Excerpts from article in The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/04/kent-state-massacre-marked-start-of-americas-polarization
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 has shaped politics into the Trump era. 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.
A majority of Americans sided with the national guard because, whatever the country’s feelings about an increasingly unpopular war, the protesters had come to represent something much more objectionable - questioning authority and revolutionary actions. That division was made all too clear as hundreds of anti-war protesters marched through New York City four days after Kent State. A large group of construction workers taunted them as anti-American and then attacked with crowbars in what became known as “The Hardhat Riot”. Dozens were injured but President Richard Nixon understood the political advantage of siding with blue collar workers against students he called “bums”.
“If there’s an era when the tribalization of the Trump era began, it’s this time. Between Kent State and the hardhat riot you have the best microcosm that there is of the beginning of the polarization that haunts America today. The way it was framed, it was the students’ fault. I was on a plane reading that and my eyes were just bugging out of my head going, wait, the kids are dead and you’re blaming them? But the country was similarly polarized as today, although Nixon seems like a saint compared to Trump”
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