When the resistance confronted Democrats in 1968, the crackdown was vicious
The Chicago convention forever changed the party
“In 1968 the name Chicago won a significance far beyond date and place,” wrote political journalist Theodore H. White. “It became the title of an episode, like Waterloo, or Versailles, or Munich.” That was the year that Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention, and witnessed a violent confrontation between the Vietnam War’s supporters and its critics. By the time the convention was over, hundreds of anti-war protesters had been beaten bloody in the streets by unrestrained police officers, doing the bidding of pro-war Democratic mayor Richard J. Daley. But the establishment didn’t emerge unscathed — the carefully constructed illusion of patriotic consensus around the war was dismantled in Chicago.
In the late sixties, the Democrats were in power, but there was also a crisis in the party. Resistance to the Vietnam War had been mounting for years, and liberals of some stripe were on both sides of the conflict. Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and as such he oversaw all war efforts in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the anti-war demonstrators “were the children of the Democratic Party,” said anti-war activist Marilyn Katz. Many were far to the left of the Democratic Party, but still they felt betrayed. “We expected nothing from Republicans. We expected everything from Democrats.”
The 1968 Democratic National Convention was shaping up to be a referendum on the war. Vice President Hubert Humphrey emerged as the clear front-runner. He reportedly had private concerns about the war, but Johnson had disciplined him on at least one occasion, and thereafter he toed the party line on the existential necessity of continuing the conflict overseas. Challenging Humphrey were George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, who were both anti-war — especially McCarthy, whose slogan was “McCarthy for peace” and whose campaign made use of white dove imagery and the peace symbol.
As the convention date drew nearer, two to three hundred Americans were being killed in Vietnam every week. Many Vietnamese civilians were being needlessly murdered, too, as bombshell exposés in the American mass media had recently revealed. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April, shortly after speaking out against the Vietnam War for the first time. Anti-war protests were drawing up to 100,000 demonstrators in Washington, D.C. Everyone knew that it would all come to a head in Chicago.
“We felt that we had to go from protest to resistance on a national scale because the war was expanding horrendously,” recalled David Dellinger, a longtime pacifist who coordinated the Chicago protests. Dellinger was joined in the protest preparations by Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, two founders of the large and influential student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Activist groups such as SDS and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam announced their intention to descend on the city. And so did some less serious players: the Yippies.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were the movement’s irreverent tricksters. They had grown to prominence by executing a protest-cum-performance-piece in which they gathered people to encircle the Pentagon and attempted to levitate it with their minds. Hoffman and Rubin were media favorites, and were instrumental in driving the youth turnout in Chicago. They created the Yippies (Youth International Party) for that very purpose, announcing that they were planning to run a pig for president. The pig’s name was Pigasus.
The Yippies filed for an outlandish permit for a citywide festival at the same time as the convention, and told news media that the party would involve events such as nude swimming in Lake Michigan and dumping LSD into the water supply. The permit request and open invitation to the nation’s youth outraged Mayor Daley, a law-and-order politician and influential Democratic Party strongman who ruled the city with an iron fist. He may not have taken the threats literally, but he loathed the thought of the city being overrun with hippies, and prepared the police department for an invasion. He also stalled on distributing any permits, including to Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden.
Davis appealed to Justice Department official Roger Wilkins, who recognized his sincerity and attempted to negotiate with the mayor. “About five minutes into the conversation,” Wilkins remembers, “red started coming up from Daley’s collar, all up on these jowls, which seemed larger and larger and larger to me. And he launched into a monologue which lasted, I believe, 25 minutes. And when I started to interrupt and say, ‘But Mr. Mayor,’ he would just raise his voice.
“When I walked away from Daley’s office,” Wilkins says, “I thought, ‘We’re going to have violence. He’s going to unleash his police department.’”
“Just before the convention, my mother called me up and said, ‘Be careful,’” remembers McCarthy delegate Richard Samuel. “I said, ‘Careful of what? This is America. I’m going out to Chicago, I’m going to express a minority point of view, I’m going to lose, and I’m going to go home.’ I just didn’t see what the big deal was. When the plane landed, there were ranks of soldiers all over the place, and we felt like we’d flown into the middle of a military camp.”
On Sunday, August 25, the day before the convention, 2,000 protesters convened in Lincoln Park. The atmosphere was largely celebratory — Beat poet Allen Ginsberg led everyone in a meditative chant. But Daley’s police hovered at the park’s perimeter, and tension mounted as night approached. The protesters were determined to sleep in the park, but several thousand police lined up and fired teargas at the crowd. As people fled, the police rushed them with nightsticks and began beating anyone they could reach.
This was the beginning of three days of open conflict on the streets of Chicago. A government account, known as the Walker Report, later found that the convention protests had consisted of:
unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in the areas where confrontations were occurring.
