Chicago 1968: An American Tragedy

My memories of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago fifty years ago this week are scattered fragments: blue and white images of demonstrators on a defective television, a conversation in Chicago during the convention with witnesses to the carnage, personal consequences of the generation gap and a strange encounter with a Chicago policeman, as well as more detailed television images of the last days of the convention, including the infamous beatings in front of the Hilton, covered live by the networks fifty years ago tonight.

In late August, Mike Shain and drove Bill Thompson and his bride, plus a trailer with their possessions, to Hamilton, Ontario, where Bill would attend graduate school and live, as it turned out, for the rest of his life.

Christopher Walken in 1968 Stratford
production of Romeo & Juliet

This actually was the subject of one of the last email discussions between Bill and me before his sudden and untimely death last summer, but letters I recently excavated confirm it.  The car belonged to Bill's father, so Shain and I also drove it back to Libertyville.  I actually remembered the trip back much better, because Shain and I stopped in Stratford, Ontario and saw two plays at the Shakespeare Festival: a Romeo and Juliet in the afternoon (apparently we saw Christopher Walken as Romeo), and a late night contemporary play in their studio theatre with the same actors, which was riveting.

(I also remember that in leaving Stratford we spotted a sign at a newsstand that said the London Times was on sale there.  In those days, the idea of seeing a real newspaper from England was almost magical.  But alas, it turned out to be the daily for London, Ontario.)

We must have at least spent the evening of our return to at Bill's parents, because I associate my memory of the blue and white television picture with Libertyville.

Soon however I was down in Chicago, though nowhere near the convention.  I met up with available Knox friends, who may have included graduates of earlier years. One was involved with several other former Knox students in a peace cafe in Old Town--it may even have been called Alice's Restaurant. (That Arlo Guthrie song became the unofficial antiwar anthem at Knox, sung spontaneously when encountering military recruiters on campus, for instance.) I don't recall who this ex-student was--the only name I remember as being involved with that project is Steven Goldberg. Maybe it was him.  Anyway, someone told us about Sunday in Old Town.

Lincoln Park during that day, before police attacked.

 On Sunday August 25, the day before the convention officially opened, a "Festival of Life" was held in Lincoln Park, organized by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies.

 Politics was leavened with music.  The park was open to everyone until the 11 p.m. curfew, when there were an estimated 2,000 people left. At that point the police moved in and started clubbing people, including those already attempting to leave the park, as well as reporters and photographers.  The crowd sought refuge in Old Town but police followed them and kept clubbing them.  Our friend told us that their peace cafe became a field hospital, as they tended to the injured.

It was not a complete surprise.  It had happened before, not only in the civil rights and free speech movements, but specifically to anti-war demonstrators.  In a 1967 letter to me, Knox grad Michael Hamrin described police busting up a demonstration in Oakland.  It had the same characteristics: indiscriminate violence by police--clubbing, tear gas and mace--against protestors, credentialed reporters and passers-by.

In fact, a specific warning had come out of Old Town earlier in the month, from a group that possibly included Knox people.  It was a letter warning peace demonstrators to stay away from Chicago, because "the cops will riot."  The festival of life could become "a festival of blood."   (The information that brutality was authorized may well have come from the local police they worked with in Old Town.)

The letter was published in a number of underground newspapers.  Such warnings are probably part of the reason I never thought about going.  In fact many demonstrators had been warned away.  I was on the busload of demonstrators from Knox that joined the 50 to 100 thousand at the Pentagon the previous October. Chicago didn't have nearly that many.

But the brutality script got even worse later in the convention.  Reporters were followed, harassed and detained, even delegates were harassed, on the convention floor.  On the day after the convention was over, police actually invaded the Eugene McCarthy suites in the convention hotel and beat up staffers, even breaking into rooms and pulling people out of their beds.

The Lincoln Park brutality was on Sunday.  On Monday night police attacked demonstrators, press and Chicago residents on their own porches in the vicinity of Grant Park.

On Tuesday there was more violence at Lincoln Park while the National Guard oversaw a peaceful Grant Park full of demonstrators.

But what most people saw on television happened on Wednesday, August 28.  In the convention hall, a carefully negotiated "peace plank" for the party platform, opposed by LBJ and his puppet candidate Hubert Humphrey, was voted down.  Inside the hall, people began spontaneously singing "We Shall Overcome," punctuated by the frantic gavel at the podium that failed to stop them.  But the news of the vote also reached demonstrators outside, in Grant Park.

