Vietnam War Protests

This problem was only exacerbated by the rise of the Coalition's Maoist bloc, the evident refusal of the public to be influenced by the calls from the White House, some politicians and the media for compromise, and by the sheer stubbornness of the Board of Trustees. (The degree of official response to the Coalition may have made the public wonder why the group increasingly proclaimed the existence of a closed system.)

If the Coalition had only had to grapple with the problem of convincing the liberal community of the justice of its case, the gym struggle of 1977 might well have ended with annex relocation. But the Coalition was confronted with apathy and often hostility in the public which it lacked the means to overcome during the controversy.

Neither the antiwar movement nor the "May 4th Movement," the most important component of which was the May 4th Coalition of 1977, was successful in gaining public acceptance of radical interpretations of the Viet Nam war or May 4, 1970. The antiwar movement did succeed in gaining a public support for a liberal interpretation of the war, however, a feat which the more narrowly-based Coalition was unable to match.

Certainly if the Coalition was not going to persuade the public that the Kent State shootings needed to be memorialized by saving the site--even with the help of the media--it was not going to succeed even to the extent that the antiwar movement had. Yet the success of the antiwar movement on only a liberal level caused part of the Coalition's problems, just as the attempts of many of the leaders of 1977 to operate only on a radical level created serious difficulties for the Coalition.

The very traditions and intelligence that told the antiwar movement and some people in the May 4th Coalition at what levels they should speak to be comprehensible to the public worked against any basic emphases on radical analyses. The more these groups were able to communicate the existence of certain problems in comprehensible, everyday terms, the less likely it became that fundamental, thus-far largely alien and incomprehensible explanations would emerge.

The very willingness of a number of influential liberals within the political, academic, and journalistic communities to respond, for instance, to the issue of the annex site in 1977, whether it was presented by Coalition moderates or militants, discouraged the acceptance of radical arguments made by the Coalition as a whole that the site decision was the result of a plot engineered by a closed, conspiracy-prone system to suppress memories and insult the dead.

Media figures, liberal academics, and some politicians had gained enough perspective on the Viet Nam era by 1977 to have some sympathy with the Coalition's position. It was the public that seemed unwilling to grapple with the issues of the Viet Nam war and Kent State 1970/1977. The three mechanisms by which public sentiment could be gauged--letters to editors, letters to legislators and polls--showed a consistent majority arrayed against the Coalition.

The hostility became more obvious as the summer progressed, options narrowed and the Coalition moved left. Much of the public apparently felt threatened by the activities of the Coalition and also by the prospect of revival of painful and alien history which it wished to ignore or forget.

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