Chicago ‘68: A Melee in America’s Cultural War

They had been fighting, off and on, for most of the day, or really for most of the week. Face-offs, defiance, violent clashes with rocks and bottles, tear gas and nightsticks--the unending cycle had finally exhausted all capacity for restraint. Now, one last time as a hot Wednesday evening turned to night, there would be no hesitation, no color of law or principle.

Even at the time it had the dark, grainy quality of a newsreel. Clouds of smoke and choking fumes riven by floodlights. A great mass of protesters pouring down Michigan Avenue toward the convention headquarters hotel. Soldiers in gas masks and battle dress blocking the way, rifles forward.

Gary Jannusch, then a 25-year-old camera store employee and a corporal in the 131st Infantry Battalion of the Illinois National Guard, remembers feeling transfixed: the crowd surging closer, young women yelling words so vile they shocked him, a piece of concrete bigger than a man’s head missing his knee by half an inch. Several protesters materialized before him, trying, of all things, to shove a bicycle into the National Guard line like a wedge. A plainclothes policeman reached over Jannusch’s shoulder from behind and crumpled them with a burst of Mace.

From the side street to the left, out of Jannusch’s line of sight, police broke ranks to club and flail the crowd with unbottled fury. At the corner, a police cordon attacked people on the sidewalk with such ferocity that a plate-glass window burst, and the melee spilled into the hotel itself. A deputy police commissioner shouted and wrestled with his men in a vain effort to stop them.

It was Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1968, the climactic moment of one of the most violent episodes in modern American political history. In a five-day period before and during the quadrennial Democratic National Convention, demonstrators had relentlessly abused, taunted, defied and harassed police and other security forces. Night after night, groups of police had retaliated with attacks on protesters, bystanders and reporters. A federal commission later labeled the melee “a police riot.”

The Democratic convention, originally conceived as a re-coronation for President Lyndon B. Johnson, had instead become a political killing floor--the point of no return in a battle that would rumble through the election of Richard Nixon in November and on into the decades that followed.

Along the way, the old Democratic coalition would be shattered. Republicans would cement a string of presidential victories--five out of six, from Nixon through George Bush--rivaling the Democratic era begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt. And the party of the New Deal and the Great Society would be forced to reexamine some of its oldest ideas.

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Beyond such political consequences, the violence that engulfed the Democratic convention 28 years ago represented a far-reaching cultural and philosophical conflict over many of American society’s basic values: attitudes about the police and the military; about drugs, sex, clothes, hair, marriage, race, religion, respect for authority; about how America should work; indeed, about whether it was a good or evil nation.

Today, almost three decades later, many of the issues that lay at the heart of the violent debates of 1968 are embodied in the 42nd president of the United States, who this week leads his party back to Chicago for the first time since 1968.

President Clinton embodies both the tensions of 1968 and an attempt to reconcile them in ways that fit present-day realities.

Moreover, there are echoes of 1968 in many of the battle lines drawn by Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole for 1996. With his emphasis on respect for authority and his demands for a return to the traditional values of his own generation, Dole embraced attitudes held sacred by Chicago’s leader of 28 years ago, Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Even at the time, in the midst of the struggles, many Americans recognized that the battle joined in 1968 was not so much between two distinct factions as between contending ideas and impulses within many of them.

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“It really tears you up,” Jannusch said, looking back. “The whole feeling that I had all during this time is that these are your own people. . . . Like everyone else, I had a lot of animosity toward the protesters. They were disrupting my life, my city, everything that I believed in. And yet, on the other hand, given different circumstances, I might have been on the other side.”

In the end, much that was cherished on both sides would be reshaped or rejected by the country, while much that was vilified by each side would ultimately be embraced.

The anti-police, anti-military attitudes of many protesters, for instance, would be instantly and continually rejected by an overwhelming majority of Americans, as would the collectivist, anti-capitalist and anti-middle-class ideology espoused by radicals.

At the same time, the protesters’ opposition to distant wars and their cynicism about government, as well as their attitudes toward drugs, sex and untraditional ways of living, would work themselves deeply--if not comfortably--into the mainstream of American life.

The ambiguity over which side “won” in 1968 remains even as the president and his party prepare for their return here. Clinton is a member of the protest generation that battled here, a youthful opponent of the Vietnam War, a draft avoider, a man whose personal life has sometimes made him seem closer to a Yippie than a church deacon.

Defying the conservative tide, he has also remained relatively liberal on such issues as affirmative action, immigration and the rights of women and gays.

At the same time, driven to the right by political necessity, Clinton today is a proselytizer for traditional family values, an advocate of more police and tougher criminal laws, a champion of the military. A “New Democrat,” he has sought to revive his party and win reelection by defining a middle ground. In the process, he has embraced positions that echo or fall to the right of Mayor Daley’s credo.

The cultural and political crosscurrents of 1968 and its legacy are caught in observations about Clinton and Daley by two historians who have studied the period and its aftermath:

“Clinton,” noted Dominic Pacyga of Columbia College in Chicago, “would never have spelled Amerika with a K,” as many protesters of his generation did to express their contempt for a nation they saw as worse than the communist system it opposed.

“Daley,” said John Allswang of Cal State Los Angeles, “would never have said, ‘The era of big government is over,’ ” as Clinton did in his State of the Union address.

To be sure, many factors have helped shape American society and its politics since 1968, some of them represented only slightly or not at all in the tumultuous Democratic convention. The Cold War is over. The economy has turned global. The federal budget deficit has more than tripled. Traditional political machines have vanished. The country has undergone demographic, social and economic changes that, willy-nilly, altered long-standing attitudes and realities.

