Vietnam War Protests

Many 1960s antiwar activists came to believe that the Viet Nam war was not a mistake but a deliberate attempt by a loosely-knit but powerful coalition that controlled the U.S. to retain a small but highly-regarded part of its empire, fueled by Cold War ideology.

It followed, then, that the real cause of the Kent State shootings had been the desire of the Nixon administration to suppress domestic objections to its Viet Nam policy so that it could have more of a chance of successfully retaining Viet Nam for the capitalist world.

Many in the antiwar and May 4th movements drew such conclusions; others did not. The antiwar movement of the 1960s was a broad and diverse coalition and many in it could agree that the war in Viet Nam was illegal and immoral without seeing it as a struggle to save Viet Nam for the capitalist world.

For seven years after the Kent State shootings, many liberals, for instance, struggled for accountability for the deaths and injuries of 1970, not because of the economic and political ramifications of the event perceived by radicals, but from a deep sense that human rights on that occasion had been denied.

Liberals and radicals came together in the May 4th Movement, and more particularly in the May 4th Coalition during the gym struggle of 1977, as they had during the 1960s to end the Viet Nam war. They shared the belief that there must be accountability for 1970 and that the May 4th site ought to remain intact as a historical reminder and as human memorial.

The small group of people which began the struggle against annex construction constituted a "critical mass" which organized and mobilized support to preserve the May 4th site. Different people had different reasons for joining both the critical mass and the Coalition, however. These reasons ranged from the broadly liberal belief that Kent State 1970 had been a tragedy and that the dead and injured should be memorialized to the radical belief that Kent State had been an example of suppression of opposition to imperialism.

A good many radicals hoped that in the course of the struggle to save the site, the public would gradually see the ramifications of Viet Nam and Kent State for American society and would become ready both to accept and participate in radical action.

There were also those apolitical and countercultural people primarily interested in anarchism and environ-mentalism who were opposed to the annex location because the site was beautiful and/or because the unresponsiveness of the Trustees symbolized for them the hierarchical and unaccountable nature of contemp-orary American society, though political Coalition members and nonanarchists also shared such concerns.

Such varied attitudes toward Coalition goals were bound to affect the strategy and tactics of the "critical mass" as it tried to mobilize mass support for annex relocation.

The struggle that developed within the Coalition between moderates and militants was in part a disagreement over the tactics most appropriate for the mobilization of mass support and in part a struggle based on different goals. Until July 12, such differences presented no major problems for the Coalition, even the marathon arrest debate ending in a display of unity. Once removed from its physical and community base at Tent City, however, the Coalition was bound to encounter more trouble holding itself together.

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