Kent State and Postwar Memory

| 301Kent State/May 4

©2006 The American Studies Association

Kent State/May 4 and Postwar Memory

John Fitzgerald O’Hara

Each spring, during the week of May 4, Kent State University hosts aseries of retrospectives and memorial ceremonies dedicated to the May4, 1970, shootings that turned the school into a landmark of the Viet-

nam War era. Crowds gather on a campus laden with objects and artifacts ofMay 4 and “remember” through a program of activities nominally orches-trated by the university to demonstrate its commitment to the history of theevent and memory of the victims. However, although once emblematic of warand domestic conflict, of insidious machinations of power and failures of jus-tice and democracy, May 4 has been increasingly drained of those contexts inspite of (and perhaps even through) the processes of commemoration itself.

Since 1990, commemorations have occurred in light of an exhortation—“Inquire, Learn, Reflect”—and in the shadow of the official May 4 monu-ment, which bears that inscription. In these fifteen years, May 4 observancesat Kent State have undergone a marked change, turning from somber, mourn-ful reminders of a violent and troublesome past to surprisingly buoyant fetesof postwar unity and historical reconciliation. Bruno Ast, the designer of theofficial monument, helped usher in this new period of remembrance when heofficially dedicated his work in 1990 on the twentieth anniversary of theshootings. The victims, he asserted, “by their sacrifice should no longer bemourned but celebrated.”1 His sentiment might have raised eyebrows—par-ticularly since two of the four students who died at Kent State, WilliamSchroeder and Sandra Scheuer, were not protesting at all and the other victimspresumably did not willingly sacrifice life and limb on May 4—but yet itsuited an institutional imperative that year to situate May 4 within a frame-work of progress, learning, and recovery that continues to define the legacy ofthe event.

While this framework is not ignoble, if May 4 were to fit into a narrative ofimmanent national history, in which each and every event of the past contrib-utes positively to the arrival of a glorious present, many haunting questionsabout the shootings would have to be muted or altogether excised. It remainsan important part of memory work to preserve the unsettled aspects of the

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May 4 case, including its many suggestions of malfeasance and conspiracy,without folding them too easily into a mythology of uninterrupted nationalprogress and renewal. This is both for the sake of fidelity to a historical periodof national challenges and setbacks and to do justice to a local instance ofextreme violence in which we may see, after Foucault, a general economy ofstate power during the Vietnam War era.

What took place in Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970, is somewhat familiar tomost Americans, though with decreasing familiarity. President Nixon’s April30, 1970, announcement of American military incursions in Cambodia sparkedprotests on campuses across the nation. At Kent State, a weekend of agitationand violence culminated at 12:24 p.m. on May 4, when twenty-eight OhioNational Guardsmen abruptly turned and fired into a crowd of protestors,leaving two dead and two dying, one paralyzed for life, and eight others criti-cally or seriously wounded. The shootings fanned the flames of war dissentand called into question the integrity of government leadership. They broughtto light the seriousness of campus protests and the grave implications of hard-line responses to them. They became a source of public trauma as the eventcame to symbolize the fracturing of the social body and the breakdown ofdemocracy.2

In 1970, a voluble hard-line approach to campus protestors had been ar-ticulated on the national political stage—by Nixon (the “bums”), Spiro Agnew(“just imagine they are wearing brown shirts or white sheets and act accord-ingly”), and, more ominously, by Ronald Reagan (“If it takes a bloodbath, ittakes a bloodbath. Let’s get it over with”). Such forceful words were echoed byauthorities managing the Kent disturbances. In a joint press conference onMay 3, 1970, Ohio’s Governor James Rhodes dubbed the Kent protestors“worse than the brownshirts . . . the most well-trained militant revolutionarygroup ever assembled in America,” and he vowed to “eradicate the problem.”3

At his side, National Guard General Sylvester Del Corso warned that Ohioallowed wide latitude in quieting civil unrest, “even to the point of shooting.”Police Chief Roy Thompson buttressed his threat: “Like Ohio says, use anyforce that is necessary, even to the point of shooting.”4 Their statements eerilypresaged the events of the following afternoon. Whether or not they consti-tuted warnings, promises, or plans raised significant concerns about what in-cited the shootings and who was ultimately responsible.

The incident generated one of the most vocal appeals for federal investiga-tions and indictments ever waged by the American public and politicians. Yet,only after a protracted battle were eight guardsmen finally brought before afederal grand jury in 1973 on charges of civil rights violations. Then, shortly


after it began, the case was summarily dismissed.5 The central questions thatimplicated guardsmen, local police, and other government figures and agen-cies remain unanswered.6 Did soldiers fire aggressively or defensively, randomlyor pointedly, spontaneously or with premeditation, with or without orders, inresponse to real or suspected sniper fire? Who burned, or let burn, the ROTCbuilding on the evening of May 3—student insurrectionists or agents provo-cateurs?7 What was the role of the mysterious armed student and FBI infor-mant Terry Norman, whose seized weapon, reportedly fired and reportedlynot fired, disappeared after the incident? Was there a cover-up in the earlyinvestigative period? Had guardsmen colluded or been “coached” prior to theirpolice and FBI interviews and by whom? Were indictments delayed becauseof interference by the White House and the FBI? Amid a host of more techni-cal legal questions—about the legality of dispersing the May 4 rally and aboutspecific National Guard policies and procedures—theories of conspiracy andimpropriety abound.

The “truth” about Kent State remains an omnipresent but elusive goal ofMay 4 narratives. As is predictable, perhaps, the lack of a definitive story hasnot deterred attempts to seek one. “Somewhere,” the Columbus Dispatch re-ported in 1995, “buried in the investigations, hearings and trials, books andmemories, is the truth.”8 Yet, tens of thousands of pages of investigations,testimonies and analysis, journalistic and newspaper accounts, twenty full-length books, and now a half-dozen web pages have not produced a smokinggun or an uncontested account of the incident. Various “truths” about May 4have proliferated in previous decades, but the salient truths are not to be foundonly in pedagogical (“what happened”) or investigative (“what really happened”)accounts. Perhaps different kinds of truths lie in how the various unresolvedquestions about the event continue to lose potency and relevance even while“remembering May 4” has become a perennial fixture at Kent State.

Foucault argued that power may be seen most clearly “in its more regionaland local forms.”9 As this suggests, the May 4 shootings might embody theseverity and excesses of polarized ideological positions in the period. If this isso, then perhaps May 4 commemorations can offer a discrete instance, a casestudy observable over thirty-five years, which reveals wider shifts in war memoryand meaning. The Vietnam War is commonly understood to have passedthrough at least three distinct stages in national history and public memory—a period of silence, another of revision, and another of reconciliation. Histori-cal commemorations of May 4 at Kent State have been both an object and aninstrument in these changes. On one hand, changing social and political con-ditions over the decades made possible new modes of commemoration. On


the other hand, new modes of commemoration not only reflected those chang-ing conditions but also actively contributed to them.

