Crime on a campus is not essentially different from crime anywhere else.

But universities thought of themselves as divorced from the communities they lived in, indeed divorced from, and superior to, American civilization. It was often psychologically impossible for them to call upon the civil authorities to maintain campus order. Faculties found upper-middle-class student radicals more congenial, on both political and cultural grounds, than working-class policemen. I remember a university official (not at Yale) who described his anguished dilemma when the radicals threatened to burn the school’s buildings. Asked what the dilemma was, he said that while the physical destruction of the university would be a great evil, it was almost unthinkable to call in the forces of the outside world.

There was more to it than that, however. There was a predisposition to surrender. Faculties and administrators being overwhelmingly liberal (in the traditional sense) could not help feeling that the radicals were in some sense right about the unworthiness of America. The students had taken seriously the rhetoric of their liberal elders and the faculties were in a poor position to say they really hadn’t meant the full implications of what they had said in the past. Not all liberal faculty reacted in this way. Splits developed. Some enthusiastically supported the radicals; some, feeling guilt, could not resist. But others, though not enough, were honest old-style liberals; they meant what they had said about reason, the life of the mind, and openness to ideas reasonably presented. The radicals resented this last group most of all. My friend Alexander Bickel, a constitutional scholar, had a reputation as a liberal, but because he tried to uphold standards of reason and civilized discourse and because he thoroughly disapproved of the mob, he was harassed regularly and hung in effigy in the law school courtyard during alumni weekend. Since nothing good was expected from a conservative, the radicals left me pretty much alone.

Walter Berns captured the emptiness of both the radicals and the Establishment. Members of SDS, he said, are miserable and obsessed, while the Organization Man is content. “Beyond this there is no difference. The Organization Man says SDS should not burn down the universities, but he can provide no reason other than one coming from the law, which is of course no reason at all to SDS. SDS, in turn, says that the Organization Man should feel miserable too and join them in burning down the universities, but they can provide no reason other than one arising out of their
idiosyncratic despair, which the Organization Man neither shares nor understands. The only thing that can come out of this confrontation is a test of wills.”
¹²
In a test of wills, a comfortable, liberal, mildly guilty Establishment is no match for angry, nihilistic radicals. Nihilists must be sat upon rather than argued with, but the “oppressive” Establishment lacked the will for that.

In the crunch, the universities proved hollow. The Sixties students did not create the emptiness of the universities; they simply exploited it and made it obvious to the world. They learned that the universities would usually cave in and so their “non-negotiable demands” escalated. The student radicals were flabbergasted. This was no way for oppressors to behave. Even the radicals didn’t want enemies who didn’t believe anything. Only institutions that were already soft, alienated from the surrounding society, without belief in themselves and the worth of what they did would have surrendered so easily and so completely. The rot was there before the radicals hit.