Forty Years Ago in August

Back in the days when we old fogeys were still young, energetic and idealistic, there was a Democratic Convention in Chicago. I can hardly believe that that it took place nearly 40 years ago, from August 26 to August 30, 1968. It had been a bitter, tumultuous primary campaign, and the convention was to be even more bitter and tumultuous.

In September, 1967, Allard Lowenstein and Curtis Gans, leaders of the National Student Association, had begun a formal movement to dump President Lyndon Johnson from the Democratic ticket. In September, Lowenstein approached Senator Robert Kennedy of NY, and asked him to run against President Johnson for the nomination. When Kennedy refused, Lowenstein turned to Senator Eugene McCarthy of MN, who agreed to run.

On March 12, 1968, McCarthy nearly upset Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, winning 40% of the vote. A few days later, Bobby Kennedy changed his mind and announced his intention to seek the nomination. On March 31, President Johnson announced that he would no longer seek nor accept his party’s nomination to run for a second term.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, TN. In Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy made the announcement of King’s death in an extemporaneous speech to a group made up mostly of African Americans at a scheduled campaign rally. Kennedy said:

I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in….

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man….

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black….the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Just two months later, Bobby Kennedy would also be cut down by an assassin’s bullet.

In reaction to the murder of Rev. King, there was rioting in more than 100 American cities. In Chicago, nine African Americans were killed and twenty city blocks burned. On the third day of rioting, Mayor Richard Daley held a press conference to announce:

“I have conferred with the superintendent of police this morning and gave him the following instructions: I said to him very emphatically and very definitely that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand because they are potential murderers, and issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city. Above all, the crime of arson is to me the most hideous and worst crime of any and should be dealt with in this fashion.”

“What about children?” one reporter asked.

“You wouldn’t want to shoot them,” Daley said, “but with Mace you could detain youngsters.”

On April 11, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Act contained a new federal law against crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. This law was later used to prosecute the “Chicago 7,” leaders of organizations who protested during the Democratic Convention in August, 1968. A year later, a group of prominent anti-war activists, including Noam Chomsky and Judy Collins, wrote in the New York Review of Books:

“The effect of this ‘anti-riot’ act is to subvert the first Amendment guarantee of free assembly by equating organized political protest with organized violence. Potentially, this law is the foundation for a police state in America.

“In this decade, countless Americans have contributed to the revitalization of politics through freedom rides, peace marches and other demonstrations of protest against impacted political institutions. Yet, from Bull Connor’s Birmingham to Richard Daley’s Chicago, civil authorities have employed police violence to suppress ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble,’ repeatedly invoking the spectres of conspiracy, incitement and riot. The Justice Department has now joined the assault on free political action.

On April 27, Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, even though it was too late to get his name on the primary ballots in most states.

On May 14, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover created COINTELPRO, a domestic counterintelligence operation designed to infiltrate and disrupt new left organizations. In a memo announcing the new program, Hoover wrote:

The purpose of this program is to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of the various new left organizations, their leadership, and their adherents. It is imperative that activities of those groups be followed on a continuous basis so that we may take advantage of all opportunities for counter intelligence and also inspire action where circumstance warrant. The devious maneuver, the duplicity of these activists must be exposed to public scrutiny through cooperation of reliable news media sources, both locally and at the seat of government. We must frustrate every effort of these groups and individuals to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents. In every instance, consideration should be given to disrupting organized activity of these groups and no opportunity should be missed to capitalize on organizational or personal conflicts of their leadership.

On June 5, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while celebrating his California primary win.

On June 23 a group of McCarthy supporters in CT, who felt they were not fairly represented in the state party delegation, formed “a Commission on the Selection of Presidential Nominees.” to petition the Rules Committee to end the winner take all system of counting delegates to the convention. A Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection was appointed by the convention. This Commission was chaired by Senator George McGovern and its proposals were adopted by the DNC in 1971. These changes greatly reduced the control of Democratic Party leaders over the selection of presidential candidates.

