Carl Moore, Oral History

Recorded: September 10, 1973
Interviewed by Les Stegh
Transcribed by Robin M. Katz, Celia R. Halkovich, and Gregg E. McCullough, February 2008

Note: This transcript includes geo-references to locations that are discussed in the oral history. Geographical names linked in the transcript will open in a new window or tab that takes you to that location information and map in the Mapping May 4 project. To request a transcript without geo-reference links included, please contact Kent State University Special Collections & Archives.

[Interviewer]: First of all, Dr. Moore, what was your position in May 1970?

[Carl Moore]: I was the Director of Forensics and an Assistant Professor of Speech.

[Interviewer]: What is your position now, please?

[Carl Moore]: The same two positions in addition to the fact that I am also the Director of Graduate Studies for the division of Rhetoric Communication.

[Interviewer]: I noticed in the papers that you turned over to the University Archives that you were the advisor to Student High Court. What years were you the advisor?

[Carl Moore]: I think 1970 to 1972.

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction to the way it functioned? Did it function well?

[Carl Moore]: To my judgment, it did not.

[Interviewer]: What were the problems that you encountered or the problems of the court itself in its operations?

[Carl Moore]: First of all, the problem of what actually are the powers designated to the high court. They are not very clear in the constitution of the student handbook. And secondly is how what powers are granted to the high court are interpreted by those who are in a position of allowing it to function. And my experience was that the University Legal Offices as well as the Student Conduct Office wanted to interpret its function so that it had a very, very small parameter of operations, because for it to have a larger parameter of operations would mean that it would encroach on what they saw as being their sphere of influence.

[Interviewer]: What was its relationship to the Kent Interhall Council, for example?

[Carl Moore]: We had real problems with Kent Interhall Council and to generalize what those problems were, they would be that those would be many of [the] students that could be affected by the Student High Court decision, but Kent Interhall Council saw themselves as parallel to Student Government rather than an agency of Student Government and, in effect of which, they did not think the Student High Court decisions in certain instances regarding Student Government bore on their operations. And they did not adhere to those decisions for that reason.

[Interviewer]: Did the Student High Court deal with any cases involving campus disturbances?

[Carl Moore]: Only of a very minor nature. Not of the nature affecting the substantive issues of 1960s or 70s. Things like who could be cheerleaders at the basketball game and reviewing a decision affecting students disciplinary conduct and so forth.

[Interviewer]: Did you give any testimony to the Mayer or Scranton Commissions to the FBI or the American Civil Liberties Union or the press or authors of any books or articles?

[Carl Moore]: Yes.

[Interviewer]: Could you tell who they were if you can remember, please?

[Carl Moore]: I was interviewed at some length by the FBI.

[Interviewer]: What sort of things did you tell the FBI? What sort of things did they ask you?

[Carl Moore]: I'm glad you asked that. I found that one of the more interesting interviews I had, and the reason I say that is because it was in the wake of May 4th and during the course of their investigation and I expected them to be interested in the fact that I was an eyewitness to what occurred on Saturday night at the ROTC building and other matters of that nature, but it seemed they were most interested in questions like the meeting that occurred in which the twenty-three concerned faculty signed the document which they signed. They were most interested in whether I knew the membership, in whether I was a member of certain campus organizations. I was really surprised at the kinds of things they were interested in, as opposed to what I had pre-judged them to be interested in..

[Interviewer]: What did you feel they were looking for in their questioning?

[Carl Moore]: Well, in that type of questioning, I felt they were interested in finding an explanation, a cause for what might have occurred. In other words, that there were leftist fringe groups on campus or something of that nature, rather than simply doing a job which I thought they were designed to do, which was describe what had occurred.

[Interviewer]: Did you give any testimony to the Mayer Commission?

[Carl Moore]: No, I did not.

[Interviewer]: What about the Scranton Commission?

[Carl Moore]: I didn't do it directly to the commission during their open hearings. I did meet with some of the members of the commission, specifically Joe Rhodes, previously to the commencement of the hearings and had a session or two with him. In fact, there was a number of us around campus who had a session with him before the hearings began. Partly to get our biases clear to him and other things of that nature.

[Interviewer]: Did you give testimony to the American Civil Liberties Union?

[Carl Moore]: I was responsible for organizing the testimony which the American Civil Liberties Union received and as such I never did [give a testimony] myself, I don't think. But I was responsible for organizing, coordinating the taking of depositions of people that were eyewitnesses to the events of May 4th.

[Interviewer]: Where are these transcripts now located?

[Carl Moore]: They are located in the state office of the American Civil Liberties Union under the care of Benson Woleman, the state executive secretary.

[Interviewer]: Did you give any statements to the press?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, many. On various occasions. I can't recall at this moment which were more memorable than others, but yes.

[Interviewer]: What sorts of things did they ask you?

[Carl Moore]: It depended. While the ACLU testimony was under way then the press was interested in what we were doing and why we were doing it. On other occasions people from the press both underground and above, I guess, were interested in my interpretation of certain events. Nothing is particularly memorable regarding the press.

[Interviewer]: Did you talk to any authors of any books or articles?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, I had a long interview with James Michener when he was interviewing persons for Kent State: What Happened and Why.

[Interviewer]: What sort of things did he ask you?

[Carl Moore]: He covered a broad range of topics. He was interested in the events of 1969 as well as the events surrounding May 4th. He covered the whole gamut, I would guess, of historical events. I have some qualms with his interview because of my research about it later, but I don't know if you want to get into that at this time.

[Interviewer]: We can catch it later. Did you speak with any other authors?

[Carl Moore]: I just can't think that I did off-hand. I've never talked with [Joe] Eszterhaus and [Michael D.] Roberts. Peter Davies--I've talked to agents of Peter Davies, people who were doing research for him. Like Bill Gordon on campus here, for example. That's not fair to say "for" him so much "in conjunction with" him. Well, wait. [Phillip K.] Tompkins and [Elaine Vanden Bout Anderson][who wrote] Communication Crisis at Kent State. Yes, I did speak with them at some length because they were very close friends of mine as well as help them in designing and carrying forth their research in that work. I wasn't an interviewer for them, but I helped them with the conceptualization of their study. I can't think of any other authors off-hand.

[Interviewer]: Do you have any transcripts of any statements that you gave to the FBI, for example?

[Carl Moore]: No, I do not.

[Interviewer]: What do you feel were the long-range causes, if any, of the disturbances at Kent State in May 1970?

[Carl Moore]: Obviously, you realize these are coming from my own biased interpretation.

[Interviewer]: That's what we want.

[Carl Moore]: OK. The long-range causes--I'm not going to be very original here--are, in my judgment, the result of the awakening consciousness of people on the college campuses to how their government was behaving and why that behavior did not seem in their interest or particularly humanitarian. When that awakening consciousness came into conflict with more recent behaviors on the part of the government--the invasion of Cambodia--and isn't it ironic that we just found out that they were bombing so much earlier that he didn't even have to get on the air and make that announcement, given behavior they were acting [under?], which is the very kind of thing that people were responding against on college campuses. That combined with an administration at this particular campus--that wasn't probably very different than many other college administrations around the country, but nonetheless was distrusting--behaved in ways that were from the in loco parentis tradition of running a college campus, in ways which were reactionary rather than open, I think led to the causes. Now I just dealt with an abstraction there, if there are any of those things you want me to deal with in more particularly, I'll be happy to.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel there was a long-range student, faculty, administrative power conflict going on at this time?

[Carl Moore]: That's what I meant by my second line of suggestions there. Yes, I saw the administration on this campus as not being a very open one, which led to certain strains between the students and that administration.

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction to the administration's handling of the 1968 walkout by the Black United Students?

[Carl Moore]: I think they ultimately handled it right and I couldn't blame them for taking so long to handle it right, because it was kind of a new event and they didn't quite know how to deal with it. What I mean by ultimately handling it right is by the granting of amnesty and whatever the hell that meant at the time, but that was an issue. By not being vituperative, by not wanting to punish, I think they handled it right. They realized this was a group of people trying to do what they thought was right. I think, ultimately, they handled it right.

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction to the way the administration handled the 1969 incident in the Music and Speech Building?

[Carl Moore]: I think that, as Michener argues and I agree, was a very direct precursor of what occurred on this campus. I thought they handled it in every possible way as poorly as they possibly could. If [Donald] Schwartzmiller is right in his revelations of either last year or the year before--that that was a planned trap--I thought that was wrong. And I thought it was wrong in the way the University reacted after they trapped those people in the building and then summarily suspended them. It even went against their own policy. I thought that more than anything else led to the climate of discomfort that existed on this campus.

[Interviewer]: Why was there such a difference between the way they handled the incidents in 1968 and 1969?

[Carl Moore]: They were only separated by about six months too, weren't they? I'm not a sociologist or psychologist or any of those "ists", but it seems to me that there are some very distinct reasons for it. One reason being that white, very middle-class college administrators that come out of certain grain don't know how to deal with black folk in this country, and so one way to deal with them is by ignoring them, even when they make trouble you ignore them. So dealing with black people is a very different thing than dealing with upstart kids who [are] mostly white, mostly middle-class just like you, whose hair is too long and they need a good shave--I think part of it is very cultural and very racial in terms of how they handled the two events. I think part of it also is by that time around the country there was a good deal of concern as to what kinds of measures do you exercise against these fanatical SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] types, and they responded by over-responding in my judgment. In some ways I can understand why they did it, being the fact that they are located in Portage County and having the influences that they have on them in Portage County, that they have the constituency that they do, that they have the conservative state legislature that they had and conservative state governor that they had. I can understand why they would react with a relatively heavy hand. I don't think it was right and I don't know if that's an explanation for it, but it might be.

[Interviewer]: Why was the group called the Concerned Citizens for the KSU Community formed in 1969?

[Carl Moore]: Well, right after there were the summary dismissals of students, a meeting was held, I think it [was] on a Wednesday night, the meeting was held Thursday afternoon, Wednesday night, April 16th it occurred. Thursday afternoon a meeting was held in the commuters' cafeteria, which no longer exists, I guess, over in the old student union now--and a lot of people were there and they were deciding what could be done to try and get this administration to realize what they had done and I remember that meeting very vividly and someone just came up with a name, it was Byron Lander in fact, he said, "Let's call ourselves CCC", it was the age of NATO and UN and all kinds of initials, they wanted to have a catchy name, I guess. I even forgot what CCC stands for, KSU Concerned Citizens Committee or something.

[Interviewer]: Concerned Citizens of the KSU Community.

[Carl Moore]: Right. So it was just a name that one person offered up to the group and then that group in turn got a steering committee and I ended up on it, not directly but indirectly, and experienced a number of I think very dramatic events as a result of my participation on the steering committee.

[Interviewer]: Who was Byron Lander?

[Carl Moore]: He is in the political science department here and first was active in the committee in giving it some legal advice and quasi legal advice because he is an attorney or has his law degree or at the time had part of it or something like that, but then he didn't stay with that group at all. I guess his most memorable event was giving the name.

[Interviewer]: Why did you join the group?

[Carl Moore]: Well, I just went because I thought the university had behaved in a wrong way and a number of my students had convinced me that that was the case as well as my believing it was the case. A number of my students were very much involved, and I believe in being involved where they're involved, for one. And two, as I just indicated, I thought the university was wrong in acting so I went to see what they were going to do, and at that meeting I explained what I had witnessed that evening, April 16th during the lock-in or whatever you want to call it. And then, later one in the weekend, on Friday, the next day I guess, I was coming from a meeting and they saw me and they said come with us and I had some time and so I went with them. They ended up at a press conference where they were running their story down and I participated in it and gradually I became a member of the group and it was just absolutely by coincidence. I didn't intend to become [a member] but when I saw things like Bill Van Wayden, the president of the student body disown it on the grounds that it was full of radicals and unknowns and make slurs against them and things of that nature, I wanted to find out more about them and I didn't see them being the kind of group that he was characterizing them as being. It was as much inquisitiveness I'm sure as it was pure chance.

[Interviewer]: What sort of activities did the group become involved in?

[Carl Moore]: It's hard to remember. Well that was the famous weekend because we met a whole bunch of times, there were some marches on the campus, I don't know if it was that weekend or the next weekend --I think it was the next week, there was a number of activities and meetings and evening meetings trying to get the conscience of the campus aware of what the University had done and why it was wrong. I didn't participate in most of it, I wasn't even there for most of it, I would have a class or just wouldn't be there. One of them was planning this referendum, which was held I think Monday the 21st or something like that, either the next Monday or the following Monday, I'm just not straight on my dates right now--and then we held this referendum, we held this Monday meeting which the university for the first time in the history of the university published a Monday edition of The Kent Stater telling students not to go and not to participate. At any rate we held a meeting on The Commons and the decision as for us to hold a referendum to see whether we should strike or do what. And then later the group kind of existed after that referendum and held a couple sit-ins to try and get matters resolved that still hadn't been resolved regarding the immediate suspensions and other related matters. I'm not being very precise but I guess its essential function was to raise the conscience and make the campus aware of what had occurred in the aftermath of the lock-in at Music and Speech. Although at the time it wasn't known that it was a lock-in. A lot of people assumed that and that was one of the reasons they were acting the way they were.

