Vietnam War Protests

So as the public exercised its informal vote by pressure to leave the annex where it was, legislature and government seem to have decided that it would be too risky to try to circumvent the expressed will of the Trustees, and the Board got its annex where it wanted it. One could call this outcome an exercise in democracy, if the use of that term did not presuppose independent thought and evaluation as the necessary grounding for votes.

In 1977, the May 4th Coalition took advantage of the contradictions it encountered--the sympathy of liberals, the media, academicians, politicians and judicial figures--to successfully delay for almost two and a half months the onset of construction. The Coalition succeeded in these delaying tactics without being heard seriously by the public, however.

Nor was the Coalition able to wage the sort of successful war of position that would have gained public acceptance of the radical view of both the Viet Nam war and Kent State 1970, partly because the public only agreed with the liberal interpretation of the Vietnam War (and largely disagreed with the liberal interpretation of 1970) and partly because the common ground on which Coalition leaders and sympathetic liberals approached the public on the annex question was too superficial to lend itself to some kind of ideological breakthrough.

The May 4th Coalition lost its battle to preserve the site of the Guard-student confrontation at Kent State of May 4, 1970, essentially because it failed to make itself an efficient enough critical mass to engineer a successful challenge of culturally-dominant assumptions and assertions about what the Viet Nam war, the antiwar movement and Kent State meant to the nation.

The group made a considerable effort to accomplish this, however, and a remarkable number of influential Americans responded to it on some level, even if the public at large did not. The Coalition needed to create a sympathetic counterculture to win its battle; the efforts to create one after 1970 and during the Tent City phase of the gym struggle were too small-scale to help in the end.

The Coalition did bring back before the public the issues of Viet Nam and Kent State 1970--even if that public failed to respond to the issues. It set an example of activism in the midst of the apathetic 1970s.

The publicity it helped to generate for the uncompleted story of Kent State may well have influenced the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision to order a new trial for Kraus v. Rhodes--one which ended in an out-of-court settlement in 1979, at least providing the May 4th families with compensation and an apology from the state.

The energy and commitment of the Coalition's legal collective set an example for the May 4th Movement, even if its words and behaviors were often contradictory. And the experience gained during the course of the gym struggle by the more thoughtful men and women of the May 4th Coalition was bound to guide them later in other, broader struggles for social justice and change.

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