By creating, permitting, or denying—and occasionally destroying—artworksand artifacts of May 4, Kent State University has established on campus afractured yet unified site of memory that embodies a history of social divisionand reunification, political conflict and reconciliation, national trauma andrecovery, after both the event and the war. Over thirty-five years, the changingconstellation of monuments on campus brought forth different kinds of me-morial rituals and commemorative activity. In these objects and acts of memory,and in their variations and revisions, a series of changing institutional andcultural responses to the event can be seen. This evolution in the event’s meaningis inevitably part of the memorial landscape at Kent State because so manyobjects there refer to their own specific histories of inclusion and exclusion inthe official historical site. Thus, the memorial field manifests the negotiatedhistory of May 4 and points toward ways in which postwar recuperations havebeen realized in part through processes of remembering and forgetting.

Remembering always contains a reliable dimension of forgetting. This is anancient understanding of memory and a durable contemporary understand-ing of history. Predicated upon distilling the real complexity of the past into areduced form, as Hayden White writes, “every narrative [of the past] seem-ingly ‘full,’ is constructed on the basis of a set of events that might have beenincluded but were left out.”10 Acts of historical representation, he argues, arealways concerned as much with satisfying the needs of the present as they arewith recovering the actual past. As the central arbiter of May 4 history and theprincipal curator of its objects of memory, Kent State University is a logicalplace to seek out, then, not the event only, but the event in context with thechanging values of the postwar period.

“Kent State” at Kent State

In 2000, Kent State University launched an unprecedented campaign to pub-licize the thirtieth anniversary of the shootings. The president of the univer-sity, Carol Cartwright, inaugurated a millennial shift in observances: “Withthe turn of the century, we decided we should more positively embrace May 4and use it in a more positive way and help people look forward.”11 That year,the university responded to perennial calls to cordon off the Prentice Hallparking spaces where students had died by erecting permanent concrete pil-lars, lights, and name plaques for the victims. Along with these new monu-ments, a number of previously unrecognized signs of May 4 were inducted


into an official memorial landscape. No longer would Ast’s monument standalone as the central object of May 4 memory, but it would be joined by othermonuments: Donald Drumm’s sculpture Solar Totem, a tower of oblong steelplates that stood between guardsmen and students on May 4 (which, in fact,had been pierced by M-1 rifle bullets); the campus Victory Bell, which sum-moned the May 4 rally and had been tolled just after the shootings; the metalpagoda in front of Taylor Hall under which guardsmen stood as they firedtheir weapons; a student-created series of stained-glass windows hanging inthe library; and a sculpture titled “Kent Four” created by a faculty-artist in1971 (a four-stemmed pipe candelabra near the art department equipped withfour “eternal” gas flames, never before lit). Additionally, other “living memo-rials” were established: an annual interdisciplinary academic conference ondemocracy; a World Wide Web portal and digital oral history project relatedto May 4; a retooled May 4 archive and resource room; four full-tuition schol-arships in the names of the victims; and a course offering on May 4 taught byin-house experts Jerry Lewis and Thomas Hensley. A seventy-member memo-rial committee conceived more than fifty individual events for the anniver-sary, including book signings, concerts, films, plays, panels, speeches, dinners,and dedication ceremonies. “My concern is that they’re turning this thing intoa spectacle,” one Kent resident said at a university-organized town meetingahead of the events. Thomas Hensley responded by likening the university’spast attitude of denial to a form of institutional grieving but added, in theparlance of popular psychology, “We’re in acceptance now.”12

When Hensley referred to a period of denial and grieving, he recalled atime during which the university sought distance and disassociation from theMay 4 shootings. This was often evident in its administration of commemora-tive objects and activities during the first decade after the shootings and helpsexplain the momentousness of the new memorial landscape. His comment ispuzzling, however, in that it dates the new era of “acceptance” in 2000 almosttwenty years after the university first committed itself to dedicated May 4preservation by sponsoring an official monument. In the early 1980s, whenthe university organized a design competition for the “official” May 4 monu-ment, this too had been allegedly to overcome a decade of institutional “si-lence” about the shootings.

During the 1970s, many people charged that the university was trying toforget May 4. Indeed, the university was ambivalent about the event. It had adramatic negative impact upon enrollments, and corporate and private con-tributions plummeted in the wake of the shootings.13 Legal investigations andlawsuits implicated some university leaders. Furthermore, the university was


immobilized by its conflicted role in accounting for the event without favor-ing one ideological position or another. As an institution overseen by the verystate that had ordered the National Guard to campus, the university was boundto affirm state interests and ally itself with narratives of the necessity for lawand order. Yet, as a public institution, it needed equally to service the politicaland emotional needs of various constituencies among whom disagreementsabout the shootings flourished as divisively as they had throughout Ohio andthe nation. In the name of neutrality, then, university officials refrained fromproviding a narrative of the shootings and contributed to the power of theevent to fester in the community.

Early memorial efforts were stymied by the university’s relative silence, whichled to the sense that it was attempting to forget May 4. The three most sub-stantial memorial efforts of the early 1970s were student and faculty initia-tives approved by the university yet without official sponsorship. In 1971, thecandlelight walk and vigil, a funerary processional and meditative ceremonynear the spaces where students had fallen, was perceived by many as an es-chewal of political contexts. The university also allowed B’nai B’rith Hillel toestablish a plaque dedicated to the fallen students near the Prentice Hall park-ing lot reading, “In Loving Memory.” This monument was soon desecrated,apparently by a gunshot, and later stolen, and would not be replaced until1975. Meanwhile, in 1974, the university unveiled the May Fourth Room, aresource center in the library. Predictably, many saw it as too much, and manyothers saw it as too little—a marginal space limited to patrons and a diversionfrom where the shootings took place.

At almost every turn, the university’s concessions to public demands forofficial recognition of May 4 were meliorated by ambivalence. In 1978, thefirst official university statement, a five-paragraph narrative of May 4, wasadded to the university catalog. Also, classes were canceled on May 4 anniver-saries—after 12:00 p.m., at the discretion of individual professors. When, in1978, the university commenced plans to construct a gymnasium annex overa substantial portion of the common, this was widely taken as an attempt toerase its historical aura.14 Thus, while some efforts to remember the event weremade, other acts seemed to strive to forget.

Some of these had to do specifically with attending to the numerous publicartworks and artifacts reminiscent of May 4 on campus. Many objects hadbeen featured prominently in photographs and films of the incident and in-vited unceasing pilgrimages by curious visitors and activists: chiefly, the Vic-tory Bell and the pagoda; the wounded Drumm sculpture, Solar Totem; andthe Prentice Hall parking lot. None of these monuments or spaces was recog-


nized officially by the university and yet, often visited and commonly adornedwith graffiti, each demonstrated the nagging resilience of public memory evenwithin the period of so-called denial.

