The shootings that occurred at Kent State University, Ohio, on May 4, 1970 have been a dark spot in American history for almost 36 years. It is a day remembered by many names, THE KENT STATE SHOOTINGS, MAY 4 or the KENT STATE MASSACRE. Four students were killed and nine were wounded, all of America suffered.
The student body at Kent State numbered about 20,000 and had been considered conservative, but not overly political. In fact they were thought of as rather passive politically. The shootings were a culmination of four days of demonstrations by members of the student body. The students were protesting the invasion of Cambodia by American forces.
In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected President. One of the promises he made was to end the Vietnam War. When the My Lai massacre was exposed in November of 1969 there was worldwide outrage and reduced public support for the war. Then a month later the first draft lottery was instituted since WWII. In April 1970, Nixon told the public he was going to withdraw large numbers of U.S. troops from Vietnam. So when he made his television address on April 30 to say we had invaded Cambodia the American people reacted strongly. In the speech Nixon addressed not only Cambodia but also the unrest on college campuses. Many young people, including college students, were concerned about the risk of being drafted, and the expansion of the war into another country appeared to increase that risk. Across the country protests on campuses became what Time magazine called "a nation-wide student strike."
The day after his Cambodia speech Nixon told a crowd at the Pentagon:"You see these bums, you know, blowing up campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in th...
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... 13 ways. Half went to Dean Kahler, the most seriously wounded survivor and only $15,000 apiece went to the families of each of the slain students. The state issued a statement of "regret" which stopped short of an apology for the events of May 4th, nine years before.
President Nixon created a public atmosphere in which students who opposed the war were fair game for those who supported the government. In the week following Kent State, construction workers rioted on Wall State, attacking antiwar protesters and sending many to the hospital, some permanently crippled. It was reported at the time, a day or two after the deaths, President Nixon called the parents of the only slain student known to be a bystander- he was a member of ROTC- to express condolences. The phone never rang in the other parents' houses. The message couldn't have been clearer: they had it coming.
Among the riots caused by Nixon’s decision were revolts at many universities, such as Kent State. Young students were upset because they were the ones being drafted and the sooner the war ended the less chance they had of seeing war. On Friday, May 1,1970 anti-war rallies began to take place at Kent State University. Students gathered and burned a copy of the constitution. Also many riots broke out in downtown Kent. The extent of the damage done in Kent was estimated at fifteen thousand dollars. Upon learning about these problems the mayor, Leroy Satrom, called a state of emergency and contacted Governor James Rhodes for assistance. On May second, the ROTC building at Kent State was burnt down during a protest. The next step was calling in the National Gaurd as ordered by the Governor. The national guard helped on campus by seeing that the new eleven o’clock p.m. curfew was followed by all students. This caused more anger among the students, and added more people to the rebellion that would otherwise not have become involved.
Nixon’s approach to the war was Birchesque. He campaigned for president in 1968 as a peace candidate by pointing out that he had been raised as a Quaker and promising to bring the troops home. His path to peace, however, entailed an escalated war. After his election as president, he unleashed a ferocious air assault on the Vietnamese and extended the ground war into Laos and Cambodia. When the anti-war movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would do: he decried the anti-war movement as a communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and that deserved to be treated as an internal security threat.
On April 30, 1970, when Nixon gave a speech announcing his invasion of Cambodia, anti-war factions rose up across the United States. In the speech he stated that, “If, when the chips are down…the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and institutions around the world. I would rather be a one term president and do what I believe is right than to be a two term president at the cost of seeing America become a second rate power.” Students did not agree with Nixon and protests cropped up on university campuses in the days that followed his speech. Amongst these protesters were students of Kent State University, “The Cambodian invasion defined a watershed in the attitude of Kent students toward American policy in the Indochina War.” At this point, the first two days of May, the students were protesting Nixon’s actions. While the cou...
Vassar College. President Nixons Speech on Cambodia: April 30, 1970. <http://students.vassar.edu/~vietnam/doc15.html> Accessed 28 February 2001.
Super, John C., ed. “Nixon’s Resignation and Pardon.” Salem Press. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014. .
Before choosing sides one must always look at the facts. The most important fact to know about the situation at Kent State University is that in the days before the shootings, the campus was anything but calm. It all began on Thursday, April 30,...
April 20th, 1999, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, experienced a mass shooting. Thirteen people were injured and more than twenty were injured. Twelve were students and one was a teacher. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their high school for forty one minutes before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. School shootings are notorious for making headline news but in 1999, school shooting were not as prevalent as they are in the present day. The media blew up on the catastrophe that was Columbine and many questions were raised, who were these kids and why did they do this? Speculation arose about why they did it. Maybe they were bullied for being goth and social outcasts or maybe they
Nixon’s approach to the war was viewed as Birchesque. He redefined the war by resorting to the excuse of POW/MIA, and successfully reconstructed American’s memory of the war. When the anti-war movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would do: he decried the anti-war movement as a communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and that deserved to be treated as an internal security threat. Meanwhile he redefined the war by creating a myth of POW/MIA, and successfully created new visions of the war for Americans.