[Interviewer]: Why was the group disbanded during May?

[Carl Moore]: We had some real interesting meeting[s] in which we tried to decide what we could do to get the campus aware. One thing we thought of was taking over the Music and Speech Building, I'm too conservative for actions like that so I kind of pooh-poohed it, not that I had control of pooh-poohing it but there were others as well--but they thought of all kinds of dramatic things they could do to try and get the campus aware. I think it was just the moment had died and it didn't seem to be the need for it, although a few people continue to raise money so they could pay off printing bills and things like that.

[Interviewer]: What was the impact of the group? Do you think it had any impact?

[Carl Moore]: Immediately it had a tremendous impact. It conducted that Friday the largest demonstration probably ever held on this campus, larger than anything in May of 1970. They got 7,000 to 8,000 students to march around this campus, it got more people to turn out for the referendum that it held than has ever voted in student body presidential elections. I thought it had a significant impact on the community because there was a lot of reaction both for and against it.

[Interviewer]: Was the group linked in any way with the Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Socialist Alliance?

[Carl Moore]: You see, that was an example of how the university mishandled the situation. They obviously thought that the group was [linked]. Now there might have been people in the group who were also members of those groups but that was because the group said anybody could join, we're a democratic group where anybody could participate, but no way were we directly linked, whatever the hell that word means, and that is what the newspaper tried to get people to believe in the Monday Kent Stater. For example, at one time we were just in a position of calling off that Monday rally when it turned out that Matson, Dean of Students at that time, or Vice President for Student Affairs, or whatever he was called, had just gotten a report he claimed from the [State] Highway Patrol that Steve Shiraff, one of the leaders of the group had been at an SDS meeting that weekend. Another example was these pamphlets that came out of Kent Interhall Council and Student Government paid for by university funds that said don't go to the rally and said look around you to see all these strange faces and things like these. Now whether SDS is taking advantage of sympathy exerted by CCC or not I don't know, but it was not an SDS organization. I have never in any way been affiliated with the SDS for example, and I was a member of that group [CCC]. Our only concern was a civil libertarian concern that the university had not acted in consonant with their own policy an we thought that wrong and we thought it was something that deserved to be righted. We decided to do what we could to right it. We didn't but we tried.

[Interviewer]: What was your impression of the importance of Students for a Democratic Society on campus?

[Carl Moore]: You mean throughout the whole sphere of their influence on campus at that time?

[Interviewer]: Yes, through the whole period.

[Carl Moore]: They as much, probably more than any other group helped to raise the consciousness level of students on the college campus, not just here but across the country. I have a theory of politics and it it probably doesn't make much sense to politicians that suggest that almost in a martyr-like way some groups have to act on the extreme fringe but then it opens up the middle in terms of what is acceptable behavior. It takes the Black Panthers acting in an extreme, maybe violent way, for example, to make it very acceptable for the middle class blacks to act even in the way they're acting and then they become very acceptable, when before they might have been considered unacceptable. And to that degree, what they did is that they opened up the middle in terms of what was acceptable behavior on college campuses throughout our society. And we owed them a debt. Likewise, I'm not so narrow-minded, I hope, that I think we owe a debt to George Lincoln Rockwell, American Nazi Party or the John Birch Society or any group on the far right as well, in the sense that they opened up in terms of what we are willing and not willing to accept as a society. Call it what you want -- political martyrdom or whatever -- I believe they're very helpful in accomplishing that goal.

[Interviewer]: Who wrote in your papers that you gave the [KSU?] Archives--there's a piece in there entitled "Some Rhetorical Questions Being Asked Those Involved in the Suspension of SDS at KSU in 1969." Here's a copy of that. Do you know who wrote that? Did you write it?

[Carl Moore]: I think so. I think Bill Gordon of the speech department did. Dr. William I. Gordon. I think he wrote it and he might even be in today. We could go down and ask him. I might have contributed to it, I just don't remember.

[Interviewer]: When did you write your summary of your activities of April 16, 1969?

[Carl Moore]: I don't know when I wrote it. I think I know why, though. Do you want me to go into that?

[Interviewer]: Yes, right, I'd like to know why you wrote it too.

[Carl Moore]: While these events occurred or just after, some people from our department left and went to a convention in St. Louis, I think it was. I didn't go because of the events and the aftermath of the events. Interestingly they were off at this convention talking about campus disruption and what can be done about it or what have you, while we were here experiencing it. And one of my mentors, who was a teacher in my doctoral program at Wayne State and a good friend of mine, Dr. Philip Thompkins, who wrote Communication Crisis at Kent State, who later came here to teach and was teaching here at that time in 1969, I think he recommended that I should write it all down because I would soon forget it if I did not. It was on his advice. Plus, there was another reason, I guess, when I was caught in the elevator and I'll read that ultimately I imagine, on the tape, they took my key and there was all kinds of rumors that I was going to be arrested. In fact a reporter from the [Akron] Beacon Journal, whom I came to know, said that he had just come from the Sheriff's Department [and] there was a warrant for my arrest for my participation in that event. Insomuch as anything else I wrote it so that I would be clear should I ever be called to court or any reason like that. I'm not sure that's the reason but, you know, in the aftermath it seems like that was a reason.

[Interviewer]: Why weren't you arrested?

[Carl Moore]: Well, when he told me that, when he came to me and said that that was going to occur, they were getting ready this warrant supposedly, oh, a few weeks after the event and things had quieted down a little, and I went to the ombudsman and told him that apparently there was a warrant out for me and I said, Look, I'm just reporting to you, maybe I deserve to be arrested and if I deserve to I should, I'm not trying to avoid arrest. My position was arresting me at that point would have exacerbated the situation in which they were starting to gain control over, you see I was a kind of symbolic person because of my participation in the elevator, to have arrested me then would have gotten temper and dander up all over campus, and I think then the university called and negotiated with the Sheriff's Department or whatever on those terms. I'm not sure, that's conjecture on my part. You might talk to Harold Kitner about that, he was the link. I was more than willing to be arrested, but see, I think the point I would like to make here is that symptomatic of my participation in the CCC as well, my concern was getting out of the situation as well as possible and the best interest of the university, not in the interest of the university that they should act in arbitrary and capricious ways, but in the interest of the university that we don't destroy this institution over something not worthwhile. That's in effect why I acted that way. I didn't want to see us exacerbating the situation.

[Interviewer]: Why did you help the students escape from the building?

[Carl Moore]: Can I read my statement and then I'll elaborate on that if that doesn't go into it. Wednesday, April 16, 1969. I wrote this in a kind of shorthand. Or if you want me to elaborate, stop me at any point. Early in the day could not make up mind whether to attend AAUP [American Association of University Professors] meeting which was going to discuss whether to contribute funds to Matthew Flanagan's defense --"

[Interviewer]: Excuse me, who is Matthew Flanagan?

[Carl Moore]: Matthew Flanagan was a member of SDS who was distributing leaflets that had the word "motherfucker" on it and I think a few other words, I don't know, and he was arrested for distributing these leaflets by Patrolman Kelly, I think it was. Probably most people assumed it was an attempt on the part of the police to get SDS, as one of the tactics used to get their membership. So the AAUP, for example, had condemned the university's arrest of Flanagan, but then they didn't decide whether or not they wanted to contribute money to his defense. American Civil Liberties Union took on the case and fought it for the attorney who handled the case. "Rebel Flanagan," which was his nickname, was arrested many more times before it was all over. The AAUP passed a resolution condemning the university's action in the affair but seemed hesitant to contribute the two hundred dollars Mrs. Barbara Tenner has asked for. She's the person who offered the resolution saying to do it. She is now Barbara Child of the English department. She has since been divorced.

The rally members of SDS were holding in front of the Student Union Building. At stake at the rally was the termination of the charter of SDS, the legal charges brought against leaders of SDS for their actions the previous week when they tried to take over the Administration Building.. Some of us felt those charges had been selectively administered and most germane to the particular rally--the fact that the Administration was holding closed hearings regarding the suspension of SDS students--they wanted open hearings so the cause could be publicized." I think one of the Bennigan [?] brothers, not the Berregan [?] brothers. There were some rebel priests from Cleveland who were at that rally speaking. In other words, I couldn't make up my mind whether to go to the rally or go to the AAUP meeting. I didn't do either, by the way. That afternoon at 3:20, I attended a meeting in Chairman Cowperthwaite's office--Cowperthwaite is the Chairman of the School of Speech--in order to determine the winner of the Pierce Memorial Award for outstanding service to the university in the field of speech. We selected two winners, Randall Gerber and Robin Rudd. I'm not sure why I put that in.

After coming out of the office, I noticed the police in the building. They were in the process of chaining the doors. Rumor related to me was that the rally planned to come to the Music and Speech Building to take over the radio and TV station for the purposes of controlling the campus communications network. That's what people were saying in the building. I had been coming in and out of my office, eavesdropping and participating in the conversation Ray Falcione, who was my office-mate and an instructor in the School of Speech, was having with Art Fine. Art was an SDS member, known on campus as, I guess, one of the SDS leaders, I'm not sure. Ray was interviewing Art in conjunction with his work on the committee assigned by the Division of Rhetoric and Communications to investigate the events at the Administration Building, whether the administration had proceeded properly in their actions against SDS and their leaders. I told Art about the police blocking the building. He confirmed that the rally was indeed coming to the Music and Speech Building. The reason being that the closed hearings had been transferred to that building. The rally was going to come in order to request open hearings. By the way, Art later was one of those arrested, I think either with the group or in some other capacity, and Ray and I were witnesses for him. I don't think--did I ever go to trial? I don't remember. I think it was thrown out of court before I went to trial. We were witnesses that he was legitimately in the building at that time, that he was here on Ray Falcione's request.

I went downstairs and told Leroy Cowperthwaite that's what I had heard. He asked Mrs. Garrett if Vice President Matson had called to request a room. She recalled that he had, room 306. Mrs. Garrett is Secretary in the Chairman's Office. I went up to the third floor to see what was going on. There were three or four police on the floor in the hall. I walked by 306 and noticed a group of people in either that room or 305. I don't remember. The room was dark and most of the people were in civies. It appeared as if there were a few police and most of them had walkie-talkies, as did the police on the main floor and in front of the building. As I recall now, afterward, it seemed like it was almost a nerve center for what they were doing. Around four o'clock or a little after, I was talking with people and police in front of the south entrance to Music and Speech. We could hear reports coming over their walkie-talkies. The rally was headed for the Administration Building. After a while, they were headed toward the Music and Speech Building. The rally wasn't to get to the building until five o'clock or a little after.

When the police saw them--quote, "coming over the hill between the two dorms up the road" -- they started to shut down what they said was the last door open to the building, one of the four doors into the south entrance. They locked the last outer door and all the inside doors and chained them up. A group of people gathered at the door outside seemingly in preparation or waiting for the rally to arrive. Those inside the building were told that they would have to wait until the whole thing blew over before they would be allowed to leave the building. When the rally arrived, I went into Professor Cowperthwaite's office to see what was going on. I could not see much. The reason I went to his office, by the way, was because it opened up to that south entrance. I went in and out of the office trying to get the best vantage. From the noise and confusion, it seemed as if brief skirmishes were breaking out in front of the building.

A small man with glasses asked to use the phone. He was a bit frantic. He called up someone to report that a fight was going on outside of the building, that there were no police outside of the building and that if he had a fog horn or something, he could read the riot act to them. He was concerned that the whole thing would break open. There were no police outside of the building. Earlier during the period I was going in and out of the office, I noticed students walking up the path along the west side of the building -- that would be this side we're by here. I wondered at that time whether the door near the outside theater in between the Music and Speech sections of the building was open.

I was in the main office and started north when I heard a crash. I ran to the ground level door, halfway between the stairwell. There was a girl there, a secretary in the Broadcasting Office who said, "Why did he do that? I saw the guy break the window, I could recognize him." The police came immediately to make certain no one entered through the door. I passed him on the way and as one of them was reporting on a walkie-talkie, "They just kicked in the door." I leaned over to ask who "they" were. As we were down by the door, we could see many of the students running around the west end of the building, and for the door between the Music and Speech sections. I went down the hallway for that end of the building and found that the students were lined up the stairway, at that time they were already up and had congested in the stairway. People were chanting things, yelling at each other, et cetera. Some were taking pictures.