As years wore on, it became clear that the shootings were inextricable, likeit or not, from the name and character of Kent State University. Local Akronand Cleveland radio stations routinely played Neil Young’s anthem, “Ohio,”and on anniversaries, many did so in unison beginning at 12:24 p.m. JohnFilo’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph achieved iconic status. Legal ques-tions continued to surface in a spate of books on May 4, while debates aboutthe shootings filled local editorial pages. In the absence of an official memorialsite, illicit expressions on the common—spray-painted messages on sidewalks,chalked outlines of the dead in the Prentice Hall parking lot—spoke directlyto the university’s hesitancy to demarcate the grounds where the shootingsoccurred. Assemblies of mourners, activists, and victims’ advocates frequentlygathered to proselytize there.

In 1974, the presence of Robert Smithson’s earthwork Partially Buried Wood-shed on campus pitted narratives of preservation against narratives of progress.With its boldface graffiti announcement “MAY 4 KENT 70,” the work hadbecome an uncanny symbol of deteriorations in May 4 history and memory,and particularly so when the artwork was slated for destruction during cam-pus expansion plans in 1974. In 1978, further controversies about commemo-ration were generated when a sculpture by the renowned artist George Segal,Abraham and Isaac, was first commissioned for the university then subsequentlyrejected by it as “inappropriate.” Taken in view with other sculptures such asSolar Totem, the Victory Bell, and the pagoda, these monuments tell a storyabout how remembering haunted the act of forgetting in the period of “de-nial,” and about how forgetting haunts the act of remembering in the periodof “acceptance.”

Partially Buried Woodshed

In 2005, the frontispiece of the exhibition catalog for the first American retro-spective of Robert Smithson’s works presented Partially Buried Woodshed as anexemplary Smithson design.15 At the same time, the thirty-fifth annual retro-spective of May 4 at Kent State further obfuscated the landmark. Pictured inthe exhibition catalog intact in 1975 with its boldface reference to May 4,Partially Buried Woodshed in 2005 lay in ruin within a copse of inconspicuoustrees on campus. As a landmark, Partially Buried Woodshed was never officiallypart of the constellation of artifacts and artworks connected to the May 4shootings. It is not included in current site guides that point to the many


objects of May 4 memory on campus. Until very recently, when renewed in-terest in Smithson brought attention to the sculpture, few in the universitycommunity remembered the work ever existed, and fewer considered the spaceas artistically or historically significant. By university accounts, it no longerexists.

Yet, as a hallmark of forgetting, Partially Buried Woodshed may be one ofthe most evocative May 4 monuments. Despite its absence in recent com-memorations, or perhaps rather because of its absence, it may best representthe relationship between forgetting and remembering May 4 at Kent StateUniversity. In its obscurity, it aptly evokes the many aspects (and objects) ofthe Kent State event that have been subject to historical erasure even in thecontext of comprehensive remembrance.

Smithson conceived Partially Buried Woodshed as an “anti-monument,” in-tended to problematize the cultural act of commemoration by illustrating theinevitable erosion of the objects and memories of the past. A concrete-and-wood structure discovered by Smithson on a remote campus field in January1970, the shed was buried at his direction under several truckloads of mud.The dirt was carefully piled on the roof until the center beam cracked, signal-ing the artwork’s completion—or, rather, its beginning. Unlike traditionalmonuments, which aim to prevent forgetting and to imbue events with acertain kind of historical immutability, Partially Buried Woodshed was con-structed to accomplish, as it were, its own nullification; the work’s goal wasultimately to leave a space where a monument once stood, to signify absencenot presence, transformation not fixity, forgetting not remembering.

As with his grander outdoor installations, among them Spiral Jetty on theGreat Salt Lake, Asphalt Rundown in Rome, and Amarillo Ramp in Texas (wherehe died in 1973 when his airplane crashed while surveying the site), Smithsondid not invest this work with “politics” in any conventional sense—only in thesense of offering a reminder that political figures and events, even entire po-litical epochs, may become irrelevant when situated in relation to natural time.(“Nixon and Humphrey?” he once said to an interviewer in 1968. “In termsof 200 million geologic years?”)16 Yet even he, who strove to express thepaltriness of civilization’s scraps and scrapings upon the landscape, related tohis wife, artist Nancy Holt, that the woodshed he left behind at Kent State in1970 had been “prophetic” and “intrinsically political.”17 Smithson perhapssensed how the graffiti words, “MAY 4 KENT 70,” added to the shed by ananonymous vandal in the weeks after the shootings, enhanced the work bytransforming it from an abstraction into an explicit reference to May 4. It isspeculative but intriguing to imagine the vandal appropriating the work with


such foresight—not only establishing analo-gies between the cracked house and the frac-tured state, a deteriorating artwork and a dis-integrating political culture, but, moreover,offering a prescient vision of forgetting im-

plicit in ensuing institutional mediations of the sites and signs of May 4 (fig. 1).In fact, it was through institutional ambivalence and neglect that the

artwork’s deterioration was accelerated. In 1974, university expansion plansaltered the layout of the campus, inverting the front and rear campus andpositioning Partially Buried Woodshed alongside an access road to the new mainentrance of the university. Rather than being hidden away, the piece was nowin a highly visible position. Not a visually attractive artwork—an ugly, half-buried embodiment of bleak entropy and also, after its desecration, a reminderof the political upheavals of the recent past—it was summarily slated for de-struction in a landscape plan approved by President Glen Olds.18 However,Kent State’s art department opposed the decision, arguing the work containedartistic and monetary value—$250,000 according to Smithson’s estate. Thatwinter, a University Arts Commission voted to rescue it from demolition.Two months later, during the 1975 spring break holiday, another vandal at-tacked the piece, setting fire to it and leaving room by the means, a “Molotovcocktail,” for speculations of foul play amid an embroiled debate about thewoodshed’s future.19 As its ongoing demise was already seen as an allusion to

Figure 1.Partially Buried Woodshed, circa 1978.Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, NewYork. © Copyright Estate of RobertSmithson. Licensed by VAGA, New York.


May 4, after the fire the work was seen all the more within a context of subter-fuge and conspiracy endemic to theories of the event itself, recalling uncer-tainties and suspicions about local power past and present.

Preservationists, including Smithson’s surviving wife, Nancy Holt, insistedthe work retained value despite its half-burned condition. The art departmentpronounced its remains “historically significant” and argued that its aestheticintegrity was not compromised by the fire since partiality and disintegrationhad been conceived in its original design.20 At the beginning of the 1975–76academic year, as the woodshed’s remains and the rhetoric surrounding it cooled,a dormant committee on the campus environment was reconvened, seem-ingly with a sole purpose to declare the woodshed a safety hazard and recom-mend its removal, renewing suspicions about insider efforts to destroy thewoodshed. No official decision was ever made about whether to destroy orpreserve the woodshed—but the site, deemed an “eyesore” by university offi-cials, was landscaped. This solution enclosed the woodshed within a circle ofpine and elm trees, obscuring it from the view of passers-by on the new frontcampus road. However, it then became a popular spot for clandestine rendez-vous, which led the university’s environmental committee to deem the site asafety hazard. The President’s Office then permitted the removal of portionsof the woodshed “as necessary” to “protect” visitors.