The columbine massacre the day where no one is safe in school or out of school. The columbine massacre is about two students named Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris both seniors 17 years old both two weeks before graduating they killed 12 students, one teacher, and 21 injured to their shooting on April 20, 1999. Both Dylan and Eric were some believe they were bullied by the sport teams in their school so they planned to kill the people who bullied them and other mostly anyone who gets in their way but that wasn’t really why the FBI he said that there target was everyone no one in pacify we will not get in to more details now. Dylan and Eric were both intelligent boys with solid parents and a good home and both had brothers younger than them. They played soccer, baseball, and both enjoyed to work on computers. Both boys were thinking on commit suicide on 1997 but instead started to plan a massacre in 1998 a year before it happened. Then the two boys had got into some trouble for breaking into a van on January 30, 1998 trying to steal some fuses and wires for bombs for them to make, but they got caught in trouble. So the court put them in a program called the juvenile diversion program, but even if they were there they were still planning the massacre and the court also put Eric in some angry management classes and people believe it worked but it didn’t he just did it to look like it work and both boys made it look like they were really sorry but they weren’t. Dylan and Eric both really hated everyone in their school and the court as well after they got caught breaking in to that van that’s when they really started to plan the massacre more and that’s when Harris started he’s journals no one really knows way but they didn’t hate a hand...
In 1968, the United States of America was participating in a violent war that some of the general public greatly disapproved of. Tension between political parties was rising and this did not help efforts with the war. Anti-war sentiment was growing in popularity amongst the younger generation; they wanted to get their voices heard. Protests and riots were occurring more frequently and growing larger in size all throughout the United States. This was the case for eight Chicago men who protested peacefully.
At first, he was a strong supporter of the Vietnam War but then became a strong opponent. The Department of Defense continued to lie to the people about the hype about the war. The government continued to say that the war was under control. The Pentagon Papers already have statistics on the Vietnam War. As soon as Nixon saw the paper, he went to his Attorney General right away to stop the printing of the New York Times newspaper. Daniel Ellsberg knew that he would get arrested for making copies of the papers.
School shootings seemed like a new phenomenon, but they occurred for the majority of American history. The first school shooting occurred On July 26, 1764, when a Lenape Indian shot and killed nine children and the school master of the Greencastle, Pennsylvania school (Galvin): as noted in Appendix A. Since 1764, the number of school shootings rose exponentially. In the 1990’s, eighty-six school shootings occurred and between 2000 and 2014, 110 shootings transpired since 2000 (Killam,2008). The development of semiautomatic weapons lead to an increase in deaths. A study conducted in 1990 found through the years of 1986 to 1990; 71 people died, 201 wounded, and 242 people held hostage by school shooters(Galvin). While the area a school serves as one factor in the number of violent acts committed per year, school shootings have not been connected to this. The schools in Chicago dealt with more violent acts, but Sandy Hook Elementary, a small city school had relatively few violent acts committed by students.
President Nixon wrote this letter to Cuck Colson only one year before Colson was indicted for conspiring to cover up the Watergate burglaries. Not even Colson could tell you how this all started, but in his character as a young man it was evident that he could and would do anything necessary to complete a task that he set out to accomplish. Colson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated as valedictorian of his High School class of 1949. He rejected a full scholarship from Harvard University, and attended Brown University, also on scholarship, and then George Washington University Law School, graduating from both with honors. After graduation he spent a few years in the Marine Core, but then settled down to practicing law. He soon became involved in politics, and was particularly enthralled with campaign managing, as he had dabbled in it while still in Law school. In 1969, Chuck Colson was appointed Special Counsel to President Nixon (Wikipedia 2013). During his time in the White House he became known as the “hatchet man” because he did whatever it took to accomplish what the president wanted. In 1973 he resigned just after Nixon was elected for his second term, and was planning on returning to his law practice. That summer he gave his life to the Lord, and was a changed man. He was indicted the following March, and sentenced to one to three years in prison for his involvement in the Watergate Scandal. While in prison his relation...
On August 01st, 1966 on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, many families lost their loved ones to the actions of Charles Whitman, a lone gunman who was only 25 years old at the time; Whitman climbed the campus tower, and with three rifles, two pistols, and a sawed-off shotgun, he shot forty-three people, (thirteen of whom died,) in just under ninety-six minutes. This historic tragic event became known as the UT Tower Shooting.
James A. Baldwin once said, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” (BrainyQuote.com). In the 1960s, “the man” was youth across the country. The Vietnam war was in full force, and students across the country were in an outrage. Society needed an excuse to rebel against the boring and safe way of life they were used to; Vietnam gave them the excuse they needed. Teenagers from different universities came together and formed various organizations that protested the Vietnam war for many reasons. These reasons included protesting weapons and different tactics used in the war, and the reason the U.S. entered the war in the first place. These get-togethers had such a monumental impact on their way of life that it was famously named the Anti-War Movement. When the Vietnam War ended, The United States did not have a real concrete reason why; there were a bunch of theories about why the war ended. Through negative media attention and rebellious youth culture, the Anti-War Movement made a monumental impact in the ending of the Vietnam War.