May 4: Star Wars, Kent State, and the Haymarket Bomb

🕐11 min read

On this day in 1970, students were shot on a campus in Ohio. On this day in 1979, a British newspaper accidentally gave George Lucas a second franchise. These are not unrelated facts — they share a date, and dates are the closest thing history has to a filing system.

The Day

May the Fourth be with you.

This is the most successful pun in the history of global capitalism, and it began as a small ad in a London newspaper.

On May 4, 1979, the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom won the general election. Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Her fellow Conservatives placed a congratulatory advertisement in the Evening News that read: “May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations.”

This was a joke. A local political joke, placed by people who were delighted about an election result and noticed a calendrical coincidence. Star Wars had been released two years earlier. The phrase “May the Force be with you” was cultural currency. The date aligned. Someone thought it was funny, placed the ad, and forgot about it.

For the next thirty years, Star Wars Day existed as a scattered fan phenomenon — mentioned in some online communities, occasionally observed by enthusiasts, never organized. Then in 2008, a Facebook group called “Star Wars Day: May 4th” gathered enough momentum to attract attention. The Toronto Underground Cinema ran a Star Wars film marathon on May 4, 2011. The internet amplified it. And then Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.05 billion.

What had been a grassroots fan observance — a joke that fans made to each other once a year — became a corporate marketing vehicle of considerable power. Disney began officially recognizing May 4 as Star Wars Day. Theme park events, streaming releases timed to the date, merchandise drops, social media campaigns from official channels. The holiday that nobody invented became a holiday that a multinational entertainment conglomerate actively promotes.

This is how folk culture works in the era of intellectual property. Something organic grows. Enough people participate that it becomes visible. A corporation with a trademark notices it and absorbs it. The organic thing is still there, technically — fans still make the pun to each other, still rewatch films they have seen many times, still feel the genuine warmth that fan community generates. But now it is also a quarterly revenue strategy.

The Thatcher angle, incidentally, has become quietly inconvenient for a franchise that now markets aggressively to progressive politics. The first use of the phrase was a celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s electoral victory. This is not a scandal. It is simply the kind of historical detail that complicates the tidy origin myth.

---

On May 4, 1970, four students were shot dead by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. Nine more were wounded. Two of the four who died — Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller — were participating in a protest against the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, announced by President Nixon four days earlier. Two — Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder — were simply walking between classes.

The confrontation had been building for days. Protests had begun on May 1. On May 2, the ROTC building on campus was burned. The governor of Ohio called in the National Guard. By the time the Guard opened fire on May 4, the protest rally had been declared illegal and guardsmen had been on campus for two days. Students were ordered to disperse. Some did. Some did not. The Guard fired sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds into a crowd of students on a university campus in the United States of America.

John Filo was a photojournalism student at Kent State. He was twenty-one years old. On May 4, 1970, he took a photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway who had been on campus that day, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller and screaming. Filo’s photograph was published around the world. It won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. It became one of the defining images of the Vietnam War era — of the moment when the antiwar movement confronted, literally, the willingness of the state to use lethal force against its own citizens on their own campuses.

Mary Ann Vecchio was fourteen. She later said that in the years following, she received hate mail. People blamed her — not the Guard, not the governor, not the president who had ordered the invasion that sparked the protests — for what had happened. The photograph made her famous and made her a target. She was fourteen and she was screaming over a body and people blamed her.

The Kent State shootings accelerated the collapse of public support for the Vietnam War. A student strike followed; somewhere between four and eight million students participated across the country, shutting down hundreds of universities. An estimated 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington. The killings at Kent State — and ten days later, the killings of two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi, which received far less coverage — marked a turning point in the relationship between American youth and American authority that has never fully healed.

A commission appointed by Nixon found that the shootings were “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” No one was convicted. Criminal charges against members of the Guard were dismissed. Civil suits were eventually settled for $675,000 — paid by the state of Ohio — and a statement of regret that was not an apology.

---

The Haymarket affair is further back — May 4, 1886 — but its shadow falls on every subsequent event marked on this date.

A rally was held in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest the police killing of striking workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company the day before. The rally was peaceful enough that Chicago’s Mayor Carter Harrison, who attended to observe, left early and told the police chief the crowd was orderly. Then a column of police arrived to disperse the remaining crowd. Someone threw a bomb. Police opened fire. Seven police officers and at least four civilians died; the number of civilians killed by police gunfire has never been definitively established.

Eight anarchist labor organizers were tried for the bombing. The prosecution could not establish that any of them had thrown the bomb — or had even been in a position to throw it. Four were hanged. One died in his cell the night before his scheduled execution. Three were eventually pardoned after serving six years, by Governor John Peter Altgeld, who said the trial had been a travesty of justice.

The Haymarket affair led directly to the establishment of International Workers’ Day on May 1 — the date was chosen to commemorate the general strike that had preceded the rally. In the United States, where the connection to labor radicalism was politically inconvenient, Labor Day was instead set in September. Most of the world marks May 1; Americans mark September.

