The Guardian this morning described how the Kent State Massacre polarized America into conservative vs. liberal camps that was played in the Media as a generational divide.
Fifty years ago today, 28 soldiers opened fire on anti-Vietnam war demonstrators, letting loose 67 bullets in just 13 seconds. Four students were killed, nine wounded, and a fissure exposed in American society that shaped politics into the Trump era.
But little attention was paid at the time to the violence against black citizens:
To large parts of the country, the Kent State massacre was a shocking and seminal event – American soldiers gunning down white students was unthinkable until it happened.
In other parts of the country, the police were killing African Americans protesting for equal rights, including on college campuses before and immediately after Kent State with little attention from the television cameras that gave saturation coverage to the deaths of the white students.
Bill Bunch, in The Inquirer this morning (paywall) has emphasized the dramatic effect it has had on our democracy:
In 1971, alarm over college unrest was a chief driver of the pro-business community "Powell Memo" drafted by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell which declared that ‘the American economic system is under broad attack” and proposed fighting back with conservative think tanks and media. It was the idea that eventually animated talk radio, the Fox News Channel, and what would become daily attacks against “those liberal snowflakes” on campus.
...leading directly to where we are today:
Another prominent far-right thinker — the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan — argued that low or sometimes free university tuition encouraged protest. Increasingly conservative governors and lawmakers — under budget pressure during the stagflationary 1970s anyway — took this to heart, slashing taxpayer money for public universities and sending tuition to unheard-of levels. Ronald Reagan — who became California’s governor in 1966 by ridiculing long-haired campus protesters — ended that state’s free tuition on his way to the White House and a new American conservative hegemony.