The only person who was taking pictures who I can now recognize was Redman from the Akron-Beacon Journal. People were putting their hands over the cameras, that really upset the cameraman that they did that. There seemed to be dialogue taking place between the group immediately before the storm doors on the third floor and those on the third floor hall. After a noise, those on the stairs and prowling went pouring into the third floor hall. I followed. I did not witness them breaking in the door or opening the door or anything of that nature.

After arriving on the third floor, I noticed that the people were grouped around the center of the hall. Howie Emmer was speaking to them. He was raised above the crowds, seemed to be on a chair or box. He said that it was fitting the closed hearing was being held in the Speech Building, the Speech people are the ones who held their National Convention in Chicago even after the August blood bath. Most of his rap he spent on the issue of closed hearing and SDS's four demands, ROTC, the Law Enforcement School, the Liquid Crystal Government Contract, and the Northeast Ohio Crime Lab. Sometime during Howie's rap or just after, I heard someone yell, The hard hats are coming. I left for the stairs to be met halfway down by a large group of the Portage County Police. They came from all over the county, I was to later find out, who wore hard hats and carried clubs. I guess the hard hats meant they wore crash helmet-type things.

We were not permitted to go down the stairs even though they were told we--Hugh Monroe and myself, Monroe being another faculty member--were faculty. Hugh Monroe pressed the man who appeared to be in charge saying we were faculty and grad students who had a right to be in the building. We were told that it was the campus police's show and could not be let down without their permission. We went up to the third floor and exited via the elevator. I and others made a few trips until we got all our people down to the second floor. Students came down with us. See, they quadranted off the third floor, but the second floor was free from there on down. And so we were left--so I left by the elevator and came back to make sure all our people were down out of it. We left the building via the elevator and with police permission.

We exited by the receiving area. A janitor, Luther, was guarding the door. In fact, two of the entrances to the building were only guarded by janitors, throughout the entire thing. Most of the students outside of the building appeared to be in that area. I stayed in the area. There were some county police in that area, but they left. There were some SDSers rapping about the four demands. There were dialogues taking place between the SDSers and Greek veteran types. Some got verbally heated, provoking usually on the part of the Greek veteran types, but did not result in fighting. Howie Emmer gave a speech from the third floor window with a megaphone, greeted with some jeering. A black girl addressing her black brothers downstairs -- there were twenty or so black men grouped -- talked about racism in the country, et cetera. When she finished, one of the blacks yelled out, "Any smart remarks?" [to?] one of the blacks downstairs. There were none. The blacks downstairs started jiving, talking between themselves. It was a bit tense.

I went up to Ken Calkins of the History Department and said that we should get some faculty together. Those who were in the area and see what role we could play in the situation. We just simply wanted to see if there was something we could do to ameliorate the situation. Ray Heisey chose not to join us, and seeing no other faculty, we entered the building where Luther was stationed. We went around the building asking people who was in charge. We would introduce ourselves, say why we were there, our presence was not needed. Our search for people got us to the third floor. You see, we literally were walking and ultimately we took the elevator to the second floor and then took it to the third floor. People started to get on the elevator and it wasn't our intent to do it, but we just took them down. We made four or five such trips, it was just as incidental as you could imagine, this is to answer your question of why. It just happened, no motive on our part to go up and take people down, it just kind of happened.

On one of the trips, we brought down the committee which was trapped on the third floor, the committee that was holding the hearing. They refused to come down on one of the trips because there were students no the elevator and they refused to come as long as there were students. Later, they decided not to be so proud and came down with us; in fact, the guy in charge of the hearing was Bobby Smith from the English Department, who is a pretty good friend of mine now, but it was an interesting situation. We stopped for a while, probably fearing apprehension. I don't know, it just wasn't all that clear in our minds. It was just a deed and we were doing it. When we decided to make some more runs, we found that the elevator would not respond to our call.

We entered the building via the Music [section?] over and through the basement and found the elevator blocked. See, the elevator, if you keep the door open, can't run--so they put a trash can to prevent it from closing. There was sand in it, where you put cigarette butts, on the first floor. Nearby police, their presence, prevented us from using it. We walked around the first floor noticing the preparations taking place were processing the students -- what I mean by that is that they were setting up the procedures for arresting the students. We asked people who was going to be processed. We were told, Some of the students. We were asked what the charges would be: no answer. We asked what criteria for selection would be used: no answer.

We noticed a meeting going on in Theater Divisional Headquarters and were told it was a meeting with student leaders. We noticed Jim [Owhymer? Oheimer? Nauheimer?] and Vince somebody, then we were talking with Dean Ambler [?]. I knew Jim [Owhymer?] who I think was student body president at that time, but he was also a member of SDS. Two rows of hard hats lined up on the first floor supposedly to clear the students from the south end of the building, so that the processed students could be taken to the waiting busses. I don't know if I mentioned it in here: we noticed some girls being taken out by a side door, black girls, the only blacks that were left upstairs. They were not arrested, they were taken off by some other means; again, I think it is part of what I was saying before, the university really does not know how to deal with black folk.

When the hard hats got to the front entrance, Kent and I went to the first floor elevator, removed the trash can and took the elevator to the third floor. The students decided to leave the elevator, they had a discussion, they didn't know whether to leave or not. They said, Should we stay and get busted, or go, or what should we do? And finally, they took a vote or something, because then they decided to go. The students decided to leave the elevator. On the second such elevator run, we took one whole load down we were met at the bottom by one campus and one county police officer. It was Officer Herman who was the campus police. Using the janitor's key, they took us to the second floor. At that point, Herman asked me for my key and name, told me the key would be returned the next morning. We waited on the second floor along with a group of students who had been trapped by the circumstances. We we separated from the students on the elevator.

There are good guys and there are bad guys. It was right over here, in fact, it was in my office, and so we waited here while the students were going to be arrested. Waited over there. They were arrested and we weren't. We were let go after quite a wait. By the way, the reason we got caught, apparently, was students we were letting down by the elevator were running around to the front of the building where most of them were locating--jeering the police, and the busses, and what have you, saying, They are letting us go, they are letting us go, they are letting us go! And so the police decided they would go investigate, and they found us. Had those students not done this, we probably would have had them all out just about the time they were ready to arrest them. They would have gone upstairs and there wouldn't have been anybody. I argue there probably would not have been the aftermath of events that occurred here, but is probably naive on my part.

[Interviewer]: How many people could you take out in one elevator load, would you guess?

[Carl Moore]: Do you want to see the elevator? Would it make any difference?

[Interviewer]: I saw it when I walked down the hall.

[Carl Moore]: Twenty to twenty-five people, I guess. It's a big elevator, a service elevator used to bring pianos up on and theatrical equipment and things like that. It's a good-sized elevator and I think we could take fifteen anyway. Fifteen to twenty-five, somewhere in that range. We made estimates [of] 150-200 we got down altogether. Maybe that's high.

[Interviewer]: When was the Portage County American Civil Liberties Union founded?

[Carl Moore]: Just about the time these events were occurring. It was in the process of being organized.

[Interviewer]: Was there any connection between its founding and what happened?

[Carl Moore]: No, this just gave an impetus to it in terms of probably some of its membership. Barbara Child, who was then Barbara Tenner, was responsible for that and probably would be the best person to talk with.

[Interviewer]: Why did you join it?

[Carl Moore]: I hadn't joined it previously. The first meeting I ever attended in my life, I was elected to the board or something like that. I don't know. Bill Gordon on our faculty convinced me that that was an organization that did good, and I saw a lot of good that needed to be done. You know, he just convinced me. Ultimately, I was chairman of that organization, but I'm still convinced, I'm still a member and still believe it did good then and it's done good since.

[Interviewer]: What role did the Civil Liberties Union play in the litigation that came about after 1969-1970.

[Carl Moore]: Much after 1970. A great deal. In 1969, I'm not sure what role they played. Then there was that Flanagan involvement I mentioned earlier. The strong advisement roles in terms of telling people what their rights were. I don't remember about 1969. 1970 is a whole other matter.

[Interviewer]: We'll get to that a little bit later.

[Carl Moore]: But I think I gave you some documents that summarize some of that.

[Interviewer]: Were students suspended as a result of this 1969 incident?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, that was one of the issues, that those people who were arrested were immediately suspended. Along with some others, I think.

[Interviewer]: Were any of them re-instated?

[Carl Moore]: I think some were. They held hearings for them. Part of the problem with the hearings they held was Ralph Oates, who is now a lawyer in town. [He] was with the Office of Student Conduct programs and he was acting on the hearing board, and the same time, he was prosecuting attorney and there is some question about the legality of those hearings.

[Interviewer]: The fact that some of these students were re-instated, did it have anything to do with a creation of an attitude, say, that the administration would back down during future demonstrations?

[Carl Moore]: I don't think so. I thought, you know, some people just had good cases, some people were entrapped. It had to do with motive that they were ascertained, why they were there, and what they did. Now the exact record is really fuzzy in my mind. I could do some research and clarify it, but I just don't remember.

[Interviewer]: Was the lack of communication within the university community a major factor or major cause of what happened in 1969 and in 1970, specifically?

[Carl Moore]: I believe it was. That's a very complex thing, though. Lack of communication between the administration and students primarily, I think.

[Interviewer]: Your role as a faculty member, do you think that you knew anything more than the students did about what was going on and what was going to happen?

[Carl Moore]: No, no. In fact, as you can tell from my statement, I read a little while ago that one of my goals as a faculty member [was] to see what role we could play and we found there was no role we could play.

[Interviewer]: To get specifically into 1970 and the events of May, what do you feel were the immediate causes of the disturbances that began on May 1st?

[Carl Moore]: Not long-range causes, but the immediate?

[Interviewer]: Immediate things.

[Carl Moore]: Well, Nixon's speech, the rally on Friday, which maybe got the university apprehensive that something was going to occur. You mean what caused these things?

[Interviewer]: What say for example caused the disruptions that began on Friday night?

[Carl Moore]: Nice weather is the reason they were there to begin with. The weather turned nice. The rally on Friday and people congregating and then the rally on Friday afternoon, the Black rally, got some people together that might have said let's go downtown. Some people conjecture that. Then there was that motorcycle incident downtown. I just think there were just a series of random events. I don't think it was a planned demonstration.

[Interviewer]: Do you think that the Nixon announcement of the invasion of Cambodia had anything to do with what happened Friday night?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, yeah, it had something to do with it, but it was only a contributing factor. I think it wasn't a sole factor. It had something to do with it in the sense that that's why people at the rally on Friday who might have said let's go downtown. It had something to do with it in the sense that once activity started downtown they used that as a rallying point for agitation. Do you see the distinction I'm drawing there? Not that it caused them to do it, but once it got started then that could be one of the things they could say they were upset about. It was a contributing, strong contributing factor, but a contributing, not a sole factor. I think a lot of things, it was the nice weather, the motorcycle incident, a whole lot of things. And that's all hearsay by the way, because I wasn't there Friday.

[Interviewer]: Were you on campus Friday at all?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, I was at the rally Friday at noon.

[Interviewer]: Did you see the Constitution buried?

[Carl Moore]: Yeah.

[Interviewer]: What was the impact of that act, do you think? How did you react to it also?

[Carl Moore]: I thought it was a persuasive thing. I thought it was effective. I noted react of the audience, acceptance over it. There was that one man who jumped out of the audience who tried to prevent it and just heightened the situation somewhat. I thought it was an effective rhetorical tool.

[Interviewer]: What do you think the reaction of the Administration was to it? Do you have any idea?

[Carl Moore]: I have no idea.

[Interviewer]: Through this whole incident there's been accounts and stories of outsiders who came on to the campus. What's the theory of it? Do you give this theory any credence?

[Carl Moore]: I don't give it credence as an explanation for what happened. But I do think there were outsiders. There's no doubt that there were. Mark Rudd was around, Bernadene Dohn had been around and Jerry Rubin had been around just previously to May 1970. They did come, the passed through here because there was a relatively growing SDS Chapter and that was part of the sequence of their national leadership and the ways they behaved apparently. The [alleged] fact that they masterminded what occurred here I don't accept.

[Interviewer]: Where were you Friday night when the incidents downtown occurred?

[Carl Moore]: Sleeping. Some of an interesting relationship to it in the sense that I was in bed and then my son, who was seven or eight months old, got very sick, very sick, and we took him into the hospital in Ravenna--Emergency. This was about two or three in the morning, and while we were there a policeman came in who had been hit with a rock or something like that and he'd been talking about Kent or Kent State and I said, "What happened?" "Oh, those damn students are up to it again," that's what the nurse told me. I said, "What?" She said, "There's thousands of them rioting," And we drove into town and decided to drive by downtown. We didn't see very much. We didn't see hardly anything at all, as I recall.

[Interviewer]: Where did you live at the time?

[Carl Moore]: Silver Oaks Apartments. And I don't even remember how the sequence went. She said five hundred students--the nurse said five hundred students were rioting, and then the radio from an Akron station said a thousand students rioting in downtown Kent. The next morning, we had a phone call from Peoria, Illinois, mind you, and it was in their newspaper that two thousand students had rioted. Each time the number got bigger and bigger and later we found that the number was about two hundred or something.

