Renata Adler, “But Ohio, Well, I Guess That’s One State Where They Elect to Lock and Load,” The New Yorker, October 3, 1970:
There followed [after August 1965] what might be called the period of the urban disasters—in which, having been for eight years primarily a peacekeeping force, the National Guard was suddenly in the position of killing people. In Watts, 13,393 California Guardsmen were called. Four thousand Negroes were arrested, several hundred were hurt, and thirty-four were killed. National Guardsmen do not have the authority to make arrests, but they do carry arms, and, as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, under Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois (in a report more valuable for its substantive descriptions of events than for its philosophical generalizations), subsequently put it, of those thirty-four dead Negroes “several… were killed by mistake.” In July 1966, there was the Filmore race riot in Chicago (4,300 Illinois Guardsmen called out, three Negroes killed, including a thirteen-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl) and the Hough race riot in Cleveland (2,000 Ohio Guardsmen called out, four Negroes killed, and several children injured, as in Chicago, by “stray bullets”). In state after state, Guardsmen were called out to deal with urban looting and rioting—with tanks, guns, and training designed for waging war against an organized, armed foreign enemy. In July 1967, in Newark, 4,400 New Jersey National Guardsmen were called out. The New Jersey adjutant general, James F. Cantwell, was at the time, and still is, president of the National Guard Association. When order was restored, there were twenty-three dead, twenty-one of them Negroes, two of them children. Later that month, in Detroit, when 10,253 Michigan Guardsmen were called and then federalized, the disturbance ended with forty-three Negroes dead. There began a period of serious deliberation about the Guard. It became as clear as anything about the National Guard ever gets that Guardsmen were performing duties other than those of a “first line of military reserve,” and the possibility arose that in civil disturbances much, if not most, of the tragedy and nearly all of the deaths were attributable to forces called out to restore order. Detroit was a crisis in the history of the National Guard.
Looking back on previous urban riots—the “killed by mistake” of Watts, the “killed by stray bullets” of Filmore and Hough—officials of the departments of Justice and Defense began to find the performance of Guard units, state by state, surreal. Guardsmen were in the habit of arriving by tank or truck, weapons loaded, and shooting out street lamps at night, for protection, then deluding themselves that the sound of their own shots in the dark was “sniper fire.” Since their aim, moreover, was bad, the rounds of ammunition required to dispatch a single street lamp often injured people in apartments blocks away or in cars on other streets. The first person killed by Guardsmen in Newark, for example, was a small boy in a family car being driven home from a restaurant. In Newark, coordination between the local police and the New Jersey Guard was so bad that Director of Police Dominick Spina told the Kerner Commission, “Down in the Springfield Avenue area, in my opinion, Guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back at them.”
Police Director Spina, who was tried and acquitted of charges arising out of alleged Mafia operations two years ago, and who was dismissed from his job on July 1 of this year, emerges, in the Newark riots of 1967, as something of a hero, on the order of High Noon. According to the Kerner Commission:
On Saturday, July 15, Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.
Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.
The Guardsman said that he had fired the shot to scare a man away from a window, that his orders were “to keep everyone away from windows.”
Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street… thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper. .. .”
By this time, four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived, and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere, looking for a sniper.
The Director of Police stayed at the scene for three hours. The only shot he heard was the one fired by the Guardsman.
Nevertheless, at six o'clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hays Housing project in response to what they believed were snipers.
On the 10th floor, Eloise Spellman, the mother of several children, fell, a bullet through her neck. …
Suddenly, several troopers whirled and began firing in the general direction of spectators. Mrs. Hattie Gainer, a grandmother, sank to the floor.
A block away Rebecca Brown’s 2-year-old daughter was standing at the window. Mrs. Brown rushed to drag her to safety. As Mrs. Brown was, momentarily, framed in the window, a bullet spun into her back. …
And so on, in Newark. The result of calling in National Guardsmen began to seem, in retrospect, frightened Guardsmen, frightened police, and a toll of babies in distant bassinets, grandmothers in distant kitchens, mothers with their backs to windows, idle spectators, and unarmed citizens of every sort. But Detroit was the worst.
The Guard’s behavior until the President’s move, and after, was a revelation and a nightmare. Some of the Guardsmen had traveled two hundred miles and been put on duty for thirty hours straight—most of which they spent firing. Guardsmen in Detroit fired off more than 13,326 rounds of ammunition, compared with 201 rounds fired off by the regular army. Some Guard units got lost in the city, and panicked. Two Guardsmen assigned to an intersection on Monday were still there on Friday. Guardsmen kept pulling up in tanks, shooting out streetlights, scaring themselves with the sound, and then blasting out the walls of whole buildings. At four o'clock one morning, a regular army unit went to the rescue of a Guard troop crouched behind a high school, claiming to be pinned down by sniper fire. The army colonel, hearing no shots at all, ordered all lights in an adjoining building turned on. The residents were terrified and unarmed. The Guardsmen had shot out every window. Mistaking a lighted cigarette in one window for a sniper, two Guard tanks drew up and a machine gunner opened fire, nearly severing the arm of a young woman and killing her four-year-old niece.
General Throckmorton, whose soldiers were doing fine without much shooting, thought tension might be reduced by less firing, and ordered ammunition removed from all weapons. The Guardsmen apparently never received the order. The Kerner Report continues:
Without any clear authorization or direction, someone opened fire upon the suspected building. A tank rolled up and sprayed the building with .50-caliber tracer bullets. Law enforcement officers rushed into the surrounded building and discovered it empty. “They must be firing one shot and running” was the verdict.
Julius Dorsey, a Negro private guard, was trying to defend a market from looting. He fired three shots from his pistol into the air. The police radio reported, “Looters. They have rifles.” Three National Guardsmen arrived and, seeing a distant crowd of fleeing looters, opened fire. They killed Julius Dorsey. The only soldier killed in Detroit in 1967 was Larry Post, a National Guardsman caught in a cross fire between two units of National Guardsmen.
After Detroit, it became clear that something would have to be done about the National Guard. In most states, Guard units—on the “first line of military reserve” theory—received no riot-control training at all, and in states where they did receive it, it was short and not uniform. There seemed, at the time, to be three basic positions about the Guard. One, that it was inevitably a corrupt, ungovernable mess of untrainable incompetents, and that it should be abolished as a peacekeeping force; local police forces should be better trained, and on those rare occasions when civil disturbances became extreme emergencies, the regular army, which has training and discipline, should be called in. Two, that nothing is perfect, that the Guard had done as well as could be expected, and that people in an area where there is rioting (even if they happen to be in their bathrooms or bassinets), though they may not merit the death penalty exactly, are in some sense “asking for” whatever they get. Three, that the Guard should be buffered with some immediate riot-control training, and that since the regular army soldiers, many of whom were Negroes, had done so much better than the Guard, the Guard should immediately recruit as many Negroes as possible.
