Comment: Have we forgotten the lessons of Kent State?

By Charles Holden, Zach Messitte and Jerald Podair / The Washington Post

President Trump’s near-daily news briefings have moved beyond his usual gaslighting and political theater. Careless words about prematurely opening up the economy are empowering angry, sometimes gun-wielding protesters across the country, demanding an end to stay-at-home orders. It is no longer just a partisan exaggeration when Washington’s Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee warns that the president’s “unhinged rantings and call for people to ‘liberate’ states could also lead to violence.”

While most of us shudder at the prospect of domestic political violence, the deepening fractures that Trump’s often-flaming-hot rhetoric have fueled in the past four years are a painful example of just how corrosive words can be to our sense of community.

A half-century ago, the same kind of political speech contributed to the often-overlooked reaction to the deaths of four students protesting U.S. involvement in Cambodia during a demonstration at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. In the run-up to this tragic episode, the slashing attacks of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew enabled President Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” to shrug off and, in some cases, celebrate the shocking events on the Ohio campus. To them, the shootings represented a grimly satisfying, overdue “law and order” response to years of unrest.

Nixon chose Agnew for the 1968 ticket as a compromise between a GOP divided between liberal Northeasterners and Southern conservatives. Agnew was a candidate both sides could accept because he blurred the lines between the two. He had previously been an enthusiastic supporter of liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican nomination. But he got on Nixon’s radar by upbraiding Baltimore’s African American leadership during the unrest after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April. As a tough-talking but polished-looking Mid-Atlantic governor, Agnew mixed the law-and-order ideas of Alabama’s George Wallace with the middle-class respectability of a local PTA president.

The former Maryland governor proved to be surprisingly effective in reshaping the Republican Party in a more populist, anti-elite direction. His meteoric rise propelled Agnew to the cover of Life magazine, and he was voted the third-most-respected man in the country in a 1969 Gallup poll. But the pugilistic speeches that caused Agnew’s political star to rise also eroded Americans’ bonds of empathy at a time when the nation desperately needed statesmanship.

It started with a transformation of the office of the vice presidency. Agnew grew bored with its traditional, ceremonial functions. Tired of attending ribbon-cuttings and funerals, he decided to turn his busy speaking schedule into a Republican revenge tour. During the autumn of 1969, with the help of Nixon wordsmith Pat Buchanan, Agnew went from city to city delivering campaign-style attacks against the administration’s enemies. The menacing tone of these speeches, which often targeted the media, thrilled Nixon’s silent-majority base, which felt maligned by the cultural elites Agnew loved to skewer.

By May 1970, Agnew had repeatedly asserted that Vietnam War protesters did not deserve a place in Nixon’s America. In one speech, he revealed his wish to “separate [the demonstrators] from our society; with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.” Agnew mocked American colleges for what he described as their coddling of student radicals, calling them “circus tents [and] psychiatric centers for overprivileged, under-disciplined, irresponsible children of the well-to-do blasé permissivists.” Citing recent incidents of campus violence, Agnew warned: “The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English; it is a problem for the Department of Justice.”

The ramifications of Agnew’s rhetoric became clear after the Kent State tragedy. When the novelist James Michener traveled to Ohio just days after the iconic photo of Mary Ann Vecchio crying out over a slain student on the Kent State campus appeared on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, he found to his surprise a local community angry; at the protesters and victims.

One woman described the killing of the students at the nearby university as merely “the first slap,” adding, “Live ammunition! Well, really, what did they expect, spitballs?” Another said that the National Guardsmen “should have fired sooner and longer.” Michener also found those who thought that “They should have shot most of the professors, too.” And a local lawyer shared this murderous fantasy: “Frankly, if I’d been faced with the same situation and a submachine gun … there would have been 140 of them dead, and that’s what they need.”

University presidents who met with Nixon the week after Kent State explained that the campuses had already witnessed massive unrest before the shooting. Agnew’s provocations had added fuel to that fire. According to Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, the university leaders feared more such violence, worried that now “there’s no way to turn it off. All blame Agnew primarily.”

Haldeman’s diaries reveal that, at first, Nixon wanted Agnew to “avoid any remarks about students.” But he noted that the “VP strongly disagrees.” Later that month, Agnew called these efforts to tone down his language “nonsense.”

Agnew understood that there were political points to be scored. Just four days after Kent State, about 200 construction workers attacked an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan, injuring more than 70. The New York Times reported that the “hard hats … were obviously delighted at the opportunity to pour out their hatred on the students.” By May 17, John Carroll of the Baltimore Sun reported that “whatever stresses and self-doubts may have accompanied [Nixon’s] Cambodia-Kent State ordeal had passed.”

Carroll added that politically, Agnew was still “pure gold.” This popularity helps explain why Nixon ultimately did not put his foot down, having begrudgingly come to recognize Agnew’s value in attracting the white, working-class, hard-hat vote, as well as conservative white Southerners to the Republican Party. Partisanship trumped leadership.

Democracy is always a rough-and-tumble enterprise, but Agnew’s harsh rhetoric, like Trump’s daily briefings, was calculated to vilify opponents for short-term political gain. Agnew had, much like Trump does, a knack for holding the spotlight and giving voice to the anger and frustrations of the working-class white base that Nixon constructed, and that Trump so effectively marshals and desperately needs.

Sadly, these tactics work. Agnew’s speeches made him a national fundraising and vote-getting star in the GOP. While it was certainly not his intention that the students in Ohio would lose their lives — and the complex swirl of factors that led to the shooting makes it far too simplistic to just blame Agnew for the deaths — his rhetoric both made him popular and gave permission to his followers to not trouble themselves greatly over the loss of life. His divisive message was all the more reckless since it came from a position of power during intensely turbulent times.

Barack Obama recently asked Americans to consider how we speak to each other about politics that “too often has been characterized by corruption, carelessness, self-dealing, disinformation, ignorance and just plain meanness.” This normally forgotten reaction to Kent State ought to help us keep our eyes open to the dangers of political rhetoric that offers no way back to a common purpose or our shared humanity. While it might prove beneficial politically in the short term, it comes at the expense of further ripping the country apart.

Charles Holden is professor of history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland; Zach Messitte is the president of Ripon College in Wisconsin; Jerald Podair is professor of history and Robert S. French professor of American studies at Lawrence University. Holden, Messitte and Podair are co-authors of “Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America.”