[Interviewer]: So, you actually knew nothing as the events were taking place of what was going on?

[Carl Moore]: Correct.

[Interviewer]: After the events took place, have you received any indication of who is making any of the decisions of how to react to this? For example, were the administrators involved in any of the discussions with city officials?

[Carl Moore]: I was invited to a meeting or two on Saturday. I don't think I went. I'd been relatively close to certain student government leaders and one of those was Craig Morgan, who is a very good friend of mine. Apparently they were having a meeting Saturday afternoon to decide what to do Saturday night. I didn't go to that meeting. I knew about it, but I don't know what occurred at the meeting in terms of decision making. But they did involve students.

[Interviewer]: Why didn't you go?

[Carl Moore]: I forget. I had a conflict. A good football game on TV -- no, I don't know what the conflict was.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that the subsequent trouble of Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday could have been avoided if more forceful action had been taken on Friday night? If more arrests, for example, had been made?

[Carl Moore]: No. No, I think that would have just exacerbated the situation even more. I'm not -- I don't know the situation that well to know if they were in a position to do so or a position to -- I just have a feeling that it wouldn't, is all I can say.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that the presence of the police and their actions on Friday night served to inflame the students?

[Carl Moore]: I can't say. I just don't know enough about it.

[Interviewer]: On Saturday, how closely were you following the events?

[Carl Moore]: From about seven o'clock on, very closely.

[Interviewer]: Were the rumors and threats on Saturday of violence real, do you think?

[Carl Moore]: Yeah, there were a number of them: that people were coming into town, rumors of the Guard, and people were descending on the city.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel they were real?

[Carl Moore]: Yeah, I know your question. I just -- I'm trying to recreate my circumstances and I just can't do it. I don't know. I don't know how I felt about it.

[Interviewer]: How extensive was intercommunication within the University at this time on Saturday?

[Carl Moore]: Limited. I was invited to come to a meeting to be a Faculty Marshall that evening. That's the reason I went. But other than that, I had very little idea what was going on.

[Interviewer]: Were you aware that the administration was making any plans other than the fact that the Faculty Marshal was organized?

[Carl Moore]: No, I was not. I don't think I was.

[Interviewer]: Whose idea was it to form the Faculty Marshal?

[Carl Moore]: I think it was Jerry Lewis and Glenn Frank.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that Mayor Satrom's decision to impose an 8:00 PM curfew on Saturday night was a wise one?

[Carl Moore]: No, I don't.

[Interviewer]: Why not?

[Carl Moore]: Because that guaranteed that everybody would be forced onto the campus. And that if anything was going to occur, you had your constituency right there.

[Interviewer]: Were you aware that Mayor Satrom was planning on calling in the National Guard late Friday afternoon?

[Carl Moore]: I don't know if I was or not. I think I was. I don't know why, but I think I was. Maybe, you know, anything I say has to obviously be qualified by the fact that I've read so much about the events afterwards, that I may be saying things that I've read afterwards and didn't know at the time. I seem to think I was, but I just don't know.

[Interviewer]: What were you doing on Saturday night? Let's say from six o'clock on? Were you aware of what was going on?

[Carl Moore]: Well, from seven o'clock on, I was acting as a marshal. I went to the meeting over in Lowry Hall and we were given little arm bands--little pieces of blue cloth--and signed up on a piece of paper which building we were going to go to. Do you want me to talk about what we were instructed to do?

[Interviewer]: Yes, right.

[Carl Moore]: And we passed around pieces of papers with names of buildings, like Franklin Hall and what have you, and those who, like, if you signed Franklin Hall, you would go there. And we were instructed--and there was no category called "Commons," so I made it up and then I went to The Commons. I figured, That's where the action is going to be, I'd rather be [there]. And they told us, Look, your goal isn't to stop any violence, your goal isn't to do anything, your goal is just to talk to people, to get them to go home and you know, that kind of thing. Ours was kind of interpersonal communicative function, which is a very difficult one, by the way, because none of us were really certain what we were supposed to do and more importantly, none of us were trained to really do anything. and so then we were divided into groups on the basis of how we signed up and we went to those particular places to talk to people.

[Interviewer]: What was the reason for the gathering on The Commons that night?

[Carl Moore]: I didn't know about it until I got there. I do remember once I got there, some of the SDS-types I know [were] passing among the crowds, telling--

[recording stops]

[recording begins again]

[Interviewer]: What was the reason for the gathering on The Commons on Saturday night?

[Carl Moore]: As I said on the other side of the tape, I'm not sure that I recall the reason. I thought about it afterwards. Probably some word went out through the underground that there was going to be a rally there and to come and probably to protest police brutality and other language like that, and the SDS demands. I'm sure there was some reason given. I don't--can't with any clarity remember what it was. I do know as I started to talk about it again on the other side [of the tape], that there were certain members who were around the crowd giving out a phone number. In fact, I probably have it written down somewhere in the papers I gave to the library. What that phone number was that night--telling people to call that number if they were arrested or got into trouble. And one of those persons again is--as I think I mentioned before, but I think it was erased--was Ruth Gibson, because I remember Ruth coming up to me and giving me that number.

[Interviewer]: Were you a witness to the efforts to set the ROTC building on fire?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, I was.

[Interviewer]: What did you think of those efforts, and could you identify any of the people who were involved in it?

[Carl Moore]: Let me first describe the events preceding those efforts, because I think they have some bearing on it. Then I'll characterize what I thought of those efforts. By the way, this is one of those places were Michener, in his book, really inaccurately misquotes me. He says that I knew about the structure of the building. I knew it was metal and one side was wood and they were trying to light the metal side and I couldn't understand it. That was untrue, but I'll tell you what I do know in just a moment.

Any any rate, around 7:30-8:00, I guess--somewhere in there, the crowd was really an unusual crowd because they were in bunches, sort of like in allegiances all over The Commons. They weren't homogenous at all, but at some designated point, I forget the times, someone ran to the bell area, jumped upon the bell and said, Brothers and sisters--or whatever they called them--are in their dorm rooms fearful that something wrong is going to happen, let's go get them, blah blah blah, gave a very brief rap and everybody started up the hill between the tennis courts and Taylor [Hall]. So if you face Taylor from The Commons, it would be the left side of Taylor. They started up that way.

And I stayed in The Commons area, because that's the area I designated for myself and there were some other faculty members there. I remember that Martin Nurmi was there. I think he was with Bobby Smith -- I don't know if he was with Bobby or not. He was with another person from the English department. No, no it wasn't Bobby Smith, it was the guy who was then the chairman of the English department, Glenn Burne. I think it was Glenn. They were there. Mike Lunine was in The Commons area. There was just a few scattered people left.

[Interviewer]: Was Harold Kitner there?

[Carl Moore]: I think Kit was. I think he was. I know I saw him a couple of times during the evening, or I think I did. Boy, it's been a long time. I'm sorry. One thing that happened that's not related to the burning, but I'll mention it. It's related to the history of the times. Mike Lunine was engaged in conversation with Bob Pickett, who was the past Student Body Vice President and the leader among the the blacks. Now, whether or not it was ever made clear in any of the writings about that weekend, the blacks also held a rally on Friday afternoon to protest their treatment and development of the Black Center and so forth, and I kind of eavesdropped on the conversation with Pickett and Lunine and I can't say specifically, but I got the impression that Pickett said the black leaders were unwilling to talk anymore. That it was clear they were going to act. And again, I got the impression that next week the blacks were going to make a move of some kind. I don't know whether it was a walk-out or sit-in, maybe nothing. I really felt that was on the scene, in fact, that [if] May 4th had not occurred, probably the blacks would have engaged in some kind of action. Again, that's almost hearsay, because it was just an eavesdropped event.

Anyway, about a half hour, forty-five minutes after they left, few of us went to the right side of Taylor Hall, if you face it from The Commons where the Pagoda is, and we looked down over the hill and saw lots of people coming. Apparently they had been successful in going to the dorms and drumming up business and getting people out of the dorms. Then they passed right by us. I was standing right next to the side of Taylor Hall and they went by. As they went by, they were chanting the usual--at least for that time--anti-war slogans: "Out now, out now;" "One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war;" and things of that nature.

There was one chant in particular -- and I can't recall who it was--but as they went by us, they were very -- it was a mob moving, it was a wave of people headed at a direction. They went straight to the ROTC Building and yelled and no particular speeches were given that I recall. There was the time when a group of people -- where one person burned the American flag. I was standing right there, and then this one guy took a picture of it with a little flash camera. It was almost like a little Brownie camera, and people ran and grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. They didn't beat him up, they were on top of him and finally -- I think it was Ruth Gibson who negotiated -- all they wanted was the film. All they wanted is the film and they got the film and they let the guy go. But there were shouts of, Kill the bastard, beat the shit out of him, and things like that. But they didn't and they got the film and he was let go.

It was still fairly light then when that occurred; it started getting a little muskier. It was eight o'clock or 8:30, but it was summer so it was still a bit of light in the air, and then they tried for a good forty-five minutes to start that--that thing on fire, and people would run up and throw things in it. They would throw a lot of rocks at it. Absolutely incompetent.

[Interviewer]: Did you recognize any of the people?

[Carl Moore]: No. You know, in fact, I really was surprised. In fact, when it first started, when it started it was still a kind of festive spirit. That's a horrible thing to say, burning a building, but it was still kind of light. It wasn't heavy, it wasn't into -- I guess people just weren't aware of it -- that that was coming down. Maybe because they were so incompetent, it was in that spirit, but I was really surprised when I looked around me in the crowd that so many of the people were, you know, short-haired and straight looking. They weren't all long hair or freaks or radical types, at least by appearance. And the same could be said for some of those who went to the building to try and light it. They weren't all long hairs, they weren't all freaks. I was really surprised by that, as I expected this to be just a heavy radical thing, but it didn't seem to be, at least just from appearances. And none of the Faculty Marshals and others who had come down by then [or] tried to make any attempt to stop it, maybe because we were told not to do that kind of thing. I don't think I would have even if I was told to. How do you stop that? And how do you act as one or two people if you're going to try and buffer an action like that? But, at any rate, it was an incompetent, just very slow attempt to get that building going, which really, at least for me, does not lend credence that they had come prepared to burn the building because if they had then it seems they would have been a hell of a lot more efficient than they were.

[Interviewer]: Were you aware of any police around at that time?

[Carl Moore]: Earlier I had seen plainclothes types in the crowd and around on the periphery, but I saw no uniformed policeman in the area at that time. Now, later I've heard about where they were and what happened, but I do not recall seeing any.

[Interviewer]: Do you remember seeing any of the top administrators around the building?

[Carl Moore]: Again, I saw some earlier. No.

[Interviewer]: Specifically, do you remember seeing Ron Roskens or Bob Matson?

[Carl Moore]: No, and I know them very well. I would have recognized them and I don't recall seeing them.

[Interviewer]: Did you see them anytime during that evening?

No I didn't, not to my recollection. I also remember one other event related to the burning, that's when the fire engine came and the hoses were taken out. Students did indeed pull the hoses and try and tear them and cut them. People made claim that they had machetes and ice picks and they were prepared to do that. I didn't see signed of that, but I did see people trying to destroy the hoses so they couldn't put out the building once it was going.

[Interviewer]: Did you recognize any of these people?

[Carl Moore]: Yes

[Interviewer]: Who were they?

[Carl Moore]: I wouldn't say. I don't know if they're still criminally culpable or not, but I don't think its fair to [say].

[Interviewer]: The FBI supposedly, in their report that's in the Congressional Record that was put in in January by Congressman Seiberling, said there are thirteen people that they have positively identified as being the ones who were active in setting the thing on fire. Of course, in the summary they don't name them. But I was just wondering if you would be willing to name any of them.

[Carl Moore]: It's interesting since they have that new Grand Jury, those thirteen will probably then come under some heat.

[Interviewer]: Why do you feel the police didn't act right away to put the thing in order?

[Carl Moore]: That's one of the most complex sub-questions of this whole event. I'm sure that's why it's a question, Les. Partly I'm sure because the police have received so much heat in the past for their over-reacting to situations that they didn't want to over-react. I think that's part of it. And the other is because those in charge of the police probably just didn't know how to handle the situation. This, of course, is one of those circumstances when I thought the police should have come in sooner. Because the attempts were so fumbling, so unconcerted, if you can dig what I mean by that, that early forthright police action, in my estimate, would have just turned back the whole crowd. Especially since most of the crowd were on-lookers and periphery people. I don't know. But then again, it's one of those hindsight observations, first of all. And second of all, it's the poor police. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. They've been criticized so many times for acting too quickly and too aggressively. Here they're criticized for not acting quickly enough. I don't know what to say.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that there was some sort of entrapment planned by the police to wait until the actual crime was committed and then go in and make the arrests and the plan sort of backfired?

