But maybe it could evolve into something like France 68; students occupy their campuses, throw up barricades, sympathetic workers go on strike in solidarity, clashes in the streets as police try to break it up only making things worse, lots of confusion and rioting.
@ BigWillyG
You're forgetting why OTL there was any sympathy whatsoever for the students. They were throwing bottles and insults at Guard troops with guns and the excuse to use them. While monumentally stupid, it takes some balls to do so.
The students were no legitimate threat and by and large, public opinion reflects that forty years later.
At the time, according to everyone right of Phil Ochs viewed the Guard as just doing their job, like the Chicago cops busting heads in '68 during the Dem convention. Sloppy, regrettable, but the price of maintaining order when confronted by a riot.
If they students're shooting at Guard troops, the Guard has every excuse to go hard and blast anything moving. See how that worked for the SLA or MOVE. The cops have reinforcements, better guns and keep coming. Students get squashed with the blessings of 98% of the electorate. Film at 11.
Something I've touched on is how much the radical left eschewed learning from babykillers (Nam vets) effective squad-level tactics, demolitions techniques, or anything that might have made them effective guerrilla threats.
It was mentioned physics, chemistry and engineering students might not be folks you want to piss off. By and large, SDS was a liberal-arts heavy organization. There were techie hippies and radicals too, just a corporals' guard amidst the folks really wanting social change. Their attempts at bomb-making were laughably incompetent.
Most of the techies wanted to work for the Feds or defense contractors making $$$$ after their ROTC hitch. Better outreach efforts to recruit techies and Nam vets to their cause would have had exponentially expanded their effectiveness.
OTOH, that doesn't solve the problem of getting fundamentally comfy people to overthrow the system.
I'm not talking about long term violence or terrorism though. I'm talking about the mob charging the guard after the shots are fired rather than running away as happened OTL. More students will be killed or wounded but they heavily outnumbered the guard and would have done a lot of damage even without guns. Especially since the guardsmen had only limited ammunition and only those who fired were loaded at that point.
Ehh...I'm not sure how you're going to get workers to go on strike with the students. You're talking about a class struggle, well the blue collar types who might strike in large part felt little sympathy for those rich kids who could go to college. These are the same folks who two years earlier voted for George Wallace, not just in the south but all over the country. Wallace who said the only four letter words those kids didn't know were w-o-r-k and s-o-a-p. I suspect that it would take more than just a bloodier Kent State to get solidarity among those interests. And, as has been touched on by myself and others, if the students fight back, then there's not going to be much sympathy for the movement overall.
There could be one source of blue-collar sympathy for any nationwide 68-style movement: certain sections of the United Auto Workers. It was the most left-wing union in the country, run by the socialist Walter Reuther for years after the War. While it moved decisively to the right through successive purges of its more radical leaders, it did have a significant leftist contingent left inside it at this point, and in the last hectic days of the 60s era there were a number of genuine Mai-68-style "quality of life" strikes by its younger members - look up the Lordsville strike. (I think that's what it was called; I'll have to check later).
That said, terrellk is right, you'd have to seriously change things to have any large-scale labor solidarity with the student movement in 1970; even more moderate representatives of the movement like George McGovern had very little union support. I'm trying to do something like this in the TL I've recently resumed working on, and it's a bit of a stretch even there.
Would it mean vast public outrage?
If by public you mean media, then sure. The general populace was getting pretty tired of the hippies and riots and all those other things going on by now, so their outrage wouldn't be as great as you might think. I suppose it would really depend on how the massacre started.
If by public you mean media, then sure. The general populace was getting pretty tired of the hippies and riots and all those other things going on by now, so their outrage wouldn't be as great as you might think. I suppose it would really depend on how the massacre started.
If by public you mean media, then sure. The general populace was getting pretty tired of the hippies and riots and all those other things going on by now, so their outrage wouldn't be as great as you might think. I suppose it would really depend on how the massacre started.