On August 8 in Miami, the Republican Convention nominated Richard Nixon as their candidate for President. Nixon promised that his first foreign policy goal would be to end the war in Vietnam and bring “peace with honor.” That night in Miami’s African American neighborhoods four people were killed in rioting and hundreds were arrested.

During Democratic Convention week in Chicago, the nation witnessed unprecedented scenes of violence and turmoil in the streets and parks surrounding the International Ampitheater, where the Convention was held. For months, various groups had been planning demonstrations in Chicago, not only to protest the Vietnam war, but to try to prevent the Party insiders from nominating Hubert Humphrey, who had the nomination virtually sewn up, since he controlled well over one hundred more delegates than needed. Nevertheless, Humphrey was worried that his close connection to President Johnson could still torpedo his plans.

Several days before the Convention opened on August 26, 1968, nearly 6,000 National Guard Troops were called up and began practicing riot control techniques. Special police riot troops were also being trained. Simultaneously MOBE (Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam) organizers were running training sessions for demonstrators.

Norman Mailer described the general mood on the night of Tuesday, August 27, in an article in Harper’s Magazine, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”:

Demonstrators mass outside Convention hall

en masse, a thousand of them, two thousand of them, there were conceivably as many as five thousand boys and girls massed in Grant Park at three in the morning, listening to speakers, cheering, chanting, calling across Michigan Avenue to the huge brooding façade of the Hilton, a block wide, over twenty-five stories high, with huge wings and deep courts (the better to multiply the number of windows with a view of the street and a view of Grant Park). The lights were on in hundreds of bedrooms in the Hilton, indeed people were sleeping and dreaming all over the hotel with the sound of young orators declaiming in the night below, voices rising twenty, twenty-five stories high, the voices clear in the spell of sound which hung over the Hilton. The Humphrey headquarters were here, and the McCarthy headquarters. Half the Press was quartered here…[T]wo-thirds of the principals at the convention must have had a view early this morning, two and three and four A.M. of this Tuesday night, no this Wednesday morning, of Grant Park filled across the street with a revolutionary army of dissenters and demonstrators and college children and McCarthy workers and tourists ready to take a crack on the head, all night they could hear the demonstrators chanting, “Join us, join us,” and the college bellow of utter contempt, “Dump the Hump! Dump the Hump,” all the fury of the beatings and the teargassings, all the bitter disappointments of that recently elapsed bright spring when the only critical problem was who would make a better President, Kennedy or McCarthy (now all the dread of a future with Humphrey or Nixon). There was also the sense that police had now entered their lives, become an element pervasive as drugs and books and sex and music and family. So they shouted up to the windows of the Hilton, to the delegates and the campaign workers who were sleeping, or shuddering by the side of their bed, or cheering by their open window; they called up through the night on a stage as vast and towering as one of Wagner’s visions and the screams of police cars joined them, pulling up, gliding away, blue lights revolving, lines of police hundreds long in their sky-blue shirts and sky-blue crash helmets, penning the demonstrators back of barriers across Michigan Avenue from the Hilton, and other lines of police and police fences on the Hilton’s side of the street.

On Wednesday, August 28, the “peace plank” to the party platform was to be debated. The debate was scheduled for late at night to avoid prime-time television coverage. The debate itself was limited to only one hour for each side and was “structured to avoid hostile exchanges” Ultimately the plank used language approved by the Humphrey Campaign. On “Face the Nation” the previous week, Humphrey had affirmed his support for Johnson’s conduct of the war.

Outside the convention hall, the worst night of violence, later called ” the Battle of Michigan Avenue” was taking place. Protestors attempting to march to the Convention hall were stopped by police and

…a melee broke out near the Conrad Hilton Hotel across from Grant Park, and police began beating bystanders as well as protesters, using clubs, fists, knees and Mace. Some militants fought back with their own caustic sprays, bottles and concrete chunks, enraging police all the more. Officers pushed people through a plate-glass window and then, according to witnesses, attacked the dazed victims as they lay amid broken glass. A group of police cheered a soldier as he bashed a demonstrator and attacked a photographer who filmed the scene.