[Carl Moore]: I have no basis for making such an observation. Now you know their history, at least given Music and Speech, could argue for that. But I have no basis for making or drawing such a conclusion or even seeing sign evidence for such conclusion.

[Interviewer]: The Guard entered the campus around 10:00 PM, according to the information that I've got. Should they have entered the campus sooner?

[Carl Moore]: Again, I can't observe. My only reaction there is some kind of forthright police action would have resulted in the building not being burned. That's my judgment. At least that evening. The Guard was the thing, maybe. I think the Guard might have just been a catalyst for the crowd to get more rowdy because then they would have been a response to the crowd. The police action wouldn't have had that reaction, I don't think.

[Interviewer]: Were you there when the Guards came onto the campus?

[Carl Moore]: Well, okay. The burning was occurring and people started to filter away, then there was tear gas thrown. I don't know when it was. I remember going back up into the what was then Student Government Headquarters to call my wife and tell her even though the building was burning down, I was alright. I had a very small child at home. And, well, not that small but enough that she felt isolated, and I'd been tear gassed by then and I tried to come out another time and I got tear gassed. The police then moved in as, you know--after the building was aflame and moved the crowd back by shooting tear gas. Then there was that incident with the tree caught and the shed -- and then the tree caught on fire and there was the bucket brigade and I recall that really vividly, the people putting out that tree. That was an event away from the ROTC building on the other side of The Commons. I remember people in that brigade putting out that tree on fire. I remember wandering the campus. Maybe I've lost your question. Do I recall the Guard coming in? No, all I saw that night were police, as I remember.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel order was restored in a better fashion on Saturday night than on Friday night?

[Carl Moore]: I can't make the comparison because I wasn't available to the way it was treated Friday night.

[Interviewer]: Well, on Sunday -- what were you doing on Sunday during the day?

[Carl Moore]: Let me tell you one more thing about Saturday night and -- I hate to do this to you. Eventually, I decided I should go home and my car was parked over in the little park area between the old Union and Engleman Hall on one side and the Education building on the other side. Do you know what I'm talking about?

[Interviewer]: Yes

[Carl Moore]: The Center area. It was parked there and I went to get it and it was the only car there and I had images of people getting mad and breaking things and what have you. It was almost a new car. I had gotten the car in April and this was May, and I started to drive and just as I was leaving, a whole crowd of people came towards where the car was, probably police had been moving them around campus or they have been moving to stay away from the police or whatever, and it was really kind of hairy getting out of there because I had to wait until the crowd got--it was sort of a scary circumstance because I--even though I knew many of the people in that mass of humanity, I thought someone was just going to throw a rock through my window. I had that feeling. It was a sense of anger that the crowd had, that they were really angry and they were anxious to do. I'm not sure what or I'm not sure why, I won't attribute motives, but they were anxious to do. I can't really make judgments as to how the crowd was handled, no. You were asking about Sunday.

[Interviewer]: Sunday, what were you doing on Sunday? Were you aware of what was going on? For example, any meetings, any times when decisions were being made?

[Carl Moore]: Well, yeah, yeah. Sunday was an interesting day, I thought. I don't know what I did in the morning except read the newspaper. I'm not sure about my Sunday morning. Late morning, or early afternoon, it was [a] gorgeous day, gorgeous day, and my family and I, we took my small son and went up to campus. Just everybody was around campus, it was really a--it was a Sunday and it was like everybody was going to be on a picnic or something, it was really a spirit, a lot of people playing tennis, everybody was out walking their dog around campus. You know, you'd see the Guard and burned-out building and all, but it was a beautiful day. And I remember that things were relatively friendly between the Guard and the people that they were guarding the building against. I thought it was so stupid they threw up a perimeter around a burned out building, that's what they were really guarding the burned out ashes, i thought that was silly but I don't know how armies work. But the spirit of the day I remember that we had come out to The Commons and my son, who was a year and a half I guess, he saw this little puppy at the other end of the--thirty yards away or so, he started running towards the little puppy or walking as fast as a one and a half year old child can walk, and he got near the puppy and the puppy jumped on him and Cris fell down and started to cry. But it was really kind of a beautiful day. I took my family home and then I went to a meeting of faculty that I had gotten a call about, and I don't remember who called me -- Harold Kitner had called the meeting, the ombudsman, I think it was Kitner who called the meeting. It was held across from his office at Bowman Hall, and I went to that meeting. Do you want me to characterize the meeting?

[Interviewer]: Yes I would because I've had comments on that meeting before. I think the comment that I heard was that it was in the morning.

[Carl Moore]: No, it began at 2 or 2:30 in the afternoon.

[Interviewer]: Well, what happened at that meeting?

[Carl Moore]: 2:30 I think. A lot of people harangued and said what we should do, and then their statements about, Here we are the faculty and we're not asked and not being involved and what position we should take. By the way, originally there was about sixty or seventy people there, twenty-three ultimately signed the document. Originally there were sixty or seventy. It was a large gathering, more than the room could possibly hold, not just younger faculty, mostly younger faculty but older faculty too. Everybody told their stories of what they observed that weekend and harangued about what happened. Well, to make it very brief and consolidate it, since I don't remember the details very well: One subcommittee kind of tried to draft a statement which the ultimately did headed by what's his name in library science. Oh, shucks. On the University Senate, he wears glasses.

[Interviewer]: The only one I'm familiar with is Dean Marco.

[Carl Moore]: No, I know Dean Marco. I thought of the name. Sid Jackson of library science was the principal drafter. He drafted this statement, and I think he was most responsible for it and then the crowd made some additions and changes and ultimately twenty-three people, twenty-three concerned faculty, I believe they called themselves, signed it.

I did not sign that. The reason I didn't was because it was a damn bad statement. It blamed the administration, which I don't mind blaming, I didn't have that against it, but it talked about racism in the country and it really minimized the event in my judgment. It dissipated the event because of the way it had treated the situation. They set up the drafting committee, the signing committee, there was a group of people who were then going to distribute the statement and all that kind of stuff. I guess I was one of those who was supposed to help distribute because I got a whole packet of them, which I gave you. I never got them distributed, I wasn't sure where I was supposed to I guess and that wasn't clear.

Something else that came as a result of that meeting--I may talk about--the reason twenty-three signed it, some of them didn't sign but by that time many had left, they had just gone because the meeting was an ineffective meeting. So it wasn't that there was seventy there and only twenty-three signed, but there was maybe thirty-five [there] and twenty-three signed. Some intentionally did not sign like myself. I also was trying to remain as neutral as possible, but that was the reason I didn't sign. Afterwards I went in and talked to Kitner and I said, "Look the situation like this there's going to be rumors going on, people are going to be panicked, why couldn't we get some faculty members and go on the air?" Televisions, radio or something and talk some sense. And so he tried to arrange it. Oh, did we run into trouble. They tried to go through Stockdale, that's one of the people I remember and a number of people in administration, they balked and they said who are the faculty members and they heard that I was one of them and they balked at that, you know, it was that kind of circumstance. And finally we agreed on an random distribution of faculty members -- it was Martin Nurmi, [Elmer] Novotny from Art, Kitner, [Harold] Mayer from Geography, and some undergraduates. We really had a kind of group of people who were going to go on the air for one hour or two hours on the radio and answer questions and work in shifts, one group of faculty with certain students for one shift, and one group with certain students for another shift. We were simply there to try and answer questions and give what accurate information we had. That must have been the most popular radio show ever to be telecast over the air here, I'm sure it must have been. The phones never stopped ringing and we ultimately went until two o'clock in the morning. We were going to go one hour, then an hour and a half, then two hours. We started at nine and went to 2 o'clock in the morning answering questions and it was a pretty dramatic time with all that stuff going on around campus, we were trying to keep the audience aware of that too. I thought it was an effective tool, in fact I thought that more of it should occur over the weekend. I think we may have had some impact. I'm not sure on what, but we may have had some impact.

[Interviewer]: Do you think a solution could have been found to the problems that were developing at this time on Sunday night?

[Carl Moore]: I just don't know. I think one solution would have been for the Guard to have acted more honestly. Again this is just in hindsight though with the students. I wasn't out with the crowd. I wasn't at the television station. By that I mean to have done what they said they would do out at the corner of Lincoln and Main rather than rush the students as apparently they did. But again I'm only basing this on what I read in books. I don't know what really occurred. So I really can't answer you. Now I tend not to look at the whole weekend as a snow-balling weekend leading to Monday morning. I tend to look at almost each of these events as disparate. Maybe that's stupid of me, but I tend to do that merely because I participated in them disparately.

[Interviewer]: On Monday morning what were you doing? There was a meeting for example that I'm curious about that was held Monday morning. That was supposedly some members of the administration and faculty members attended with the Guard and the members of the administration.

[Carl Moore]: All I know about that is what I've read about it. I did not attend it. I went to my class. I taught a class Monday morning.

[Interviewer]: What time was the class? Do you remember?

[Carl Moore]: No, I don't.

[Interviewer]: What was the mood of the campus as you sensed it on Monday morning?

[Carl Moore]: A little festive again. Again it was a bright, pretty day. I keep mentioning weather but the weather I think was really a variable in all this. Monday again turned out to be a nice day. I remember Barclay McMillen was on the radio station telling people not to go to the rally, talking law, but I don't remember much about Monday morning until around noon when I went over to the rally.

[Interviewer]: Were you then aware of any kind of ban on rallies on Monday?

[Carl Moore]: No, now there was, I did notice the injunction that the County Prosecutor had taken out which was posted on the door to the Music and Speech Building. Plus over news and radio people had heard about it.

[Interviewer]: I see. So you were not aware of any ban then?

[Carl Moore]: No. I mean I think there were rumors to it and maybe Barclay McMillen as I listened to part of that radio talked about it. But I don't care what they said, I was going to go to that rally.

[Interviewer]: Why were you going to the rally?

[Carl Moore]: I'm a terribly curious person, for one. For two, my profession is studying public speaking and studying how groups behave in mass circumstances. That's the stuff of which I'm professional about, and I couldn't avoid not going to observe.

[Interviewer]: Where did you go to observe it?

[Carl Moore]: Okay. Oh, I had a golf match. It was at 12:30 or maybe 12 even. It was a make up, not a make up but a substitute match for the faculty golf league that I play in. By the way, that was the last time I ever played golf in my life. I have not played golf since. But that was May 4th, 1970. I'm not a very good golfer so the world is not missing much. But I, John Miller and I, who was my golf partner, we walked over and stood between the trees and Taylor Hall, facing The Commons and on the way over I ran into my wife, who had walked through that area coming home from her Latin class. And we were in that area when the jeep went around and said to disperse, this is not a legal gathering, whatever it was they shouted and they finally started shooting tear gas and people started coming over the hill then and we ran too, as soon as we got a whiff of the gas, and we went through that dorm over there, not Prentice, the one across from Prentice. Is it Prentice or Dunbar or something?

[Interviewer]: There's Verder.

[Carl Moore]: No, it wasn't Verder.

[Interviewer]: Right across the street is Dunbar.

[Carl Moore]: Dunbar, it was probably Dunbar. We went through Dunbar and we said, "Oh well," and just kept going until we got to the car and went out and played golf. John went in his and I went in mine because I had to pick up something or something like that. I got in my car and when I was over, I remember the spot vividly. I was over, I guess it's by Rhodes Road and Main, where they kind of come together, just about down the hill I could hear what I thought was a burst of firecrackers, a couple of bursts of fire crackers and I saw some smoke go up from The Commons area, and from that distance, I was over by where the Grant's store is and I said, "Oh, shit, it's too bad they've got firecrackers because that will just agitate the situation. But what I heard at that moment was the shooting, it was an aftereffect. I went out to the golf course, got my shoes on and went out, we were on the first green walking down getting our balls when we saw ambulances going by. It was really spooky. Of course we were the only people on the course, but one of the guys on the opposition had a little portable radio and he said two Guardsmen and one student or two students, or something like that, I forget what, the first reports were, had been shot to death. I immediately disbelieved it. I didn't believe the students would have guns, and I was right, but not for the right reasons. So, at least, I was not there. I did not witness it.

[Interviewer]: Did you turn around and go back then or did you finish your golf game?

[Carl Moore]: No, I continued to play golf and the guy finally came out and said your wife wants you to come home immediately, and not to go through the main street because the city is being quadranted off. So I went through a back route and got home alright. She didn't say that. She didn't say that. She just wanted the guy to leave a message in my car that when I got through to come home. I really was mad, I was having one of the best rounds in my life. So I got home and then we tried to listen to the radio and we did and tried to make some phone calls and we couldn't because the lines were all too crowded. We live in Silver Oaks and we saw a couple of Guardsmen running through Silver Oaks with machine guns in their hands and that was strange. They were outside. I don't know if you heard about that. One of the bullets by the way had landed in Silver Oaks, that one of the Guardsmen had shot in the hill. It was a strange time.