It was perhaps the largest gathering of the week, estimated at 6,000.  Organizers once again attempted to march to the convention hall.  Police and National Guard (with machine guns) blocked the march and police were ordered to clear the streets.

“The police attacked . . . like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing,”wrote Norman Mailer in his celebrated book on the two 1968 political conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Demonstrators were backed up to the Hilton Hotel where networks had their cameras.  The resulting carnage--beatings, mace, tear gas--were covered on live television, along with the demonstrators' haunting chant: "The whole world is watching."

Delegates inside the convention hall were also watching.  They could see the police riot (as the Kerner commission later officially called it) on television monitors as nomination speeches for the party's presidential candidates were proceeding.  Delegates could be seen (and heard) reacting, but the convention chair tried to squelch any protest.

But then it came time to nominate George McGovern, a peace candidate meant to absorb votes of Robert Kennedy supporters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Eugene McCarthy.

 McGovern's name was placed in nomination by Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, an RFK supporter who had served in JFK's cabinet. He looked down from the podium directly at Mayor Daley in the Illinois delegation that was positioned front and center when he said, "and with George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago."  Daley, his face contorted with anger, shouted something back which some heard as "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch."

Humphrey was nominated on the first ballot.  Some 400 delegates joined protesters in Grant Park.

The next day there was another emotional moment in the convention hall when a short film on the life and death of Senator Robert Kennedy was shown.  This was the first Democratic Convention since 1964, when Robert Kennedy introduced a film about his murdered brother, President John F. Kennedy.

Again spontaneous singing rang out in the hall.  This time it was The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was the song that crowds in some places had spontaneously sung as Robert Kennedy's funeral train passed by.  One witness wrote of the singing in the hall, "It seemed that they would never stop."

It is highly likely that none of this would have happened if Robert Kennedy hadn't been murdered in June.  In 1968 the state primaries elected relatively few delegates--the power was still with party officials, who were essentially controlled by LBJ.  Even after RFK won the largest primary in California, LBJ's anointed successor, VP Hubert Humphrey, would arrive at the convention with more delegates.

But things would probably have changed there, and the key ironically would have been Mayor Daley.  Daley had no firm conviction about Vietnam, but he wanted a winning candidate, and he'd helped JFK win the White House.  He let it slip once in the time leading up to the convention that his candidate had died.

Two Conn. McCarthy delegates: Paul Newman
and playwright Arthur Miller

Even after RFK's death, Daley and reportedly many other party regulars knew that Humphrey was a weak candidate.  He was running far behind Nixon in the polls, and even behind McCarthy in Illinois.  Daley was one of those leaders who during convention week tried to persuade Senator Ted Kennedy to accept a draft for the nomination, but the Kennedy family was still in disarray after RFK's death and Ted was now the head of the family.  He was only 36, just a year beyond the age of eligibility to run for President.   In the end he declined.

But had RFK lived and Daley delivered the Illinois delegation, others would have followed, and it is likely that Robert Kennedy would have won the nomination, with every chance of winning the presidency and in short order ending the Vietnam war.

The demonstrations in Chicago would probably have been different as well.  Some groups had begun planning them immediately after the October march on the Pentagon, but when McCarthy and then RFK entered the race and were winning primaries, interest slowed to nearly a stop.  It was only after RFK's assassination, when it was clear that McCarthy wouldn't make a real run at the nomination, that calls for demonstrations became louder and more urgent.

Bumper sticker I plastered on my guitar case after 1972
election.  Particularly popular during Watergate.

The debacle of the nomination itself led to reforms within the Democratic party to give wider representation at the convention and more decision-making to voters, including the expansion of primaries that now usually decide the candidate.

 But the immediate effect was mostly to replace the violent chaos of 1968 with the joyous chaos of the 1972 convention.  Humphrey in 1968 came within a half million votes of the presidency.  George McGovern in 1972 went down to the most resounding electoral college defeat in history, losing every state but Massachusetts and DC to Nixon, re-elected by that margin despite what was already known about Watergate.

Part of the reason was that a lot of people didn't like chaos.  They didn't like rampant impropriety (and worse) that threatened stability and security, and seemed to insult their careful lives.  So even though polls and primary results showed that a great many Americans wanted the Vietnam war to end, and some saw the horror of official police violence, they tended to blame the demonstrators more.

