As delegates and the media gathered in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a prescient reporter said “I think this is going to be a week to remember” as he checked into his hotel.
It became a week the city for years afterward would have preferred to forget, with angry confrontations, brawls and police brutality on display in the streets as well as on the convention floor.
“I’m tired of this, I tell you. I’m tired of this,” shouted a New York delegate after being asked for his credentials for the third time on the floor of the International Amphitheatre. He was hustled off by “three sergeants-at-arms in suits,” the Tribune reported, an eviction slightly delayed when they ran into a television crew attempting to capture the action on film.
“The whole word is watching,” protesters chanted, which was barely hyperbole given the widespread print and televised coverage given to the violence on Chicago’s streets.
“As 1968 began, I felt I was living on the knife edge of history,” Tom Hayden, an anti-war activist and one of the “Chicago Eight” charged in connection with the riots during the convention, wrote in “Voices of the Chicago Eight.”
In fact, the Walker Report from the National Commission on the Cause and Consequences of Violence called what happened in Chicago that August a “police riot.” But the report also noted that “the police were targets of mounting provocation by both word and act.
“It took the form of obscene epithets, and of rocks, sticks, bathroom tiles, and even human feces hurled at police by demonstrators.”
During that momentous week in August 1968, a freelance photographer from Milwaukee bunked in the apartment I lived in overlooking Lincoln Park.
On opening night of the convention, he and I started out to watch the protesters gathering in the park. We were met in the entranceway by baton-swinging cops. They beat him bloody and smashed his cameras. The “white shirt,” their commander, refused my neighbors’ request to take him to a hospital. An assistant U.S. attorney took the photographer in his own car.
Our patched-up house guest never left the apartment again until the delegates left town.
The 1968 Democratic Convention was essentially a tug of war over the First Amendment, which guaranteed “The right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Like the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago, the 1968 convention was preceded by fear of protesters converging on the city, and rumors that some wouldn’t make their point peacefully.
The anxiety was kindled by the riots that followed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination that April, when stretches of Madison Street and Roosevelt Road were reduced to rubble and Daley issued his infamous police order to “Shoot to kill any arsonist.”
In August, the mayor put the 12,000 members of the Chicago Police Department on 12-hour shifts. Six thousand members of the National Guard were sent to Chicago.
Hayden, one of the protest leaders, was tailed by a pair of undercover cops.
“The larger of them (Ralph) Bell had a real habit of losing his temper, getting wild eyed, moving close, and threatening to do away with me on the spot,” Hayden wrote.
The party’s nomination for was up for grabs. President Lyndon Johnson had announced in March that he would not seek reelection, knowing to do so was likely futile because of the Vietnam War. Vice President Hubert Humphrey wanted the nomination, but refused to criticize the war or Johnson’s policies in conducting it.
Sen. Robert Kennedy, who acknowledged the war was an error and pushed for peace, seemed poised to win the Democratic nomination, but was assassinated in Los Angeles in June.
Hayden and his cohorts talked about toppling capitalism and seeing a more equitable society emerge from the rubble. But their lack of coherent organization was made plain in testimony by another of the Chicago Eight defendants, Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Yippies and a leader of the Chicago convention protests.
“I’m a cultural revolutionary,” Hoffman said under questioning from a defense attorney at the trial. “I live in Woodstock Nation.”
“Will you tell the Court and the jury where it is?” Hoffman was asked.
“It is in my mind and in the minds of my brothers and sisters,” he replied.
Hoffman was asked if the defendants had agreed to come to Chicago to encourage and promote violence.
“We couldn’t agree on lunch,” he said.
Some of the protests during the convention were merely guerrilla theater. Hoffman and his partner-in-shtick Jerry Rubin had released a pig in Civic Plaza as their nominee. They dropped hints of a plan to put LSD in Chicago’s water supply.
It became the Chicago Seven trial when the judge separated Bobby Seale’s case from the other defendants. Seale insisted on representing himself so vehemently that the judge, citing his disruptions, had him bound and gagged, providing one more haunting image from the convention’s aftermath.
During the trial, Hoffman testified that the plan was a myth created to draw attention to the convention protests. “A myth is a process of telling stories most of which aren’t true,” Hoffman explained.
The myth was refashioned into a FBI report. A report on the protest’s leadership identified Hayden “as one of the most likely among their number to deliberately start or create an incident of violence.”
Other Chicago Eight defendants included David Dellinger, an older and more experienced activist who had driven an ambulance for the anti-fascist side during the Spanish Civil War, and Rennie Davis, whose father was an economic adviser under President Harry Truman. Davis applied for permits to march but got the runaround from City Hall.
On Aug. 29, Hayden’s marchers found their route to the Amphitheatre blocked by the cops. Detouring east to the what was then the Conrad Hilton hotel, they arrived just as nominating speeches were being delivered in the Amphitheatre.
That happenstance created a split-screen view of Democracy in action.
The cops shoved protestors up against the hotel. A ground-level window broke, and Hayden found himself lying on the shards, inside the Haymarket Lounge.
In the Amphitheatre, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff shifted from praising his candidate, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, to decrying the cops’ “gestapo tactics.” Daley screamed back. At the Chicago Eight Trial, an attorney for the defense asked Daley if he swore at Ribicoff and called him a “dirty Jew?” The prosecutor objected, and Daley didn’t have to answer.
Five of the Chicago Eight defendants were found guilty of some charges against them, but their convictions were overturned by an appellate court.
The convention ended with Humphrey’s nomination. At a news conference on its final day, comedian and activist Dick Gregory predicted the disturbances handed the White House to Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, and lamented the scenes of “horror’ from the week in Chicago.
“I never thought I would see the day when it is more dangerous to walk along the street with a camera than with a beard,” Gregory said.
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