[Interviewer]: Why did the students leave so quickly and quietly once everything on the hill had calmed down and the University had been closed?

[Carl Moore]: Well, for one, Glenn Frank and some others went around I think it was in an ambulance with a loud speaker telling them that they had to and what to do. Probably most had never been in a battlezone before and it scared the hell out of them. Any number of reasons. Some were frightened that there were revolutionaries crawling all over their campus, some were frightened that the Guards were going to crawl all over campus with loaded guns. I'm sure there were any variety of reasons why they were concerned.

[Interviewer]: Was there reason for fear in the city on Monday night?

[Carl Moore]: I don't know, but there was a curfew on Monday night. I think it was 6:00 or 8:00 or something like that. I didn't have any reason for fear.

[Interviewer]: What was your position in the American Civil Liberties Union at this time?

[Carl Moore]: I was a member of the Board and at some time I was elected Chairman. I don't know if it was before the events of May 4th or just after. Sometime in that period I was elected Chairman of the Board and was very involved with events and their aftermath.

A couple of things about Monday: one is there was a whole bunch of arrests that took place in the wake of May 4th, around town, and I think I played a role in getting a lot of people out of jail. Like a friend of mine, Craig Morgan, who became Student Body President, was arrested along with one or two other people. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon and the reason was breaking the curfew, which was 6 o'clock or 8 o'clock that evening. He was arrested for going to a meeting with the mayor. It was just incredible. I forget what the circumstances were. Monday morning, I called a meeting at my house of some of the Board members of the ACLU. The premise of it was, all kinds of legal actions are going to result out of what happened here, we should find some way of recording. So we called the state office and got some advice from Benson Wolman, State Executive Secretary, and some others and we got permission from Jake Jacobs at the United Christian Fellowship House, which was next to the corner of Lincoln and Main, and we found a couple of people who had tape recorders and got some tapes and got word out through the underground, and anybody we knew we told them we were taking testimony and people were flooding in. The next two weeks we stayed in operation taking testimony of eyewitness accounts and we set up a procedure of what kind of questions to ask and ways to do it and where to do it and set up a map. We did it very unprofessionally but given that none of us were lawyers we didn't know what we were doing and we generated a great deal of information about that time.

[Interviewer]: What was your role in helping these people that were arrested?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, making phone calls, I never -- calling parents and calling other people who were able to make bond for them and things like that.

[Interviewer]: Did you attend?

[Carl Moore]: For example, when Craig called me -- I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you -- when Craig called me he gave me a whole list of people who were in jail and so I called each of their parents.

[Interviewer]: Excuse me, is that the list that's on the back of your bicycle receipt?

[Carl Moore]: The pink list, that's the list of people that were given to me by Craig of the people who were in jail with him. The reason was that they didn't give any of them, let any of them, make phone calls. Or what they would do is taker away all their money, again this is according to those who were in jail, and then say, "OK you can make a phone call," but not give them a dime to make it with. Literally doing this, according to them. So Craig was the only one who was allowed to and that's because he ranted and raved, "I'm a member of the board of the ACLU." Craig made it so he made the one call for everybody else. I tried to make arrangements for each one of those in terms of getting out.

One other thing in terms of the question you asked before, and I hate to do this because it's out of sequence, but you said why did people go so quietly. One reason because I don't think there was a monolith of radicals on this campus, as some people would like to believe. There were some radicals and many of those weren't even on campus to begin with in the sense that they were town people who lived in the area but so there was only a few people who would be hard-nosed about leaving anyway and but you've got to realize most of this campus was very peaceful, very straight as it always has been and has been since, and that's the reason there was no problem getting them to obey the order. I'm sorry I didn't mean to take you out of sequence.

[Interviewer]: That's alright. Did you attend the faculty meeting that was held on May 5th in Akron?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, I did.

[Interviewer]: Could you describe what happened there, please?

[Carl Moore]: OK, I remember going. It was at the Unitarian Church over by Summit Mall. I forget the name of the church, but it was packed, and I've never seen so many faculty members. What's his name from Chemistry was in charge of the meeting. The Vice President, the President was out of town. Can I turn that off and go find his name? I think it was Tom Meyers from Chemistry who was running the meeting. John Miller was giving advice. I remember John was --

[Interviewer]: Excuse me, who is John Miller?

[Carl Moore]: He is in the Speech Department, one of my colleagues. John is Parliamentarian of the Senate and that's why he was giving him advice. John had dark glasses on and looked very emotional and everybody wondered who the hell he was. He's a big guy. So Meyers was running the meeting, just didn't know, didn't have control I don't think, but anyway there was a number of issues that were raised, but see it was really a meeting of the Faculty Senate but they were opening it to the whole faculty and they played all kinds of Parliamentary games. It was silly and it was typical of those kinds of situations, and so there was a number of things. Barclay McMillen, I mentioned him before, Barclay McMillen was in the Political Science Department, but he was also an attorney so he was and he served as legal counsel to the Administration at some point. So Barclay McMillen got up and answered some questions. I remember I even asked him some about regarding those people who were still in jail. There was a couple speeches made by some graduate students. It was a pretty dramatic meeting. I can't recall details. I can't recall details of what I did this morning, you know, so I have a bad memory for details, but the thrust of the meeting, the main point of it, was that finally this resolution was proposed and voted on and passed and it went through modifications. Some people didn't like it. There were people who voted against it, much discussion of it, but eventually it passed. The reader of the resolution was Doris Franklin of English. There was a number of people that participated in the writing. I know Mike Lunine, for example, was one. I don't recall off hand but I think I gave you a copy of it with the names of those responsible for signing it on that copy. I know one of the graduate students who gave one of the more emotional speeches, for example, was Jim Crocker, who was one of our graduate students here in Speech. I know the names of many of those who spoke that day, but I don't know the names of many of those who spoke that day, but I don't know if it would even be in profit to try to reconstruct it from that perspective.

[Interviewer]: Was Steve Shiraff there?

[Carl Moore]: I imagine.

[Interviewer]: He plays kind of a central role in Michener's book, or an important role. What would you evaluate his importance to the whole episode as being?

[Carl Moore]: Well, he played a central role in 1969 during the CCC stuff. In '70 I don't know that he played a crucial role at all. He was there on the scene and available during many events, but I wouldn't characterize his role.

[Interviewer]: Do you know who published the Kent Strike Papers that appeared after this time?

[Carl Moore]: I gave you some, didn't I?

[Interviewer]: Yes, you gave me some.

[Carl Moore]: I don't know who was responsible, but I know where they came from. It was a little shop on Water Street, in fact there's a plant store there now or there was this summer. Offhand, I can't remember who it was.

[Interviewer]: Were you a member of the KSU Community Relations Committee that was formed after this time?

[Carl Moore]: I went to a meeting or two of theirs.

[Interviewer]: What was this all about, this committee, when it was formed?

[Carl Moore]: I'm not the best person to talk about it. I'll tell you what I know, but a good person to talk to about that might even be my wife. She did a lot of very nitty-gritty work. People were starting to say alright, it's done, the horror's happened, what can we do to rebuild the city and the area and everything else? One of the groups was a a group called the "Hundred Homes." They were going to find a hundred homes in the community and get the faculty and community people to all come together to meet and talk and do things like that. And my wife, for example, was one of those who worked on arranging that. That's the meeting I went to. Seems like there was a whole bunch of other things, the aftermath, in terms of community relations

[Interviewer]: There was another committee that was called the Committee for Non-Violence. Do you recall anything about that?

[Carl Moore]: Yeah. I think they're the ones responsible for bringing in a group of four Quakers who then trained a large segment of the University in how to engage in non-violent direction action as well as how to engage in marshaling activity should things like this occur in the future. I took their courses rather religiously. I didn't take the course in marshaling, but I did take the course in non-violent direction action. The one course, there was just a few people who took it. I don't remember a few of the others that took it and then they left and they left some people here as trainers who then trained others. And there was a marshaling group on campus for the next year or two.

[Interviewer]: In your papers there is a thing that's called "Proposals for Opening the University." Do you recall anything about that? Who wrote it, for example?

[Carl Moore]: Oh yeah, yeah, Okay. I guess I still had my red beard then [laughs], but I was characterized as one of those young faculty members that nobody quite knew where I was at. A lot of the faculty thought that I was on the radical fringe and a lot of kids thought I was in the conservative domain of the faculty. And I wasn't sure where I was at either probably. But John Doutt, who was at that time was the Chairman of the Faculty Senate, if I'm not mistaken. I'm probably mistaken, but he was some capacity of the University. He had called together some faculty members. There was myself. There was Arlen Melcher from Management. Ragh[bir] Basi I think was in on those meetings. Gene Wenninger was in on those meetings. We held them at John Doutt's house and what can we, this sub-group, five or six or eight of us, however many there was -- [Edward] Frieden from Chemistry was there -- what kinds of things can we do to try and get this University going? So we had a couple of skull sessions talking about whether it should remain open or it shouldn't. And if so, what kinds of things? How could we go about getting it reopened? I think this is a product of that event.

[Interviewer]: Was that immediately afterwards that these meetings took place?

[Carl Moore]: Yeah, right in the aftermath, because that's when we didn't know the circumstances of whether the University would stay closed or whether it would open up again, and so forth.

[Interviewer]: Did you attend the faculty meeting on Friday, May 8th, where President White announced that the University would remain closed for the rest of the quarter?

[Carl Moore]: Yes, I did.

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction to President White's speech and the meeting in general?

[Carl Moore]: Everybody was anxious to see if he would show his face, given his reclusive type of personality. I just don't know what my reaction was. I remember a little bit about the meeting and I remember again I asked a number of questions. I only mention that because my questions were the same. They had to do with those people that were being arrested and continuing to be arrested and continuing to be held in jail. I was very concerned about them and I was kind of on a one-man crusade to see what I could do about it. I got some bullshit answers, not from him. I think he turned it over to either Matson or Hoffman or somebody like that and they said, "Oh yeah, we'll do everything we can," and I don't think they did anything.

[Interviewer]: Was it a wise decision for the University to stay closed do you think?

[Carl Moore]: Only in hindsight, yes, it probably was. I don't know how we could have carried on business as usual under the circumstances.

[Interviewer]: Who were your contacts in the universities in exile at Oberlin and Western Reserve?

[Carl Moore]: Some people I knew quite well kind of were heading the thing up.

[Interviewer]: Who were they?

[Carl Moore]: Tom Lough and Elaine Wellin of the Sociology Department. Have you talked with Tom Lough?

[Interviewer]: Not yet.

[Carl Moore]: He would be a good person for you to talk with. I went up there for a couple of meetings on evenings and one time I went up there and stayed an afternoon and evening and the next day.

[Interviewer]: At Oberlin?

[Carl Moore]: At Oberlin. It wasn't organized very well. We got the wrong room, there was a small child sleeping in a crib. They were trying to hold meetings to organize what could be done and then another instance they were trying to hold think-tank sessions figuring out different aspects of the problem from which some recommendations came for change. A lot of people attended some of the meetings -- one or two of the meetings. Not many stayed there.

[Interviewer]: Why did you go?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, curiosity, again--one. Two: I, like everybody else, was searching for some truth to come out of all this; some meaning to come out of all that had occurred, and I wasn't finding it and that may be an answer. I also, by the way, went to Cleveland a number of times to talk to students there. What the situation was, what the law was--not that I'm a lawyer or know anything about the law, but for some reason they thought I was -- it was the ACLU affiliation. I remember going with Kitner a couple of times, one or two other people. I'm sorry.

[Interviewer]: Who was Max Wohl? W-o-h-l.

[Carl Moore]: American Civil Liberties Union from Cleveland.

[Interviewer]: Was he at Oberlin?

[Carl Moore]: He may have been, I don't know.

[Interviewer]: There was some reference to him in your papers. I was wondering if did elaborate on this [sic]?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, yeah, I think it was on the back of a little piece of paper, I may have had his name and I had the name of another guy and some numbers. But what that was all about was when I was at Oberlin one evening someone came up to me, a girl, who was working with him on legal events. She was very interested in law, I don't remember her name. She said, "There's a black attorney here from Northwestern, would you like to talk to him?" I said, "Alright," and so we went over to them and talked to this guy who was working on Daley's law staff or something and was teaching at Northwestern and was about to go to Washington, really a sharp guy, to get advice as to what we could do to open up the university and what we could do about the County Prosecutor and things like that. He had told us--I think his name is on the sheet, I don't recall--he had told us things like what kind of civil rights actions could be brought and things like that and what's what those scribblings had to do with. If I had them here I could interpret them, probably. The reason I called Max Wohl and Benson Wolman and some other people at ACLU is we were trying to find out some answers like what we could do to get protection for people and get the Guard off and a whole myriad of legal issues that were growing out of May 4, some of which ultimately cumulated in law cases.