Also Today

International Firefighters’ Day (observed since 1999): On December 2, 1998, five firefighters died battling a wildfire near Linton in Victoria, Australia. A South African firefighter named J.J. Micks initiated an international campaign to establish a memorial day in their honor. The date chosen — May 4 — is the feast day of Saint Florian, the patron saint of firefighters in the Catholic tradition. The international memorial has been observed on this date since 1999. The traditional memorial involves wearing a red and blue ribbon.

Bird Day (United States, since 1894): Charles Almanzo Babcock, superintendent of schools in Oil City, Pennsylvania, designated May 4, 1894 as Bird Day — the first American conservation holiday. The date was chosen because it falls during spring migration in much of the Northern Hemisphere. Babcock’s initiative predates Earth Day by seventy-six years and represents one of the earliest organized conservation education campaigns in American history.

Dodenherdenking (Netherlands): The Dutch national remembrance day for civilians and soldiers who died in World War II and subsequent conflicts. Observed on May 4 each year with two minutes of silence at 8 PM. The following day, May 5, is Liberation Day, marking the end of the Nazi occupation. The two days together form the central commemoration of the Dutch experience of World War II — a particularly acute experience, given the occupation’s duration (1940-1945) and the destruction it caused, including the deportation and murder of approximately 102,000 Dutch Jews.

The Backstory: How Star Wars Day Became Inevitable

The capture of fan holidays by the intellectual property owners of the things fans love is not unique to Star Wars. It has happened with countless cultural touchstones. But Star Wars is an instructive case because it is one of the most complete examples of how it works — and because the franchise itself contains, in its DNA, a particular relationship to popular mythology that makes the dynamic especially layered.

George Lucas built Star Wars explicitly on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth — the hero’s journey, the structure Campbell identified across dozens of mythological traditions in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Lucas has said in multiple interviews that Campbell’s framework was the skeleton on which he built Luke Skywalker’s story. The result was a film that felt, to many audiences, like something they recognized from somewhere older — not derivative, but archetypal.

This archetypal quality is what gives the franchise its unusual hold on its fans. People do not form communities around entertainment products that merely entertain them. They form communities around things that feel meaningful. And things that feel meaningful because they touch something archetypal, something that appears across human mythological traditions, will naturally accrete the kind of devotional behavior that looks a great deal like religious practice — because it is, in some functional sense, religious practice.

Fan holidays, collective re-watchings, quotations exchanged as in-group signals, pilgrimage (to Celebration events, to film locations), the creation of new canonical material that extends and deepens the mythology — these are the behaviors of a living tradition. The pun holiday is one expression of this. It is the kind of playful, low-stakes communal practice that every religious tradition has — the equivalent of the fisherman’s pun in Christianity, or the Purim plays in Judaism, or the mischievous aspects of the Holi festival.

When Disney incorporated Lucasfilm and gained control of the intellectual property, they gained control of the trademark. They did not gain control of what the stories mean to the people who love them. But they gained the ability to mediate the commercial expression of that love, to decide which new stories get told and in what form, to monetize the fan holiday and the pilgrimage and the devotional objects (merchandise). The community remains genuine. The corporation now has a seat at the table it did not create.

Whether this is good or bad is, appropriately for a franchise built on Campbell, a question about power, corruption, and what it means to remain true to something as the world tries to commodify it.

Pin It

May 4 is a day on which a corporate entertainment franchise celebrates a pun, students were killed on a university campus for protesting a war, labor organizers were hanged for a bombing they may not have committed, and five Australian firefighters are remembered by firefighters worldwide. It is the feast day of Saint Florian, the oldest American conservation holiday, and the Netherlands’ national moment of silence.

If you are looking for a theme: power. Who has it, what it does with it, who gets hurt, what we remember, and what we are encouraged to forget. The pun is easier to market than the rest of it. That is not an accident.

Sources

On the origin of Star Wars Day: Tricia Barr and colleagues have documented the 1979 Evening News ad extensively; the original clipping has been reproduced in multiple Star Wars fan history projects. For the cultural dynamics of franchise folk holidays, see Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age (2006).

On Kent State: the most thorough account remains Peter Davies, The Truth About Kent State (1973), though it should be read alongside the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest report (the “Scranton Commission,” 1970). John Filo’s photograph and Mary Ann Vecchio’s subsequent experience are documented in William Gordon, Four Dead in Ohio (1990).

On Haymarket: James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon, 2006) is the definitive contemporary account. Governor Altgeld’s pardon message (1893) is a primary document of unusual power and is available in full from the Illinois State Archives.

On International Firefighters’ Day: the J.J. Micks campaign is documented at the International Firefighters’ Day Foundation, which maintains records of the 1999 inaugural observance.

On Dodenherdenking: the Dutch National Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) maintains the most complete records of the commemoration and its evolution since 1945.

Related Articles

• May 3: Machiavelli, the Constitution Nobody Remembers, and the Day We Agreed the Press Should Be Free
• May 5: Cinco de Mayo, Napoleon's Last Word, and the World's Most Misunderstood Holiday
• May 8
• May 6

More Days Worth Knowing

• May 12

Also worth knowing: May 20