Inside the convention on Monday, August 26, Richard Daley himself was the master of ceremonies. He began the proceedings by condemning the protesters outside, saying, “We have no flag burners in this Democratic National Convention, and I don’t think any of them would belong here.” Anti-war delegates were subsequently harassed on the floor: officials went around checking their credentials every 10 or 15 minutes, and when they objected, a fray occurred and a dangerous crowd crush ensued. The police took the occasion to forcibly drag anti-war delegates out of the convention.
In his nominating speech for McGovern, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff said, “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!” The crowd erupted in cheers and boos. Daley said something inaudible; many lip readers have concluded that his words were “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.”
On August 28, more than 10,000 protesters arrived in Grant Park for the biggest demonstration of the convention. Though not conclusive, it was reported later that, “according to Army sources, as many as one in six protesters at the Chicago ’68 protests were really undercover military intelligence agents. There were local police and FBI agents planted throughout the antiwar movement, often urging their cohorts to ever more daring feats of resistance.”
But there were many genuinely angry young anti-war activists, too, and after days of arrests and beatings in the streets, they were on fire. A teenage boy climbed the flagpole in the park and lowered the American flag. The police moved in and arrested him, dragging him through the crowd and shoving him into a squad car. The crowd began throwing objects at the police, and chaos ensued. “I told people, ‘Sit down, sit down, don’t throw anything,’” recalls Dellinger. “That’s exactly what they want. They want to start a riot.” Davis asked the police to withdraw, but they advanced instead. They targeted Davis specifically, and beat him unconscious.
The police violence escalated, and the rhetoric and tactics from some activist speakers grew increasingly agitated This dismayed some of the nonviolent elements of the movement, and the leadership of the demonstrations fractured, with Dellinger urging caution and Hayden coaxing rebellion. Hayden grabbed the mic from Dellinger and advised the crowd to disperse in an disorganized manner throughout Chicago, saying:
If blood is going to flow, let it flow all over the city. If gas is going to be used, let that gas come down all over Chicago and not just over us in the park. That if the police are going to run wild, let them run wild all over this city and not over us. If we are going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated.
Night fell, and activists remember seeing police emerge from the thick haze of teargas, clutching their nightsticks, like a scene from a war movie. anks rolled through the streets. The teargas was so voluminous that it disturbed Hubert Humphrey in his hotel room, causing him to take refuge in the shower. For their part, many protesters simply walked and chanted, but others lit trash fires, blocked roads, taunted policemen, and on a few occasions attacked them.
The climax occurred at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the site of the convention. The ratio of police to protesters was roughly one to one, though the police had weapons and license to do violence. They used their nightsticks, their fists, and their feet to beat protesters and bystanders alike. They were no longer just following orders — they were acting out of rage. Historian David Farber writes:
Policemen came at the tightly packed crowd from all sides. Some officers attacked people watching from the sidewalks. Others pursued fleeing demonstrators for blocks. One of the first groups of police reinforcements, furious over reports of injured comrades, stormed off their bus chanting, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” A police lieutenant sprayed Mace indiscriminately at a crowd watching the street battle. Policemen pushed a small group of bystanders and peaceful protesters through a large plate glass window and then attacked the bleeding and dazed victims as they lay among the glass shards. Policemen on three-wheeled motorcycles, one of them screaming, “Wahoo!” ran people over.
The most intense period of assault lasted about 20 minutes. Nearly the whole time, protesters chanted in unison, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
This event came to be known as the “Battle of Michigan Avenue.” The battle’s generals were arrested on charges of conspiracy to incite a riot. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner were the defendants. An eighth defendant, Black Panther Party member Bobby Seale, was tried separately for contempt of court.
The judge at the conspiracy trial was Julius Hoffman, who thought it necessary to remind the courtroom that he was not related to Abbie Hoffman. At this, Abbie cried out, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” The moment encapsulated the generational divide: the youth movement felt, especially after 1968, that the system controlled by their elders was broken beyond repair.
The defendants, who’d come to be known as the Chicago Seven, were all found guilty, as was Seale, though all eight eventually had their convictions overturned. Humphrey became the Democratic Party nominee and lost to Nixon. The battle ended in an uneasy truce, and the stalemate stretched into the early seventies. But the legacy of ’68 lived on in the increasing willingness of some Democratic Party politicians to speak out against the war. The whole world truly had been watching, and the party could no longer pretend that the war was universally supported.
Todd Gitlin of SDS was there that day. He writes, “One may rue the overindulgences” of the protests of ’68, “while still recognizing that the movements of the time were preludes to a necessary enlargement of democracy, freedom and moral seriousness. The good of this immense effort outweighs the bad, though — as with so many laudable efforts — it reminds us of unfulfilled promises.”