That's why, some say, Humphrey lost in 1968, and a contributing reason for McGovern's loss in 1972. And it's probably why, one night of convention week in Chicago, I couldn't find a place to sleep.

A star of TV coverage, young Julian
Bond, who had to pass on a vice-
presidential nomination bid  because he was
too young.

I have strong memories of watching the TV coverage of the last three days of the convention.  I just don't remember where I was watching.  But it seems likely I left Chicago on Tuesday.  So it must have been on Monday night that I was out with Knox friends.  My train was leaving the next morning, so I needed a place for that night--in other words, the guest room or floor of somebody's parents' house in the Chicago suburbs.

But there was too much chaos on television, and one by one, my friends failed to get permission (let alone an invitation.)  I imagine the question was asked more than once, "Does he have long hair?"

So I had no recourse but to sleep in the train station.  I find myself in memory walking Chicago streets at night, a little stoned and a little lost.  I thought I was close to the station but wasn't sure.  I was cutting through a large parking lot when I saw a policeman in the gear I'd seen on TV, perhaps returned from the battle, leaning against a car in the semi-dark.  His head was down.  He seemed to be shaken.  I don't even think he saw me before I spoke. For whatever other instincts I had, my first was from childhood training: when you're lost, ask a policeman.

That's what I did.  He looked up to see a long-haired kid carrying a duffel bag and a guitar case.  I repeated the question and he straightened up.  He seemed to come to himself.  He thought about it a second and gave me walking directions to my train station.  I thanked him and moved off into the darkness.

Grand Central Station circa 1968, demolished in 1969.

Here's where the memory gets fuzzier.  I recall the station I was looking for as the Grand Central Station (which no longer exists.)  I know I sometimes took trains from there to Pittsburgh, and indeed there was at least one train--the B&O Chicago Capitol Limited--that still left from there.

Chicago Grand Central Station interior

But I was going back to Galesburg and eventually to Iowa City.  For awhile I thought it had to be Union Station but recently I found a note that suggested it was Dearborn Station, where the Santa Fe Railroad train left for Galesburg.

Santa Fe train leaves Dearborn Station in 1968.
These trains moved to Union Station in 1971.

In any case, I made it to the station that night, and was dozing in the waiting room when a worried looking man in a vaguely railroad uniform woke me up, and asked me what I was doing there.  I told him I was taking a train in the morning.  Somehow I satisfied him this was this case--maybe I had a ticket, or I bought one from him.  In any case his attitude changed completely once I was a passenger, and he escorted me up some stairs to another waiting room where other passengers were sleeping.  I would be safe there, he said.

There are many books, articles and videos on the Chicago convention, as well as information online. ( I found this timeline particularly useful.)  One of my favorite books covering the subject is An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 by three British reporters.  But their title is wrong: this was an American tragedy.

There are recent recollections and commentaries, including David Denby in the New Yorker, who basically writes about Mailer writing about Chicago. He ends with a comparison to today.  He quotes Mailer:

"Since obsessions dragoon our energy by endless repetitive contemplations of guilt we can neither measure nor forget, political power of the most frightening sort was obviously waiting for the first demagogue who would smash the obsession and free the white man of his guilt. Torrents of energy would be loosed, yes, those same torrents which Hitler had freed in the Germans when he exploded their ten-year obsession with whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness. Through betrayal, Hitler had told them."

Denby concludes:

"This premonition of Donald Trump and of what Trump has “loosed” in his audience was written exactly fifty years ago. At the moment, not one word of it seems excessive. “Miami & the Siege of Chicago” was composed at the worst time in our national life, though the current moment is a close second. Reading it gives not only pleasure of a literary sort but strength and solace. If the country could survive 1968, it will survive Donald Trump, too."

Inevitably I think instead about contrasting moments in Grant Park.  Photos from 1968 show it filled with protestors, who on several occasions got battered by police.  It was in political terms the center of frustration and futility as well as brutality.

Then there was election night of 2008, when thousands gathered in that same Grant Park to hear the networks say that America had elected its first black President, and then to see Barack Obama and his family make their first post-election appearance on the stage before them.

It's not a sight that I would have imagined possible forty years before.  And now, ten years after, it's hard to believe that it ever really happened.