Skip to main content

Remembering Kent State




One of the most searing songs Neil Young wrote was Ohio, which he sang with Crosby, Stills and Nash.  He describes the night he and Stephen Stills put the song together upon hearing of the news at Kent State in 1970.  CSNY recorded it the next day and had it on the radio by the end of the month, offering an electric counterpoint to the Nixon administration's callous defense of the shootings that left four students dead in Ohio, which had dismissed the students protesting the war as "bums," and Zielger saying after the shootings that "when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy."

The student protests against he Vietnam War have lost their resonance over the years.  Yet, at their peak, these protests galvanized young Americans. In the wake of Kent State, over 4 million students protested across the country, closing more than 900 college campuses in May and June of that year.  Yet, most Americans saw the students as "bums" just like the Nixon administration did.

Young said in his memoirs that the counter-culture didn't get any respect.  Their songs were seen as dissonant and angry and for the most part dismissed by critics.  Yet,  "Ohio," released as a single backed by Stephen Stills earlier "Find the Cost of Freedom," peaked at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100, showing that the message carried.

With no Internet, the radio, particularly the college stations on the FM dial, were the major conduit for this generation to get its message out.  Songs became a form of pamphleteering, and Neil proved to be great at it.  But, there was something about the power of a four-part harmony that made Ohio resonate more than other songs at the time, largely because CSNY was so quick to get the message out.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...