Over the next ten years, under an expanding canopy and a mounting coverof ground foliage, grounds crews removed loose debris from the woodshedliberally, once arriving with a backhoe to do so, eventually dismantling thewoodshed. The Kent State Art Gallery estimates the woodshed’s demise tohave been complete by January 1984.21 A sizable patch of sixty-foot trees nowencompasses the foundation of Partially Buried Woodshed and a thicket of veg-etation has fully overgrown the diminished mound of dirt that once coveredit. In its present state, Partially Buried Woodshed disputes the idea that com-memorative narratives of May 4 provide the surest or only means to experi-ence or encounter the past. And, as it evokes absence in this context, the artworkrecalls other alternative representations and narratives of May 4 (fig. 2).

Abraham and Isaac

George Segal’s Abraham and Isaac, commissioned for Kent State by the Cleve-land-based Mildred Andrews Fund, is one such representation. Debates aboutthe woodshed were not focused upon the political contexts of the artworkeven while its graffiti and the memories it evoked clearly informed the discus-sion and may have inspired the arson attempt. In contrast, the rejection ofAbraham and Isaac by the university in 1978 was explicitly upon political


grounds. The perceived message of thesculpture did not accord with theuniversity’s vision of neutrality.

A bronze statue inscribed “In Memory of May 4, 1970,” Abraham andIsaac depicts the critical moment of the patriarch Abraham about to fulfill adivine obligation to slay his progeny, an allusion to the moral dilemma inher-ent in the treatment of students by the state in Kent. Detractors saw in this anorthodox countercultural criticism of political platforms to quell campus pro-tests through violence. Advocates, though, suggested the work depicted a re-fusal of violence and, ultimately, mercy and forgiveness—for, as they pointedout, Abraham does not kill Isaac but sacrifices a ram instead. In its openness toopposing interpretations, the work evoked both the moral ambiguities andcompeting visions of May 4, but its fate was sealed in the controversy over itsmessage. Faced with tempestuous debates about the sculpture’s acceptabilityin 1978, President Brage Golding tagged the artwork “inappropriate” andturned it down.22 It was presented to Princeton University in 1980, where itnow stands in the Modern Sculpture Garden. As a sign of its controversialnature, in 1980 a vandal broke off the blade of Abraham’s knife.23 (This hasbeen repaired.) As a rejected monument, its historical significance in relationto the May 4 memorial landscape lies both within the statue and without: that

Figure 2.Trees concealing Partially Buried Woodshed,2006. Photograph by John O’Hara.


Figure 4.Donald Drumm, Solar Totem, Bullet hole atlower right, 2004. Photograph by Brett Spyker.

is to say, the artwork reflects not only the moral and political dimensions ofthe May 4 shootings but also the conflicts in the university and its communityabout how to remember and interpret the event (fig. 3).

Solar Totem

Donald Drumm’s Solar Totem, like Smithson’s woodshed, antedated the May4 incident but became an indefatigable monument to it. As with both thewoodshed and Abraham and Isaac, its artistic intent was overwritten by his-torical events and memorial contexts. One of many in a series of Drumm’ssteel sculptures that dot the northeastern Ohio landscape, the artwork, erectedin 1967, was originally intended to evoke the totemic status of the region’smost precious and problematic industrial product. Its patina, the rusty textureof the postindustrial landscape, recalled abandoned steel mills and stockyards,which, perhaps like the legacy of May 4 itself, are irrefutable in their materialstubbornness, not easily disposed of. The sculpture, pierced by a bullet onMay 4, provided cover for some demonstrators and was entered as evidence in

Figure 3.George Segal, Abraham and Isaac, 2006. Photographby John O’Hara. Rights granted by VAGA, 2006.



the criminal investigation. Transformed by history, the sculpture has becomea relic of the war at home as it orients visitors to the positions of students andguardsmen on May 4 and makes apparent, with its hole, the tremendous powerof bullets (fig. 4).

When Solar Totem was included on the first site guide to campus monu-ments and historical spaces in 1980, it was referred to only as the “metal sculp-ture,” without reference to its significance or “wound.” No official descriptionof its role on May 4 appeared over the next twenty years. Many locals, ofcourse, were aware of its presence, but many were not, and fewer were awareof its significance. Without references to the sculpture in official documenta-tion, there was no way to verify it as a May 4 remnant. Like the Prentice Hallspaces where students had died, and upon which cars still parked, and likeother unrecognized monuments, such as the Victory Bell and the pagoda,Solar Totem marked not only the May 4 shootings but also the silences andanxieties surrounding them.

Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget

In 1982, the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) estab-lished at once a physical monument and an ideological mandate for postwarpolitical, social, and psychological passage. With national leaders speaking ofgetting over the “Vietnam War Syndrome,” the VVM imaged “healing” as thedominant metaphor for these various forms of recovery. At the same time, itprovided Kent State University with a framework to offer a recuperative his-tory of May 4. As inextricable as May 4 was from the war, it was also subject tosimilar trajectories in historical representation and public memory. And aswar history entered a period of revisionism in the early 1980s, marked by anumber of comprehensive histories as well as memoirs and films that activelysought to reconfigure the war as a “noble cause,” May 4 history, too, becamepart of the emergent effort to rethink the past and recover from its effects. Nolonger would the university leave the obligation and tenor of memory to mourn-ers, activists, and crusaders for responsibility and justice. Instead, it wouldassume custody of the event whose memory had dogged it over the previousdecade.

Presented with an opportunity to overcome previous memorial problemsand to do what it had been resisting, Kent State created the May 4 MemorialCommittee in 1983. This committee drew substantially upon the VVM’smaster-narrative as a source of inspiration. Now, instead of conceiving May 4as a “wound” of the past, the event could be memorialized, as the war had


been in the VVM, as a scar. Paul Spreiregen, the Chicago architect who waslead advisor to the jury in the selection of the VVM, was hired to serve in thesame capacity for the selection of a May 4 monument.24

In organizing and planning the 1985 announcement of a national designcompetition for an official monument, the May 4 Memorial Committee facedproblems similar to those with memorializing the war: how to represent mili-tary failure in the light of acceptance; how to provide a site for social cohesionand not division; how to achieve “closure” with regard to a relatively recentevent still plaguing victims and their families, the community, and the politi-cal body at large.