[Interviewer]: What was the role of Tom Lough through all of this, through the whole episode? Can you characterize?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, boy. I probably shouldn't, but I will.

[Interviewer]: Anything that you want to leave out - -you know, that you want close for a certain period of time - -can be done.

[Carl Moore]: No, I don't know anything that is legally culpable but I just--you know, to describe another person's actions. Tom was a faculty member, bright guy and a good friend, and I knew him well before this event and I don't know what he did on May 4th to get arrested for. I do know that he spend six or eight thousand dollars in legal fees and never got a day in court because they dropped the charges. I was also working with him on the Kent Legal Defense Fund, which I assume we'll talk about at some point. Well, I guess the only kind of characterization I could possibly make is that he is just one of those people that can relate well to certain elements in the student community. I guess I can't answer the question. I just don't know enough. I wasn't with him on May 4th or other days that I could characterize. I was with him at Oberlin but I --

[Interviewer]: Do you think his teaching of the making of Molotov cocktails had anything to do with this?

[Carl Moore]: No, I thought that was a legitimate academic exercise and to use that is silly and petulant.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that President White's effectiveness declined rapidly after this incident?

[Carl Moore]: Well, I would have to have made the assumption that he was effective previously to the incident. I couldn't make that judgment because I didn't find him to be particularly effective beforehand.

[Interviewer]: Did you ever serve on either the Mayer or the Kegley Commission?

[Carl Moore]: No.

[Interviewer]: Did you testify? I think I asked you before, but did you testify before any of those?

[Carl Moore]: I worked for the Kegley Commission in a couple of different capacities. One time, for example, the non-violent direct action group that I was working with went and did a demonstration for them and I worked on a sub-committee of the Communications Committee that was studying communications at Kent State for the Kegley Commission.

[Interviewer]: Do you have any idea why Charles Kegley or Harold Mayer were chosen to head up these commissions?

[Carl Moore]: No. They were probably pretty good choices, though. I think they were. I know them both: Chuck Kegley very well, and Mayer incidentally.

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction to the way the Kegley Commission functioned?

[Carl Moore]: I really remember some controversies about it functioning, and since I wasn't a member of it I don't remember perhaps as explicitly as some others would. For example, there is some disagreement among the committee, like [about] what position they take on the presence of ROTC on campus, and there is some controversy and I am trying to place what it was. Maybe that White had made one statement and they made another statement or something like that. There is some disenchantment with the committee -- by members of the committee -- because of, I think, the attempt by certain members of the administration to impose themselves in the committee, but I don't think that it was a real issue. I remember some issues regarding how they functioned, but they [are] not clear at all in my mind. And since I wasn't a member, I couldn't really speak to them firsthand.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that the work it accomplished was valuable?

[Carl Moore]: You know, the only two material things that I can think of offhand, which would be the test of what they accomplished, were the communications study which became the book Communications Crisis at Kent State and the Hyde Park Forum or whatever they call it -- the Hyde Park area where the ROTC was. I guess there was real controversy where they were going to place that, I recall. I just can't recall all that they did, so that is a test that I am not aware of all which they accomplished. I can't judge the other things, I would have to go back and look at what the recommendations were.

[Interviewer]: What was your reaction to the results of the dormitory search on May 15th when the displayed the items they found in the dormitories?

[Carl Moore]: Well, that day I had been attending a meeting with a faculty group that were trying to see what they could do about the situation. We were in a meeting over in Cunningham--isn't that where the English department is? Not Cunningham, Satterfield. A meeting in Satterfield. As I recall, Harrison from Secondary Education , Jim Cope [sp?] from the Center for Urban Regionalism seemed to be heading up this meeting. We were there and I remember half an hour, an hour at this meeting, I got up and announced that I was going to leave because the County Prosecutor had announced he was going to display all the things they found in the dormitory search, and I went over there and we got there and we couldn't get in. The police would not let us in; they let the press in and what have you, but they wouldn't let any faculty members in. Like, I was there when Harold Kitner got there; they wouldn't let him in. Lou Harris came and they didn't let him in. I think Lou finally got in. Lou Harris was in charge of the university because White was gone and he was the Provost and he was responsible for the conduct of the university and the police were not letting him into that meeting, which shows you the control the County Prosecutor had over the campus. So I and other faculty members, we signed a little protest. In fact, I think I gave you a little sheet of paper with the names of some signatures of faculty member -- in fact, I think that is what it was.

They interviewed a few faculty, I was interviewed myself two weeks later by CBS News when they did a month-later feature on Kent State. And I was interviewed because I was Chairman of the ACLU, regarding what I thought of the County Prosecutor's display. And in that interview, I explained that it was a show by a county prosecutor who wanted publicity, because I don't think you could go on any college campus or almost square city block in the city of Kent and not found what you found there. Like, you probably would have found worse things in either of those other two circumstances that I just mentioned. And they were displaying syringes -- which very well could have been for insulin injections, probably most were -- as if they were heroin syringes, I assumed, because they went untitled and they had -- and then later, by the way, when the ACLU was trying to do a report on what had been taken from student rooms, we got all kinds of reports where televisions were taken out of people's rooms, other things of that nature. At any rate, I was not impressed by it, I thought it was a demonstration by a county prosecutor who wanted publicity. It was a bad one in bad taste and did not serve the function.

[Interviewer]: Do you know if Glenn Frank was involved in the searching of rooms?

[Carl Moore]: I am pretty familiar with that, only because I have read the depositions of Schwartzmiller, Hyatt [sp?] from the Highway Patrol, and some others as to what actually occurred during those searches. the reason I had access to the depositions was because they were part of the ACLU case regarding the attempt to get a restraining order against any further such searches and the reparation of damages for the search which did occur. And I don't remember whether Frank was involved, actually. I am sorry, I do know there were some outcomes from those searches, like a policeman or two were kicked off the force for theft as a result of it. Things of that nature. But the search was done almost solely by the campus police.

[Interviewer]: Can you describe your activities after the May 4th incident in helping classes to meet and students fulfill their obligations to receive their grades and credit?

[Carl Moore]: I did mine by paper work, I did not meet with my classes. I do know that some people arranged to meet with their classes in some churches and other places; I did not meet with mine, as I recall. I did mine by them -- by giving them the choice of withdrawing from the course, taking it pass/fail, getting a grade. Filling the course for them was, in my case, meeting certain paper requirements which had already been tentatively given to them and were finalized through the mail.

[Interviewer]: Do you remember which alternatives most students chose?

[Carl Moore]: I think most chose to complete the course and to complete it pass/fail. It seems that way to me at the time.

[Interviewer]: Can you describe what happened at your meeting with Andrew Jones, the editor of the Reader's Digest?

[Carl Moore]: Yes. I got a call from him to ask if I would meet with him. And I met with him at the Brown Derby [restaurant]. He made sure we sat way back in the corner, I don't think he wanted to be seen with us. At the meeting were myself, Jerry Lewis, Bob Dyle--Jerry Lewis of sociology, Bob Dyle of philosophy, and one other guy from philosophy who--I think this other guy is a key figure, he had written Reader's Digest and said, There's a story here, you should send someone to do it. At any rate, Andrew Jones was an advance man for Reader's Digest. He had come here to see what kind of story was here. And he talked to us -- we being the liberal radical faculty, or so they assumed -- and we [were] not very liberal. Well, probably liberal but we're not very radical. And he wanted to see what kind of a story we had.

And to me it was a particularly interesting meeting from the perspective that I told him all about the elevator episode, for example. And then when Michener in the book interviewed me and then in the book wrote about the episode and the way Michener wrote about it was I queried more to find out more -- he made it seem like he had pieced together that I might be the elevator operator that nobody knew about and was so mysterious and eureka, he found it out when I admitted it, when Jones knew who it was in advance and everything else. I don't know if that's enough of a characterization of that meeting with Jones, but he was the advance man to decide whether Reader's Digest should get involved. And then they decided to get involved and then they brought in James-somebody-Michener to do the book.

[Interviewer]: Did you encourage the writing of the book?

[Carl Moore]: I don't remember. Maybe. I felt something should be done by someone who people would listen to.

[Interviewer]: When was this meeting held?

[Carl Moore]: At dinner [laughs]. I don't know. Gee, it's all jumbled.

[Interviewer]: Was it immediately afterward, was it a couple months?

[Carl Moore]: No, it was sometime afterward, but maybe a month or two months.

[Interviewer]: As a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, did you have any -- or did you work towards having the injunction lifted that had closed the campus?

[Carl Moore]: Yes. I don't even remember what we did, though. There was a whole series of things that we were interested in. One was that injunction, one preventing getting the Guard off campus, another was preventing searches like what occurred, another was the wrongful death action and the ACLU particularly represented the Scheuer family and they all worked together. There was a whole number of legal activities that grew out of the event, but I just don't remember explicitly what they did to get the injunction lifted.

[Interviewer]: What was your role in the Kent Legal Defense Fund?

[Carl Moore]: Well, I was a member of the Board of Trustees, and I attended most of the meetings and participated in the decision-making of that organization. I'm sure they wanted me to be a member because I was also the Chairman of the ACLU and they wanted to interface with the ACLU because they didn't have much money or anything at that time, and they needed the legal resources of the ACLU as well as they wanted to coordinate. I was really -- do you want me to talk about it?

[Interviewer]: Yes, I'd like to talk about the Kent Legal Defense Fund.

[Carl Moore]: I was really very skeptical at first, not skeptical so much that they had bad intentions but there were some pretty radical types, you know, hardened SDS members and what have you, in that organization. I guess I'm sort of a coward, I don't know what they were about or what they wanted to do or how they used the organization. So I was very cautious and very skeptical, because I was by far the most conservative member of that group and always opted for the conservative options, and in fact, when we first decided that to go the route of a fundraiser to raise money--boy, were those some dramatic meetings. The reason they were dramatic was that we had about $5,000 or $10,000 that had been raised, which is a lot of money, $5,000 or $10,000. I don't have that much in my bank account, I don't have anywhere close to that, that's a lot of money, and we had raised that by -- I mean, it wasn't a drop in the sand compared to what we needed, but it's still a lot of money, if that makes any sense at all. And we had raised that money by people getting donations, going out to speak at other campuses, by selling buttons, by a myriad of reasons, selling t-shirts and things like that.

Alright, it came down to this fundraiser needed $5,000 or $10,000 to raise us more money and some members of the board quit and said, That's no more than rolling the dice and giving away the money we've already raised, and they were really upset. [They said] that's the people's money, you can't give it away, that money, because, you see, we were having to invest it and it really was a gamble, because we didn't know what payoff we'd have. The mailing was going out, getting organized in November, which means the mailing would hit right after Christmas, the worst time of the year to raise money because had just spent all their money for Christmas. We're really get an education, too, and the fund raiser we knew something about and she came highly recommended from Spock and a few other people, but we didn't know too much about, and we would say, Yeah, we're going to do it, then we'd have another meeting to reconsider and another meeting to reconsider -- oh, we were just bet out of shape over it.

We finally went ahead and did it and, eureka, ultimately we raised almost a quarter of a million dollars through fundraising. The first one raised $50,000 or something--it was a phenomenal return. No one expected it to go as well as it did and ultimately, we raised a lot of money and it did a lot of good, I think. But there were some hairy times, and even later on when decisions were to be made as to how money should be spent and what have you, there were terrible conflicts between the lawyers, who would see the need to spend money some ways, and the lay people, who couldn't understand why the money had to be spent that way, and I think the minutes would characterize some of it. I gave you some of them and I think they will characterize some of what I'm talking about, but those were really dramatic moments. I think somebody should write a history of that Legal Defense Fund because it was very successful in raising money, it accomplished its goals, not that it did it alone but it certainly did it in concert with other groups, and I think did a lot of good for the community in a lot of different ways.

[Interviewer]: Who were the people that belonged to it?

[Carl Moore]: The membership changed. The original membership? I think I've got a phone list I gave you that included those. Now let me see, some of the people I can remember. I'll just remember some of them and go back to the list or something?

[Interviewer]: Alright, we can check it off on the list.

[Carl Moore]: There were people like Bobby Franklin, he wasn't a member, he served as a kind of an office manager. We had a couple different offices, one was way on the west side of Kent, way away from things and we ultimately moved downtown. Bobby was office manager there, but was not a member of the Board. Nancy Dykes was a member, Tom DuBois was a member, Elaine Welan was a member, Tom Lough was a member. I can see some of the people, but I'm forgetting their names. Should we dig out the list?

[Interviewer]: I just wanted the key people.

[Carl Moore]: They can check this out by going to -- Ken Hammond was a key person, we tried to keep it democratic. The Chairmanship shifted every month to a different person, which was good because it meant everybody had to be involved in the organization. There was a guy, by the way, from a labor organization in Akron who was a member, some attorneys from Cleveland who were members. I can't think of their names offhand. I could if I thought about it for a second. There was a mixture of people. We shifted the membership around from month to month.

