Who gave the final order to deploy the Ohio National Guard to Kent State on May 4, 1970?
Executive summary
The decision to send the Ohio National Guard into Kent was made by state and local officials: Kent Mayor LeRoy Satrom asked Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes to intervene after street unrest, and Governor Rhodes authorized the Guard’s arrival—troops began arriving on May 2 and occupied the campus by May 3 [1] [2]. The Guardsmen who fired on May 4 were under the immediate field command of Assistant Adjutant General Robert Canterbury, but Canterbury did not "deploy" the Guard to Kent; he commanded the force already sent by the governor [3] [1].
1. The spark and the request: local officials ask for state help
Following escalating disturbances in downtown Kent, including rioting and the burning of the ROTC building, Kent’s mayor, LeRoy Satrom, declared a state of emergency and formally requested that Ohio’s governor send the National Guard to restore order—this municipal appeal is consistently cited in contemporary accounts and later histories as the trigger for state intervention [1] [4] [5].
2. The formal authority: Governor James A. Rhodes orders the Guard to Kent
Governor James Rhodes accepted the mayor’s request and authorized Ohio National Guard forces to go to Kent; Guardsmen began to arrive the evening of May 2 and roughly one thousand were on campus by May 3, a deployment initiated and authorized at the state level by Rhodes rather than by federal authorities or the president [1] [4] [6].
3. The national context often misread as a command
President Richard Nixon’s April 30 announcement about Cambodia is widely credited with provoking the protests that led to the unrest, and some summaries link Nixon’s speech to the Guard’s presence on campus—but Nixon did not order the Ohio Guard into Kent; the decision to send state troops was made through the mayor–governor channel described above [7] [8]. Multiple sources make the causal connection between national policy and campus protests while distinguishing that the deployment itself was a state action [2] [9].
4. Who commanded the troops on the ground—and what he ordered
Once in Kent, the Guard operated under state military leadership; Assistant Adjutant General Robert Canterbury was the ranking Ohio National Guard officer on site and gave tactical orders that day, including the order to march, issue a dispersal, and later advance—Canterbury’s decisions shaped the confrontation on May 4, but those field commands were distinct from the political decision to send the Guard in the first place [3] [1].
5. Important legal and investigative findings about orders to fire
A September 1970 commission report and later scholarship found that no explicit order to fire was given by commanders on the hill and criticized inadequate fire control discipline; the commission concluded the shootings were unjustified and noted that apparent lack of an order to fire complicated accountability for the gunfire that killed four students and wounded nine [2].
6. Conclusion and limits of the record
The preponderance of primary and secondary sources attribute the final political authorization to deploy the Ohio National Guard to Governor James Rhodes after Kent’s mayor requested help; operational command on the ground during the fatal encounter rested with Assistant Adjutant General Robert Canterbury, and investigative reports later determined there was no clear order to fire [1] [3] [2]. The sources consulted do not produce a single contemporaneous signed memo from Rhodes authorizing the deployment in the files provided here, so the reconstruction rests on contemporaneous reporting, official statements, and later historical summaries rather than one surviving directive in these materials [1] [4].