Committed to provide a positive, collective meaning to May 4, the com-mittee called for an artwork that would embody a national redemption narra-tive. While the official May 4 monument would not become, by federal law, anational monument (though that designation was sought), its subjects andsponsors, referents, and concerns were definitively national in character.25 Thecompetition was conducted with federal and state government oversight. Thetwenty-five-member May 4 Memorial Committee included university admin-istrators, faculty, students and alumna, local citizens, and politicians, plus Ohiosenators John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum, and eleven other U.S. senatorsand congressmen from ten different states. The design competition announce-ment expressed their desire “to bring about a re-examination of [May 4] andits meaning to the university and the nation in the flow of our history . . . forour permanent collective conscious . . . [which] requires and deserves a na-tional collective effort.”26 The monument, it read, should promote “healing”and avoid “sources of further dissension.”27 It also specified that the monu-ment be the work of an American artist.28

The committee’s diversity was established to guarantee a space open to dif-ferent perspectives on May 4, but with a two-pronged aim to promote per-sonal and political closure (through public mourning and ritual reconstitu-tions of the social-political body) and historical closure (through acomprehensive narrative of the event), the result would be a constructed spacewhere “inquiry, learning, and reflection” would be circumscribed within theboundaries of a narrative approved by a state committee commemorating anincident, possibly a crime, in which the state itself was inimically involved.

Because of this, the context of government oversight is important. State-created monuments can exert significant ideological power. Public monumentsoffer physical sites for social communion and historical edification. As tech-nologies of public memory, they can imbue time and events with a sense ofdeterministic progress and unproblematic collectivity, effectively nationaliz-


ing history. Often, they embody what Benedict Anderson has termed the “MyCountry Is Ultimately Good” principle—a feature of nationalism that vindi-cates governments and their subjects after periods of moral and ethical turpi-tude: “for if nations can, at least hypothetically, be Wrong, this wrongness istemporal, and is always set against a transcendent Right or Good.”29 As JanAssman notes, monuments stabilize and regulate cultures by riveting eventsinto a shared historical narrative, contributing to what Anderson has called“imagined community” and Lauren Berlant “national fantasy.”30 Public monu-ments, in short, can produce historical meanings as powerfully as they reflectthem and, in doing so, can facilitate forgetting as much as they evoke memory.

The May 4 Memorial Committee selected as its first-place design a pro-posal by Ian Taberner, who designed four connected grottos dedicated to eachof the four students killed.31 Like the VVM, it featured a “scar” metaphor: inTaberner’s words, it was to be “carved from existing rock below the grass sur-face with vines, greenery, and ground cover attempting to heal the wound.”32

Troubled from the outset—some felt the structure resembled a tomb, othersopposed the need to remove existing monuments on the landscape—the de-sign was disqualified when Taberner revealed his Canadian citizenship.33 Whileuniversity officials and Taberner’s attorneys fought, the second-place designwas announced as the winner: the estimated $1.2 million, fourteen-hundred-square-foot marble-and-granite plaza designed by Bruno Ast.

Ast conceived an ingenious vector scheme that imagined a number of theo-retical lines emerging from, and converging into, an epicenter within theplaza—intended to represent the ways in which the local event was connectedto “the rest of the world.” All pathways around this monument were designedto lead upward toward the plaza: “The act of processional,” Ast wrote in hisproposal, “must bring one out of the ground . . . [to] celebrate rather thangrieve.”34 Later, in his dedication statement, he reemphasized the need to cel-ebrate and offer gratitude to the victims of May 4—and all victims of the warand the era. “For it is through them,” he wrote, “that we will be able to con-tinue to exist as free American people.”35 Paul Spreiregen likened the monu-ment to the VVM: “a well of sympathy and support . . . regardless of [one’s]views on the war.”36 At the groundbreaking ceremony, university trustee Wil-liam Risman explained the monument’s edifying principle: “to form the char-acters of the past; to teach us; to help to govern the conduct of the living.”37

As in many of the official statements surrounding the construction anddedication of the official monument, the loss of lives in the war and at KentState became hardly distinguishable. This informs a late-stage revision of themonument, conceived by faculty artist Brinsley Tyrell and approved by the


university to provide balance to the site—“Daffodil Hill,” a field of 58,175flowers placed next to the official monument to honor each American killedin the Vietnam War. Although symbolic of the connections between May 4and the war, the field of flowers diminishes the significance of the four indi-vidual deaths in Kent. It integrates them into the war in a totalizing way as ifto suggest that soldiers abroad and dissidents at home all died for a unified,collective supreme cause—the cause of history and national progress. Such avision really can be constructed only by forgetting and shows how, even amidpassionate remembering, forgetting remained a crucial context.

The ambitious design and high price tag of the monument disturbed somelocal constituencies, particularly in light of a higher education budget crisis inOhio in the late 1980s. Some did not consider the monument a priority andothers found it offensive. The Ohio American Legion publicly opposed it as a“monument to terrorists” and lobbied the state legislature to block it.38 TheOhio Fraternal Order of Police adopted a similar resolution. Amid such pres-sures, the university’s initially enthusiastic effort to generate funds stalled.39 In1989, the monument budget was reduced by more than 90 percent to$100,000. Ast was retained as architect, and the project was scaled down to afragment of the original design—without the square plaza, without ascendingsteps leading to it, without a vector scheme.40 One urban legend holds that itsfrayed edges represent Ast’s frustration with the university as he tore the de-sign plans in half. While this was not true, once constructed, Ast’s monumentdid exhibit signs of the tensions that accompanied its realization.41 The “com-pleted” yet “unfinished” monument seemed to betoken the prematurity of the“closure” it was intended to convey (figs. 5 and 6).

In the effort to create an official monument, aspects of silence and denialremained. In other ways, too, the university’s desire to disassociate with May 4belied its overt commitments to remembering the event. In 1986, for example,just as Ast’s monument was selected, President Michael Schwartz quietly hadthe word “state” removed from the university seal, sports uniforms, and otherofficial material, in part to make the school’s name less readily identifiablewith the shootings.42 Meanwhile, as the design competition progressed,Smithson’s artwork quietly disappeared. Drumm’s sculpture and the otherobjects and spaces of May 4 memory, too, continued to go formally unrecog-nized, and some were, in fact, considered disposable. These facts help to ex-plain Thomas Hensley’s seemingly belated reference to the period of “accep-tance” beginning in 2000 with the thirtieth anniversary. It was a tacitrecognition that in the previous two decades, even while “closure” was soughtin an official monument, the period of so-called institutional grieving hadcontinued.


Figure 5.Ast monument inscription, 2004.Photograph by Brett Spyker.

Figure 6.Ast monument frayed edge, 2004.Photograph by Brett Spyker.