[Interviewer]: Who played the most significant roles throughout the crisis period, would you say, and afterwards?

[Carl Moore]: How would you define the crisis period?

[Interviewer]: Well, let's say May 1 through 4 and then afterwards.

[Carl Moore]: Glenn Frank was certainly a dominant figure through that period. How do you mean significant? I hate to beg the question, but --

[Interviewer]: In terms of decision making, in terms of influence upon decisions that were being made.

[Carl Moore]: I see. Okay. All I know about the university decision makers is what I've read about. Apparently [John] Huffman played a key role. That's not first hand knowledge; nobody should accept it as such. That's a terribly hard question and I'm not sure I'm in a position to judge who did so. If you want to refer to a specific event, maybe I can make a judgment about it.

[Interviewer]: Let's say as your role as a member of the faculty and your contacts with the heads of your department and the deans, were you aware of them being brought into the decisions that were being made?

[Carl Moore]: No, I was not.

[Interviewer]: What were your role and objectives throughout the period after May 4th?

[Carl Moore]: Peace [laughs]. Gee, I don't know, very mad at what had happened. I'm sure I had a revenge goal. That's terrible to say, but I'm sure that deep in my soul somewhere I did. I wanted people to -- revenge goal in terms of justice. I was very bitter as I reflect on it. What was I talking about? Oh, my feeling and objectives and things like that. I wanted to get the University going. I wasn't sure why, but I felt like I had a need to do that. Justice for those who had been wronged. Taking care of those who have been wronged. I'm really speaking abstractions, but that wasn't a time for precision. I didn't sit down and say, Here are my criteria for how I'm going to behave and this is what I want.

[Interviewer]: How would you characterize your activities since the summer of 1970 in terms of involvement and subsequent developments?

[Carl Moore]: I was very involved with all the legal actions that grew out of it. So involved that when the next year I was no longer Chairman of the ACLU, I didn't even run again for the Board. I was just spent. I had put too much energy into it, and I would get at least a dozen phone calls a week not only related to Kent and the aftermath effects of police harassment and things like that, but any number of things. I tried to help everybody out. It just took too much of my energy. I wasn't a lawyer and I couldn't do as much as I wanted to do, but I helped do much of the coordination of the legal action in that next summer and the following fall. We even worked on things like getting students approved for food stamps for Portage County. Many, many myriad related issues and rent problems and things like that.

I was involved with a non-violent direct action group I mentioned before and became a student marshal or faculty marshal. I became a faculty observer. I was very interested in what could be done to bring stability to the campus and I tried to do many things to realize that goal. I was on a number of University groups, like a commission that had been formed called the Ad Hoc Innovative Curriculum Committee, which had been formed summer and met all summer on what could be done to innovate curriculum matters, so that in the light of what had happened so that we could realize some change, and worked very hard on that. Got some suggestions passed, which I think are good and I can illustrate to you are in effect already and some that people paid lip service to, but haven't done anything about. I can just think of scores of ways. I think I tried to work to bring about stability. Stability and justice were very important to me.

[Interviewer]: Would it be possible to ever have the events of May 1970 repeat themselves here, do you think?

[Carl Moore]: No.

[Interviewer]: Why?

[Carl Moore]: Well, as I suggested to you, they weren't a product simply -- it would be easy to cop out and say it was Nixon's speech, but remember I tried to make very clear that I didn't think it was Nixon's speech. I thought that was just one factor, maybe not even a catalyst. Maybe a catalyst, maybe not. It was just one factor. It had to do with the weather. It had to do with the climate around the country. It had to do with just myriads of things: the motorcycle incident downtown; the building of events. I just don't believe you'll ever find that series of events repeat themselves in the same fashion. No, the events are much too complex to re-occur.

[Interviewer]: I see you have Peter Davies' new book on the desk. Do you give any credence to his theory that there was a conspiracy among the Guardsmen?

[Carl Moore]: Yes. Everything I've read -- no hard evidence do I have, but the sign evidence is clear. Since the day after the event, I've believed that before Peter Davies ever articulated it. The reason I believed it, remember I mentioned the ACLU took depositions from the people who saw what occurred were eyewitnesses, etc. I just don't see how two columns of Guardsmen lined up in line could swing around like that all at the same moment individually, decide to shoot at exactly the same moment. Not bump each other and shoot each other, you know. Okay, you and I are marching up the hill and we both turn with our rifles, I could cut you with my bayonet that stuck out at the end of my rifle, if we don't know when to turn; if we don't turn in a proper way, I could shoot you if you're in front of me, if I don't know what else I'm shooting at, you see what I'm saying? The coordination really suggests to me that those people had to be acting in concert. They could not have been acting individually.

Now, I've felt that way ever since I saw the first pictures, which came out the next week in that Life magazine. I have copies of that should you want any, but I just threw away about five or six copies of that Life magazine. When pictures came out, on the basis of what everybody told me. In fact it's really interesting much of the testimonies says things like front line dropped to their knees and the back line shot over their heads. Now we know from the pictures that did not occur. They just both turned, but isn't it interesting that many people made that observation. The reason they did was how effectively they turned. They assumed from all their old John Wayne war movies that that's how it had occurred. Just that assumption suggested they were impressed by the coordination that occurred. At least that's how I interpreted it, and I was impressed by it. I don't see how they could have been acting individually and they all acted individually at exactly the same time with exactly the same intent. Then, even the fact that some people shot in the air, again to me is a sign of evidence that they were instructed to shoot or asked to shoot, but they chose not to shoot towards the objects they were asked to shoot towards. Why would they shoot in the air unless they were acting upon some request or demand or order?

Interviewer]: What precautions are you aware of that have been taken since May 1970 to prevent the recurrence of violence?

[Carl Moore]: Well, again myriads of suggestions and what have you came out of all the different commissions, committees and organizations formed all the way from how to improve communications to better warning systems to how to interface with the police better, many things have been done whether any of it's good or any of it would work, if the situation occurred again, that I can't judge. I just don't know. For example, the communication studies said some things about this place: that the advertising wasn't very good; people weren't very sensitive; that the University shut down at noon. If you need something at noon you couldn't get it. It made a lot of suggestions regarding how people behaved at this University and I don't see many changes in those. It made some suggestions about what kind of leader the President should be. I see some changes there, but whether it's better for the University or not, I'm not going to judge. But I just don't know whether the changes have been effective or not. Many have occurred, I'm sure. Many other have not occurred that I think should have occurred. I'm copping out on your answer, but I really don't know it.

[Interviewer]: What do you feel the impact of the tragedy has been on both the University, locally, throughout the nation?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, boy. Twenty thousand words or less. Let's take each of those. The University: it raised the consciousness levels of some people for a brief time, but not in a permanent way. The University is still operating much the same as it did then, except for those changes that I was very vague about in my previous answer. It had some effect on the enrollment -- had some effect on the enrollment of maybe all universities. It's one of those events that contributed again to a number of other events which caused people to start question the necessity of a college education. I don't blame it just on Kent State, but it was one of the building blocks to people changing their attitude about a university education. One thing it affected had an immediate effect on the nation. I had a friend who as working in the drug clinic in San Francisco and he said there was more ODs the day after Kent State than they have ever had before or since. There was other effects like that around the country with all other school closings. Just dramatic immediate effects.

In terms of the long range effects, I'm sure it affected again this attitude towards education that I was talking about. It contributed to a certain segment of the population continuing their disaffection with the government because nothing really was done about Kent State. The President didn't even accept the Scranton Commission; but then the Scranton Commission did occur, so some if it trades off. There was many immediate effects, long-range effects. The event is starting to be out of sight, so I don't know what the long range effects are. I'm copping out again, but I just really don't know.

[Interviewer]: Could you give your reactions to some of the works that were written about Kent State? For example, the Michener book.

[Carl Moore]: Pretty good book. In places it is by far the best. Some of the things it does, like some of its chronologies and some of the attempts it does to be careful, it makes to be very careful. Very vulnerable in some other ways. He included things in that book which he did not know to be true and he should have found out to be true before he included them. I'm in a position of documenting that assertion if necessary. He didn't include some things because it wouldn't have set well with his theory. The factual parts of the book I don't have near as much qualms with as I do with -- although I have some real serious reservations about the result of my own research -- I have a distinct reaction to the subjective parts. I don't think his conclusions are as founded as he would like to believe they are. In fact, it's unfortunate that he wrote the book to make those conclusions. I'm not saying that was the purpose of writing the book, that he was so interested in making them that he shaped the book in that way. It can't be avoided, but it should have been. I mean it can't be because we're human beings. Subjective. So the factual parts of the book I find useful, the other with reservations, and the materials of mine regarding the work I did on that book will be placed in the library so people can find out exactly what I mean by that statement.

Communication Crisis at Kent State serves a useful function. It's a scholarly work. It's not a good work. It's the way Tompkins and Anderson, who by the way is now Mrs. Tompkins, the way they wrote that book, the way Phil did his calculations, it's very imprecise. He makes judgments without support for those judgments. He draws very large conclusions on the basis of very little differentiation in terms of his data, so it's a scholarly work that's lacking. In other ways it is a very useful book. There certainly is a lesson in that book for people on the business of running universities. Thirteen Seconds I've not read, but I read excerpts of and everything I've read is a relatively sloppy job of research. The I. F. Stone thing (The Killings at Kent State) I've read and I've liked only because I like I. F. Stone and it's written with his bias, and that is fine because I agree with much of his bias or liked it if one wants that perspective that's a work to read. What am I leaving out? I haven't read Peter Davies' yet. I've read his first report and I thought it was interestingly done. The problem is he's absolutely dependent on secondary evidence. But until there's a Grand Jury reporting he's going to have to be dependent on secondary evidence, and so it does a service for that reason.

[Interviewer]: Have you read Stuart Taylor's work (Violence at Kent State)?

[Carl Moore]: Yeah, bunch of numbers. It's fine if you want to look at those numbers. I had a cover ripped off my copy. I wish I had another one. I found it moderately interesting.

[Interviewer]: What do you feel we have to know to have a full understanding of what happened?

[Carl Moore]: Oh, I think we've got to let the Guard give testimony where they can be cross-examined.

[Interviewer]: Do you feel that immunity should be granted to some of the Guardsmen to get them to talk?

[Carl Moore]: I'm not sure how all that works. You know, it's sort of like the Watergate stuff. If that would do it, fine. I'm just not very expert on those proceedings.

[Interviewer]: Have your attitudes towards what happened in May 1970 changed since then?

[Carl Moore]: I'm sure I've mellowed. I'm not as upset as I was. I mean, I lived through them. I don't have a need to for redemption, or whatever, as much as I did before. I would still like to suggest this very much, and would work again and work hard again to do whatever would be necessary to realize that.

[Interviewer]: Have you had any contacts with Peter Davies and the families as of late in their works?

[Carl Moore]: No, I've never had any contact with them. I'm looking at a long, yellow sheet of paper, which I think came out of the Oberlin paper, Les -- in fact I'm pretty sure it came out of the Oberlin paper. What it was, we tried to resolve some things regarding what could be done to help the students when they were allowed to come back to the dorm rooms to get their stuff. For those that had things taken and so I had called up some attorneys in the ACLU and people like that. And these are the -- were written -- here's what was given to me over the phone as to what kinds of things we should procedurally pay attention to so that if later they wanted to reclaim them or some actions taken regarding them, it could be done. That's what this sheet is. I think that's all.

[Presumably reading files.] Number 17. These are messages and from Michael Geltner. And I don't think there's any reason why they shouldn't be included, but I think they would need Mike Geltner's release. Michael Geltner is a law professor at Ohio State University. Do you see what I mean? For example, this thing, Kent State-slash-Government response, Texas Talk, Michael Geltner. Mike at one time was going to do a book about Kent State, so he sent me these materials. So I, only because he was in the habit sending things as he did them. Now I'm sure he wouldn't want someone else to copy this because he may still want to do something with it. But I think you need to get Mike's release before Number 17 is an open file. I don't care for anything that affects me, but I do care that he has that prerogative of choice, especially since he's an attorney.

Now Number 20 and some of these Kent Legal Defense fund materials the minutes and everything else did affect me, yes, and I provided them to you, but they also affect a heck of a lot of other people because things they said and did and didn't do are mentioned in here. So I'm not quite sure how to recommend to you to handle this, but I do think maybe some kind of release is necessary or what have you from others in the Kent Legal Defense Fund. You know, there are letters here like the person who ran the campaign for us and I think this is going to put you into a lot of trouble, but it is probably necessary. You've got my release for anything that affects me, but I think you should try as much as much as we can to protect others.

Do you want me to leave these files out or stick them back in?

[Interviewer]: You can stick them back in.

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