WI: 1970 Kent State Shootings turn into bloodbath

If the initial shots provoke a battle between students and the guardsman you would probably see fairly heavy casualties among the guardsman. That could make turn support from the students to the Guard, especially if the source of the shooting is lost in the melee.
 
TxCoatl1970 raised some very good points to which I might add the epic journey of the National Guardsmen before they finally arrived at Kent State.

Imagine your mood after close to a full day in uniform and military gear during the heat in an old army truck. Any argument in favor of a crisis on campus would certainly have trouble with that detail suggesting that the guard's presence was apparently not urgently required after all.
 
@ 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.
 
It should be noted that, of the four students killed, only TWO were protestors. One warned another student against protesting, and one was an honor student in ROTC...
Simply play up the ratio of protestors to dead, and you might have a bit more outrage...
 
I don't know why exactly these students would suddenly engage in protracted people's war/focalism. 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. That sort of class struggle seems more likely than students suddenly becoming guerrilla soldiers especially considering most of them radicalised after being told they were being sent off to war.
 
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.

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.
 
@ 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.
 
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.

So what about the opposite? Students charge and kill all the guardsmen Lord of the Flies style in mob violence. Could there be, then, counter-student violence that then turns into street fighting?
 
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.
 
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.

Actually it is Lordstown. That strike with workers that sabotaged cars as they left the assembly line hurt the UAW and gave it a bad reputation that lasts until this day.:eek:
 
A student charge of the Guard line (and their M1 rifles had bayonets fixed if I recall the photos correctly) likely would never have reached the Guardsmen, who by then would have been shooting to kill. Many of the Guardsmen who pulled the trigger in the initial volley deliberately aimed high or low -- those bullets in the ground were a confusing factor in the aftermath, with some people initially claiming they came from the student side of the line. That would not have been the case with the second or following volleys. And M1s have an eight-round capacity.

A massacre of unarmed students -- let's say 50 dead and another 60-75 wounded before the crowd turned and ran -- would have caused an explosion of riots and protests on campuses across the country. Even the OTL event closed down hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools, with an estimated four million students participating. The national media by that time were firmly antiwar. I can envision what Walter Cronkite would be saying as he introduced Special Report after Special Report in the days and weeks afterwards. It could well have turned into the sort of coverage that we saw a decade later with the Iran hostages.

The national antiwar movement was struggling by 1970 -- the March on Washington in November 1969 seemed to be a high water mark until the Kent State shootings revitalized the movement. It kept going until the end of the draft in January 1973 cut the legs out from under it. A full-on massacre would have radicalized far more students and given a boost to the Weather Underground and other violent cadres. (As a side note, it might also have sent more young people into the back-to-the-land movement out of disillusionment and dismay at the system.)

Politically the reaction could have gone one of two ways. Nixon might have gone full-scale G. Gordon Liddy on the antiwar movement. COINTELPRO was already in place and active. (I was one of its targets.) It wouldn't have taken much to expand it, and J. Edgar Hoover would have loved the excuse to crack down on dissidents. Or a dismayed Nixon, under intense pressure from a shocked Congress, could have ordered an earlier end to the draft, more extensive pull-outs of troops in Vietnam, and more aggressive negotiations with North Vietnam to end the war long enough for full disengagement.
 
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.

There's a difference between "tired of hippies" and "okay with US citizens being shot by the hundreds by the National Guard". An exponentially more deadly Kent State Shooting would shock and apall a lot of the US "Silent Majority" IMO - it kind of did OTL, and this would be much more so.
 
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.

It's one thing for some hippies to get knocked around by riot police. It's entirely another thing for National Guardsmen to shoot dozens of students dead on the spot. Something like THAT hasn't happened in the US since the 1920s (Battle of Blair Mountain, Colorado mine strike massacres, etc) and this is in the middle of the Cold War within living memory of the Soviet Union crushing the Prague Spring and the Hungarians with armed force. The average American is NOT going to like seeing the US acting like a dictatorship, especially not when you're talking white, middle class college kids getting shot dead.
 
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.

Eh, no. The general public by 1970 was pretty tired of the war and the nightly body count on the evening news. Having a few dozen middle-class white kids slaughtered by the National Guard because they were protesting the war would have been a match in a powder magazine.
 
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