May 4, 2000

From 1990 to 2000, Ast’s monument exerted an ultimately precarious narra-tive of reconciliation and recovery. Not only did it exhibit signs of the contro-versies that limited its realization, but it was surrounded by existing, organicmonuments that could not be fully overwhelmed even when, as with PartiallyBuried Woodshed and Abraham and Isaac, the objects were absent. The “other”monuments of May 4 were residual objects of a particular institutional con-struction of May 4 history and drew attention to the very processes that ob-scured them or denied them status. The political conflicts at the heart of theMay 4 shootings, therefore, were not only built in to the official monumentbut were indelibly inscribed upon the memorial landscape, either manifestlyor in absentia.

In 1999, architect Jeanine Centuori referred to Solar Totem and the VictoryBell as objects of “vernacular memory” whose meanings were maintained in-formally by visitors more intimately familiar with the role they played in his-tory. In these unofficial monuments, Centuori detected an excess memorialfield disjointed from the official monument, offering Kent State “a goldenopportunity” to integrate them, “to show the world how to allow the diversebeliefs of a community to coexist in a public space, which, at the same timebinds the community together through agreement and collective memory.”43

In 2000, at the dawn of the “acceptance” stage, the university inducted theVictory Bell, the pagoda, and other “vernacular” May 4 monuments into theofficial memorial landscape, adding along with them the new Prentice Hallvictims’ monuments.

This marked the first time “all” of the May 4 monuments were packagedfor public consumption. The orientation kit produced for the thirtieth anni-versary, still distributed on campus, provides a map titled “Guide to May 4,1970, Sites, Memorials and Observances.” It suggests viewing the availablemonuments in a particular order according to an illustrated schematic. Thesequence constructs an interactive journey of inquiry, learning, and reflection(“first spend some time in the May 4 Resource Room . . . where you will seephotographs of the four slain students”; “Next we suggest that you visit theplaces where the May 1970 events took place. . . . As you do so, tune in toyour emotions and REFLECT on the significance of those events to you, tothe nation and the world”). Visitors are then invited then to apply principleslearned along the way by investigating the major in Applied Conflict Manage-ment (once the less-euphemistic “Peace Studies”), enrolling in the course onMay 4, donating to the scholarship funds, or joining in the candlelight walk


and vigil. One student at the observances vaguely praised the material: “I thinkit’s hard to understand without them telling you.”44

Some, however, speculated that much of this activity was motivated by acommercial impulse, somewhat ironical, to brand the university as “the” May4 historic site and to tout anniversary observances. The word “state” was rein-troduced to the university seal and sports uniforms. The campus was outfittedwith new street and building signs and other “face-lifting” elements in prepa-ration for the event. Yet, administrators denied the sense of promotion. “Iwould not characterize this as a promotion,” Carol Cartwright said, “[but] asa comprehensive commemoration.”45 Still, the thirtieth anniversary was anevent quite unlike the more mournful commemorations of the past, perhapsbringing to fruition Ast’s idea that these should take shape not as lamentationsbut as celebrations—of victims, democracy, and history.

Donald Drumm had once claimed, during the official monument selec-tion process, “My piece should be the memorial.”46 In 2000, it had becomepart of the memorial field. Nevertheless, the integration of Solar Totem, alongwith the other previously unrecognized monuments, signals a co-optation ofartifact in the service of artifice—a newly unified, all-inclusive history of theevent that would work in conjunction with a millennial narrative of “accep-tance.” Over three decades, Solar Totem, the Prentice Hall parking lot spaces,the Victory Bell, and the pagoda offered signs of a May 4 counternarrative toa knowing audience prepared to recognize them as, perhaps, more authenticlocations and monuments. Solar Totem stood as canvas for guerilla memorialacts in the form of graffiti, political iconography, and antiwar messages scrawledin chalk or scratched into its plates. To see and feel the pierced steel, or exam-ine the graffiti, one had to depart from nearby sidewalks, climb the work’sconcrete base—minor forms of transgression, beyond the paved pathways lead-ing to the official monument. The sculpture showed defiance to the limits ofappropriate behavior approved for the more elegant Ast monument, with itssmall sign in front asking visitors to “please respect this memorial site,” and toengage in “quiet contemplation” (figs. 7–9).

Smithson’s and Segal’s works are notable exclusions from the site guidesthat collect “all” of the May 4 monuments in a narrative of national develop-ment these works do not accommodate. Over the years, Kent State Universityhad accepted some monuments and memorials, denied or destroyed others,and, on occasion, enthusiastically constructed its own, each according to chang-ing institutional and cultural demands. Thus, the archipelago of memorialsites on campus contains the capability of the wrenching legacy of May 4,manifesting a continuous and ongoing struggle over the history and meaning


Figure 7.Solar Totem, 2006.Photograph by Brett Spyker.

Figure 8.Kent State University Victory Bell, 2006.Photograph by Brett Spyker.


of the event. In their absence, Partially BuriedWoodshed and Abraham and Isaac evince whathas been excluded in order to “celebrate” May4. Each of these monuments demonstrates howthe history of erasure itself cannot be fully erased

from the memorial field. Each challenges historical complacency by pointingto the fundamental inescapability of forgetting in the processes of commemo-ration.

Barbara Foley uses the terms invisibility, dismissal, and salvage to definethree treatments afforded to representations that countervail dominant cul-tural understandings of the past. Countervailing representations, she says, maybe simply ignored, virulently disdained, or, occasionally, actively revised orreinterpreted to better reflect the values of the present.47 Sensing a loose butbinding partnership between state institutions, history, and art, Foley sees thatworks of art bear considerable relations to the presumed work of the arts—that is, the role artistic representations play in establishing and affirming thesense of a secure and stable culture that is the collective subject of nationalhistory. Key to her claim is an idea, often advanced by literary theorists and“canon” reformers, that the survivability of art is predicated not only uponaesthetic evaluation. It is also, just as substantially, predicated upon an indi-

Figure 9.Prentice Hall parking lot marker forJeffrey Miller. Solar Totem and metalpagoda in background, 2006.Photograph by John O’Hara.


vidual work’s political use-value in and for the present. Invisibility, dismissal,and salvage are useful designations for looking at the alternative sites of May 4memory, because the memorial landscape at Kent State, with its vaunted andvexed memorials, brings to light how historical objects may be rendered cur-rent or obsolete depending upon changing social and political imperatives.

In Partially Buried Woodshed, we can see an example of an object of memorymade invisible—a form of refusal—because it did not accord with visions ofthe proper place or form of a historical remnant. Segal’s Abraham and Isaac,four hundred miles distant from Kent State, provides a model of dismissal andat once emblematizes the outcast status of radical art in the context of theproto-nationalist memorial field. Drumm’s Solar Totem, like other artifacts onthe memorial landscape, testifies to the power of historical invisibility anddismissal, but also raises the proposition of salvage—the way in which a par-ticular object, once excluded, can be reconditioned to meet the requirementsof the prevailing historical narrative. In each these monuments, it is possibleto witness not only the institution’s power to confer legitimacy upon historicalrepresentations according to changing narratives, but also the pressures con-tinually reexerted by the monuments themselves—for, while the universitycan set the stage of history and public memory, it cannot write the script.

