Kent State and the Hard Hats: An Historical Perspective
26 April 2024
On May 4, 1970, the Ohio national guard fired on a crowd of student protesters at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Four students were murdered by the guardsmen and nine more were injured. The protest, directed against the expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia, had begun peacefully, but contradictions between between the students and the relatively conservative townspeople of Kent had been stoked by the local political elites and the home-owning gentry. The townspeople had been led to believe that the students had hidden caches of weapons and that the local water supply would be spiked with LSD.
The national guard had been called in by the mayor and governor on May 2, and when the guard arrived on the scene that night, the campus’s ROTC building was on fire. Kent students would be blamed for the fire, although no perpetrators were ever caught or arrested; student protesters who were obstructing the response of fire fighters and cheering while the building burned were escorted to their dorms at bayonet point.
The next day, the governor of Ohio gave a speech in which he claimed:
We are going to eradicate the problem. We’re not going to treat the symptoms. … these people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They’re worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America. Now I want to say this … I think that we’re up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.
The mayor of Kent ordered a curfew and the guardsmen were used to enforce it, using tear gas and bayonets. Kent State administration, with the governor’s blessing, prohibited further demonstrations.
On May 4, however, a final rally was held, this time protesting the presence of the National Guard on campus. Kent State’s official account of the massacre suggests about 3,000 people were present, 500 being “core demonstrators”, another 1,000 “cheerleaders” who supported the demonstrators, and 1,500 who were “spectators”. 100 armed guardsmen stood opposite of the demonstrators. The University, occupied by the guard, had attempted to announce that the demonstration was banned, and attempted to disperse the crowd of protesters. Demonstrators threw rocks at the police and guardsmen who attempted to enforce this. General Canterbury, the officer in charge of the guard’s occupation of the campus, gave the order to descend on the protest, firing tear gas canisters into the crowd, an action which was met with more rocks. After bumbling onto a practice football field, where they were fenced in and even more subject to the barrage from demonstrators, the guardsmen made their way to Blanket Hill. Once at the top, a fraction of the guardsmen kneeled, turned their weapons on the crowd, and fired 61 to 67 shots over the course of 13 seconds. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheur were killed.
Nine more students were injured. Many of them were not campus radicals or protesters, but spectators who were watching the protest unfold. Two of the dead were not activists at all.
As Gerald Casale put it, the massacre at Kent State and the ensuing wave of repression symbolically signaled the end of revolutionary student activism:
I had a scholarship to the University of Ann Arbor Graduate School as an artist, but because I was a member of SDS, after the killings at Kent State, the governors of four states, including Michigan, made a pact that all out-of-state students that were members of any radical group would lose their scholarships and be denied admissions. … You kill a few students and that really works. The activists left town or went into hiding or joined the Weather Underground. Other kids cut their hair and went to work for their dads, who had been bugging them to get it together. Kent State killed the movement.
After the massacre in Ohio, protests in solidarity with the victims of the massacre, and against the expansion of the war, were held in cities across the country. In New York, over 1,000 people turned out to a protest held on May 8. Protesters made their way to the Federal Hall memorial on Wall Street in Manhattan from the New York Stock Exchange. They were eventually surrounded by a line of police, separating them from a crowd of over 400 construction workers.
The “hard hats”, as they were called - mostly white union construction workers in New York - rallied in defense of Nixon, the war in Vietnam, and the perpetrators of the Kent State massacre. They carried American flags and chanted the familiar Birchite mantra, “love it or leave it”. The police allowed the hard hats to assault the protesters, effectively dispersing them. The hard hats made their way from there to City Hall, where they would demand that the mayor raise the flag from half staff, where it was in honor of the dead at Kent State, to whole staff. After some back and forth, New York’s deputy mayor Richard Aurelio ordered the flag to be raised. Over 100 were injured in total, mainly student protesters.
American unions at the time were broadly in favor of the war in Vietnam. Union workers were alienated from the student- and youth-led New Left, and many union jobs were located at “defense plants” that built weapons for the war effort. High off the hog of the GI bill, which transformed many proletarian ex-soldiers, veterans of the second world war and the war in Korea, into members of the home-owning gentry, these workers experienced the height of the American empire, at least the height for the “middle class”. Having bought in to the petit-bourgeoisie (via state-subsidized mortgages), and being led politically by class collaborationist business unions, they did not expect the capitalist class to turn on them - they were, after all, not just fellow Americans, but white Americans, many the descendants of settlers, and many also descendants of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants who had only relatively recently been brought in to the fold of whiteness. To them, this was their society that the left-wing students wanted to dismantle.
But less than two years after the hard hat riot, Nixon made his trip to China, the first step of what would coalesce in the opening up of China’s labor market to American capital. Offshoring began not much longer after that: American capitalists could move their factories from places like Ohio and New York to Shanghai, where workers could be paid a fraction of the wage that was demanded by the American labor aristocrats, and made to work in far less safe - but far cheaper - working conditions. American workers lost their jobs en masse, as well as their bargaining position. Technological changes, especially the advent of the humble shipping container, meant that production could be more easily centralized in Eastern Asia, where labor costs were pennies on the dollar. The opening up of China’s labor force would be followed, in the 1990s, by the resumption of diplomacy and trade with the same government in Vietnam which 60,000+ US soldiers died fighting against. “To die for the reactionaries is lighter than a feather.” American capital would become free to move anywhere across the globe, and it moved in search of the lowest cost of labor.
Globalization began in earnest with Nixon’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Manufacturing jobs in the US would peak in 1979, less than a decade after the hard hat riot. The protectionist policies which had kept US workers in a privileged and affluent position would erode gradually under successive presidents, and capital - forced into a corporatist relationship with the business unions following the Depression and the New Deal - found itself once again dictating terms to American workers. The pro-war unions, who apparently thought the arrangement of class collaboration would last forever, were blindsided repeatedly by plant closures. The number of union workers fell into absolute and relative decline, a trend which unions have still not recovered from.
Most Americans polled agreed with the actions of the national guard at Kent. A smaller fraction of the public sympathized with the protesters. Nixon’s gift to the white working class for their loyal support was unemployment, the rust belt, and “deaths of despair” - the mass opiate-induced suicide of newly lumpen-ized white American workers where once there were jobs and fat incomes capable of supporting a family.
The fate of the “hardhats” who rallied to the defense of the political establishment and its armed agents who carried out the massacre of student protesters serves as a cautionary tale for workers of a conformist bent today. The ultimate beneficiary of the empire and its material reproduction as such is only the ruling class or the “power elite” to use the sociologist C. Wright Mill’s phrasing: the capitalist class which includes war profiteers, the politicians who set forth imperialist wars, and the high-ranking officers, including of the business unions, who win sinecure with imperial ventures - for example, Peter Brennan, who was president of the mob-connected Building and Construction Trades Council, whose members were among the hard hats, would go on to be appointed as Nixon’s Secretary of Labor for his role in the affair. The working stiff, to the power elite, is expendable and replaceable.