TV audiences heard protesters chanting “the whole world is watching” as Chicago police, empowered by Mayor Daley, engaged in what would later be called a “police riot.”

the media recorded graphic violence on the part of the Chicago police. Many innocent bystanders, reporters and doctors offering medical help were severely beaten by the police. Many hotels where the delegates were staying were affected by the riots. Fumes from the tear gas used by the police and “stink bombs” thrown by the protesters drifted into the buildings…[including] the Conrad Hilton, the headquarters for the Democratic party and the press.

Approximately an hour after these events, scenes of the violence taking place on the streets outside were shown on the big screen in the convention hall. Senator Abraham Ribicoff in a nomination speech for George McGovern, who had announced his candidacy on August 10, referred to the police conduct as “Gestapo tactics.”

Mayor Daley erupted in anger and shook his fist at Ribicoff. Most reports of the event also say Daley yelled an off-color epithet beginning with an “F,” but accoriding to CNN executive producer Jack Smith, others close to Daley inist he shouted “Faker,” meaning Ribicoff was not a man of his word, the lowest name one can be called in Chicago’s Irish politics.

Humphrey’s worst fears did not materialize. Despite numerous challenges during the course of the week, the Humphrey/Johnson forces maintained control of the party machinery, and Humphrey was easily nominated. He chose Edmund Muskie of ME as his running mate.

The arrest count for Convention Week disturbances stands at 668. An undetermined number of demonstrators sustained injuries, with hospitals reporting that they treated 111 demonstrators. The on-the-street medical teams from the Medical Committee for Human Rights estimated that their medics treated over 1,000 demonstrators at the scene. The police department reported that 192 officers were injured, with 49 officers seeking hospital treatment.

I see so many parallels between 1968 and 2008. In about a month, the Democratic Party will hold a Convention to nominate a candidate whom at least half of Democratic voters do not support. We are in the midst of another endless, futile war that Democrats in Congress pretend to oppose but have supported with their votes. As in the late ’60s, our government is treating us as the enemy and we are subject to out-of-control, government spying. But today, the government’s spying ability and the weapons they have at hand for crowd control are far beyond anything we could have imagined forty years ago.

In 1968, the hopes of my generation were pinned on either Eugene McCarthy, an intellectual Senator who opposed the Vietnam war or Bobby Kennedy, whose brother John had been assassinated in 1963. Bobby was seen by many as a ruthless insider, but during the campaign, he had shown himself to be a compassionate man who was able to connected with poor and working class voters, especially in Appalachia. In 2008, we have been through a campaign in which generational, ethnic, gender, sexual preference, and class divisions have been exploited in favor of a candidate playing the outsider, but supported by the powers that be faced a purported “insider” who was seen as calculating and ruthless, but who revealed her vulnerability and compassion and connected with the poor and working class people of Appalachia in much the same way that Bobby Kennedy did forty years ago. In much the same way that Johnson still controlled the Party apparatus and the Convention in 1968, Democratic leaders have manipulated the process in favor of their chosen candidate and against the preferred candidate of the majority of Democratic voters.

I also see some frightening contrasts with 1968. Today the media pretty much ignores anti-war demonstrations and helps the government cover up dissent. Far more than in 1968, the press acts as an arm of the government rather than in its Constitutional role as “the fourth estate,” charged with informing the people and acting as a counteracting force to government power. Democrats in congress have supported unconstitutional domestic spying by the government. We don’t really have a national structure to mobilize group actions, and our constitutional rights right to assemble and to dissent have been shockingly curbed by forcing demonstrators into ironically named “free speech zones.” Finally, this year, young people are supporting the candidate who represents the DC insiders and is supported by the major investment banks, oil companies, and the nuclear industry–a candidate who supports changes to if not full privatization of social security, has closed the door on national health care, and supports unconstitutional domestic spying by our government. Most stunning of all, the presumptive nominee’s young supporters are opposed to an open convention in Denver. Meanwhile we old fogeys are holding out for counting all of the votes and an open convention with an honest rollcall vote.

What other parallels and contrasts do you see? What can we expect in Denver? I think these are things that we PUMAs need to discuss.

General Sources:

Dean Blobaum, Timeline of events surrounding Chicago 1968

CNN

Chicago Tribune