(Counter-)Monuments and (Anti-)Memory

Smithson, in his conception of the “nonsite,” pioneered a form James Younglater called the Gegen-Denkmal, or countermonument—the monument thatrefuses to present as true, final, or absolute the events traditional monumentscustomarily entrench as timeless or unforgettable.48 For Smithson, the nonsitewould break down such goals, “showing, with seemingly very stable things,the instability, the elusiveness . . . within this whole complex.”49

Countermonuments repudiate the didactic functions of traditional monu-ments, overturning what Young calls their “authoritarian propensity to reduceviewers to passive spectators.”50 “The Gegen-Denkmal,” Young writes, “aimsnot to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to beeverlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passersby but to demandinteraction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation anddesanctification; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throwit back.”51

Partially Buried Woodshed is a captivating countermonument. Shroudedwithin trees that appear natural to the landscape, the work does still exist, andexists consistently with the physical, natural, and ephemeral intentions of its


artist—though its original embodiment of natural entropy was, in fact, has-tened through human interaction and neglect. Viewers in the now-unkemptspace of the copse, which itself was constructed as a cover for Partially BuriedWoodshed, may ponder the tendency within the institutional culture of KentState to turn away from the past and expunge untoward representations of it.As a ruin, the woodshed evokes the “absent present” in history—the very ele-ments of the May 4 incident the university long sought to downplay or divertattention from. The detritus of nearby maintenance work and stealthy smoke-ins litter the site indiscriminately: on a recent visit, the woodshed’s foundationcontained bits of scrap wood, a cake wrapper, a modified soda-can pipe andother garbage. The sight of this random garbage, some illicit, strewn about adestroyed, forgotten artwork provides an image of the trash heap of history, aplace where the concealed objects in the gutters of official history may befound (fig. 10).

Young writes that monuments narrate events “in the vast museum of con-temporary life . . . according to the taste of their curators, the political inter-ests of their community, and the temper of their time.”52 Revisited by newgenerations in changing times and contexts, the meanings conveyed by monu-ments are fluid and negotiable. It is, finally, how monuments and other ob-jects of memory are used that determines their aesthetic, social, and historicalvalue. Monuments may even be turned against their original goals.

The relationship between a state and its memorials is not one-sided. . . . On the one hand,official agencies are in a position to shape memory explicitly as they see fit, memory thatbest serves national interest. On the other hand, once created, memorials take on a life oftheir own, often stubbornly resistant to the state’s original intentions.53

This potential for state-created monuments to operate as countermonumentsis realized in the “incomplete” Ast monument, a work that evokes the verycontroversies that limited its construction. Yet, this potential also makes itpossible that monuments like Solar Totem, once a countermonument par ex-cellence, can likewise be put in service of the rigid or subsuming historicalnarratives they once worked against.

Kent State University is not a monolith; over thirty-five years it has beenconstituted by various and changing administrative bodies and administratorsof varying opinion about May 4. It must be recognized that, undoubtedly,many participants in May 4 memorial efforts over the years sought to offerofficial spaces open to a wide variety of perspectives. Historically, the univer-sity has been criticized at almost all commemorative turns, with even “neu-


trality” greeted skeptically. The university has beenconsistently caught in the middle of opposingarguments about May 4. Its role, very logically,has been to attempt to mediate and reconcile those oppositions. Its effortshave been appreciable. Nevertheless, contemporary commemorations, premisedupon recovery and progress, offer an overture for reconciliation that cannotcontain, to a great extent, debates about responsibility, reparations, new inves-tigations, statutes of limitations, and such.

The official May 4 monument was designed as a site of remembering andrecovering, a place where bad could be transformed into good through analchemy of memory that required forgetting important facts and questions,government policies abroad and political motives at home, and other specificcontexts of May 4 dissent. Similarly, even while contemporary commemora-tions encourage “inquiry, learning, and reflection,” for the event to be repre-sented positively or productively, as Cartwright suggested, these crucial his-torical contexts must be marginal, at best. Furthermore, “positively” and“productively” must be conceived in particular ways—forgiveness must beaccepted without justice; conspiracies and cover-ups must be left to rest; vic-tims should not be mourned but celebrated; and May 4, along with the waritself, must be seen as a contribution to the richness and success of the nation.

Because of this, for many people, commemorations still fall short of fullyremembering May 4. This is no longer from a lack of institutional efforts to

Figure 10.Partially Buried Woodshed, 2004.Photograph by Brett Spyker.


remember but from the nature of commemoration and a paradox of memory.Every act of remembering, it is said, is at once an act of forgetting. Kent State’sofficial memorial landscape cannot simply or passively mark the past. Instead,like any field of historical production, it establishes a site of symbolic exchangewhere the past is continually transformed, where official history meets publicmemory, and where signs of the past gain and lose currency. To inquire, learn,and reflect with this in mind is to open possibilities to rediscover a range ofinvisible, dismissed, and salvaged objects of the event and the war—any num-ber, one might suggest, of our partially buried woodsheds.

Notes1. Bruno Ast, “May 4 Design Statement,” Kent State University Archives, Box 85A (emphasis mine).2. For a number of early reactions to the shootings, see Ottavio Casale and Louis Paskoff, eds., The Kent

Affair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).3. Governor Rhodes Press Conference Transcripts, May 3, 1970, Kent State University May 4 Archives,

Box 178.4. Ibid.5. See Peter Davies, The Truth about Kent State: A Challenge to the American Conscience (New York:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), and William A. Gordon, Four Dead in Ohio: Was There a Conspiracyat Kent State? (Laguna Hills, Calif.: North Ridge Books, 1990). For an account of the legal case, seeJoseph Kelner and James Munves, The Kent State Cover-up (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 15–18.

6. William Gordon offers an overview of the key questions of May 4 on his personal Web page at http://members.aol.com/nrbooks/williamagordon.htm (accessed June 1, 2005). Among early interrogations,see also I. F. Stone, The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished (New York: New YorkReview of Books, 1970); and Joe Eszterhas and Michael Roberts, Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation atKent State (New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1970). Thomas Hensley and Jerry Lewis, KSUprofessors, offer a brief overview in “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The Search forHistorical Accuracy,” at http://dept.kent.edu/sociology/lewis/LEWIHEN.htm (accessed June 1, 2005).A legal chronology from Kent State University Library’s Special Collections is available at http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/legalchronology.html (accessed June 1, 2005).

An essay by Emerson College’s Professor J. Gregory Payne on the legal quandaries of the inci-dent is available at http://www.may4archive.org/aftermath.shtml (accessed June 1, 2005). This re-source also contains links to a number of extensive discussions on May 4 mysteries and a bibliographypointing to further sources.

7. As it provided the rationale for mobilizing guardsmen to the campus, responsibility for the ROTCbuilding’s arson may be one of the most important unanswered questions. For analysis, see Davies,The Truth about Kent State, 17–20; Gordon, Four Dead in Ohio, 80–89; James Michener, Kent State:What Happened and Why (New York: Random House, 1971), 188–200; and Mac Lojowsky, “KentState Thirty Years Later,” The Humanist (July 2000), at www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_4_60/ai_63257721/print (accessed November 2, 2005).

8. Joe Hallett and Alan Johnson, “To Some, Kent State Hasn’t Lost Poignancy,” The Columbus Dispatch,May 2, 2005.

9. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 96. Foucault writes of the local-global rela-tionship in studies of power: “[My analysis] should be concerned with power at its extremities [where


it] becomes embodied in techniques and equips itself with the instruments and even violent means ofmaterial intervention.”

10. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 10. White notes that narratives of the past impose meaning onevents by situating them within narrative—a self-consciously produced structure of coherent develop-ment. Every historical narrative, he writes, “has, as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralizethe events which it treats . . . to identify [reality] with the social system that is the source of anymorality we can imagine” (14).

11. “Kent State Widens Programs for Killings’ 30th Anniversary,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 30, 2000.12. “KSU Will Commemorate Shootings 30 Years Ago,” Youngstown Vindicator, April 7, 2000.13. Amanda Young, “Tent City and the Decade of Our Discontent: An Interview with Former Kent State

University President Michael Schwartz,” The Chestnut Burr, May 4, 2000, at http://www.burr.kent.edu/archives/may4/contents.html (accessed November 2, 2005).

14. Ibid.15. The Robert Smithson Retrospective, organized by Eugenie Tsai with Connie Butler for the Museum

for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, September 12–December 13, 2004, traveled to the DallasMuseum of Art, Dallas, January 14–April 3, 2005, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, June23–October 16, 2005.

16. Suzaan Boettger, “Degrees of Disorder” [unpublished interview with Robert Smithson by WilloughbySharp, 1968], Art in America (December 1998): 76–77.

17. Dorothy Shinn, “Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed” (Kent, Ohio: Kent State UniversityArt Gallery/Ohio Arts Council, 1990), 5.

18. Ibid., 7.19. William Bierman, “Burn the Woodshed! Save the Woodshed!” Beacon Magazine, Akron Beacon Jour-

nal, July 7, 1975, 6.20. Ibid., 6.21. Shinn, “Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed,” 12.22. Brage Golding, “Statement of University President,” Akron Beacon Journal, August 29, 1978.23. See Laura Putre, “In Memory of . . .,” The Chestnut Burr: A Kent State Magazine (Spring 1990): 39.

See also “American Still Life: George Segal,” PBS Web presentation available online at http://www.pbs.org/georgesegal/monuments/monuments1.html (accessed November 2, 2005).

24. “Project Advisor Noted: Viet Vets, KSU Design Have Links,” Kent Record-Courier, April 5, 1986. Twoother May 4 monument jurors, Richard H. Hunt of Chicago, Illinois, and Grady Clay of Louisville,Kentucky, also served on the VVM selection committee. The competition garnered more entries thanany other national monument design competition to date—after, incidentally, the VVM’s.

25. Ohio’s Senator Howard Metzenbaum and Congressman John Sieberling filed for official designationof the campus common as a national landmark in 1978. The National Parks Service did not conferthat designation.

26. “Competition Announcement: Kent State May 4 Memorial National Open Design Competition”(Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, October 1985), 2 (emphasis in original).

27. Ibid., 2 (emphases mine).28. Ibid., 17 (unnumbered).29. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London:

Verso, 1998), 360, 368.30. Jan Assman, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique (Spring 1995): 132–

33. Monuments, Assman explains, bring together a diverse culture by gesturing toward commonorigins and common purposes and passing on “public memory.”

31. “Statement of the Jury to the President and Board of Trustees,” May 4 Memorial Committee, KentState University, April 3, 1986. “All who come to or through [the memorial] can contemplate scenesof historic confrontation in a serene setting,” the release states.

32. Design Statement Press Release, Kent State University, April 11, 1986 (emphasis mine).33. “Chief Designer of KSU May 4 Memorial Is Disqualified,” Akron Beacon-Journal, April 16, 1986.34. Bruno Ast, “Reflections on the Year 1970,” in Kent State May 4 Memorial Design Competition Selec-

tions, ed. James E. Dalton (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 1985), 18.35. Ast, “May 4 Design Statement.”36. Margaret Ann Garmon, “Consultant Proud of Viet Memorial,” The Kent Record-Courier, April 3,

1986.


37. “Mr. [Trustee William B.] Risman’s Statement at May 4 Groundbreaking Ceremony, January 25,1989,” Kent State University May 4 Archives, Box 85A.

38. Karen Farkas, “Legionnaires Try to Block KSU ‘Terrorist’ Memorial,” Akron Beacon-Journal, Septem-ber 12, 1986.

39. One offer, presented by victim Alan Canfora on behalf of the May 4 Task Force, a local action grouphe heads, indicated that $250,000 had been pledged by a single private donor. The University citedthe right not to perform the competition in conjunction with “outside interests.”

40. Sheryl Harris, “Kent State to Scale Back May 4 Memorial,” Akron Beacon-Journal, November 16,1988.

41. In fact, Ast participated graciously with the university even during the memorial “controversy.” Hisexchanges with monument officials can be found in the Kent State University May 4 Archives, Box85A.

42. Originally Schwartz had claimed the change was made for aesthetic reasons (“The type was ugly andblack, and I just didn’t like it”) and for what another university official called “single-word advertis-ing.” Years later, however, Schwartz conceded the decision was made in part to distance the universityfrom the May 4 events: “We wanted to get people to think of the university in other terms. Kent Stateis more than just an historical event. In the 70s and 80s there was a lot of negativity about it.” SeeMike Rasinski, “How May 4 Dropped the ‘State’ from Kent,” Daily Kent Stater, May 4, 1999.

43. Jeanine Centuori, “The Residual Landscape of Kent State, May 4, 1970,” Landscape Journal 209.16(April 1999): 1.

44. “Then and Now,” The Daily Kent Stater: May 4 Commemoration Special Edition, May 4, 2000.45. “KSU Will Commemorate Shootings 30 Years Ago,” Ibid.46. Terry Holthaus, “Persistence Pays Off . . . Memorial Gets OK,” Akron Beacon-Journal, May 21, 1988.47. See Barbara Foley, “Renarrating the Thirties in the Forties and Fifties,” 1995, at http://

www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~bfoley/foleyfifties.html (accessed November 2, 2005). See also RadicalRepresentation: Politics and Form in U. S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-versity Press, 1993).

48. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 1993), 30.

49. Boettger, “Degrees of Disorder,” 76.50. Young, The Texture of Memory, 28.51. Ibid., 30.52. Ibid., vii.53. Ibid.

Documents

Kent State and Postwar Memory