But 1968 was the year when the changes sweeping American society seemed to reach some sort of critical mass. It was a year born under a cloud--a year in which such unimaginable and catastrophic events tumbled down upon the country that trouble at the Democratic convention seemed almost predictable.

In January, North Vietnam’s Tet offensive rocked U.S. troops in Southeast Asia. As opposition to the war intensified, Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination and won more than 40% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. At the end of March, Johnson stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek reelection.

In April, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Major cities, including Chicago, erupted in riots that left more than 30 people dead nationwide--11 in Chicago--and mile upon mile of urban America in smoking ruins.

Though Chicago police were praised for their restraint during the riots, Daley announced that henceforth they would “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters. During a subsequent peace march, police took a much tougher line than they had before, using their clubs to disperse demonstrators.

In June, Robert F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from New York, was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. And in August, just days before the Democratic convention was to open, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the bid for freedom known as “Prague Spring.”

As the convention drew near, antiwar activists, radical leftists and an array of other protesters announced plans to descend on Chicago.

The thousands of demonstrators were led not only by what sociologist Jerry M. Lewis of Kent State University calls “the focused antiwar protesters” but also by cultural and political radicals who rejected almost every aspect of American life. It turned out to be an explosive mix.

“The conflict in Chicago was not at all simply about America’s involvement in Vietnam. The conflict was over how the American political system worked and over how Americans found meaning in their lives,” concluded Barnard College history professor David Farber in his book “Chicago ’68.”

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Leading the antiwar demonstrations were such veteran protesters as David Dellinger, who favored nonviolent protest himself but was not prepared to denounce more militant tactics, and Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, both more radical than Dellinger.

Representing the cultural revolution were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others, who had invented something called “Yippie” just for the occasion.

Dellinger and Davis and the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam sought permits for protest parades, especially one to the Amphitheater on that Wednesday, when Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was to be nominated to succeed Johnson.

Meanwhile, the Yippies put their emphasis on a counter-convention, a “festival of life” to mock the Democrats’ “convention of death.” It was to be held in Lincoln Park, north of the Loop, and the Yippies sought city permits to sleep in the park after the 11 p.m. curfew.

Many of the protest leaders had begun their political lives inside the system; Rubin, for instance, had made a serious run for mayor of Berkeley, Calif. When they failed to achieve radical change from within, they concluded the system was incurably corrupt and became more militant. What they believed in and the tactics they favored varied, but all had concluded the existing political system had to be torn down, and each was prepared to support whatever tactics other protesters adopted.

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The Yippies in particular took careful aim at many of the traditional institutions and beliefs that mattered most to Daley and his city.

“Break down the family, church, nation, city, economy; turn life into an art form, a theater of the soul and a theater of the future,” a Yippie proclamation declared. “What’s needed is a generation of people who are freaky, crazy, irrational, sexy, angry, irreligious, childish and mad. . . . People who say, ‘To hell with your goals!’ . . . People who redefine the normal.”

In press conferences and articles in the underground press, protest leaders announced plans for a reign of terror and outrage. Among other things, they claimed they planned to: dump LSD in the city water supply, blow up gas mains, stage a stall-in of old jalopies on freeways, release greased pigs throughout the city (the Yippie candidate for president was a pig named Pigasus), practice mass public sex and use Yippie girls as hookers to seduce delegates and drug their drinks.

They would paint fake cabs and hijack delegates to Wisconsin, bombard the Amphitheater with mortars, gather 230 “hyperpotent” Yippie males to seduce the wives and daughters of delegates, assemble 100,000 people to burn draft cards spelling out ‘Beat Army,’ confront the city with 10,000 nude bodies swimming in Lake Michigan, drug the hotel food, scatter nails on roads, dress up as Viet Cong and hand out rice. . . .

Today, the list of plans reads like a David Letterman “Top 10” list, a collection of proposals so farfetched they seem hard to take seriously. But they were designed as guerrilla theater, each proposal gauged for its capacity to drive the authorities into a frenzy of overreaction.

They succeeded.

The Chicago of Richard J. Daley was still dominated by the children of European immigrants, by Irish and Polish and other ethnic groups deeply imbued with traditional attitudes on public behavior, patriotism and respect for authority. Many, including the police, were still struggling to maintain their grip on the middle-class life and opportunities that many of the more affluent demonstrators took for granted.

And whatever their personal feelings about the Vietnam War may have been, many police officers and city officials had brothers and sons and friends from the neighborhood who served there, and knew some who died.

“What was frightening to them . . . was that the young radicals were denying those values of America on the basis of which these people had risen up, in the first and second generation at least,” said Allswang of Cal State. “What had given the American working class a great deal of hope was being called evil” by the activists.

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“These second-generation immigrants had been persuaded that the liberal modification of the American dream worked--that with an active federal government social and economic policy there had been growth, there had been jobs, they had a clear improvement in their position over their parents, and so on. And they accepted, even supported very strongly, the social and economic structure of the liberal state while they never really bought into the cultural aspects of it.”

“They were both acting in very, very American ways, only on different wavelengths,” said Pacyga. “Daley and the police saw themselves as patriots,” defending the standards and values they had been raised on. “And I think some of those kids saw themselves as patriots, defending the American tradition of protest. So you really had two cultures that just didn’t understand each other.”

The resulting confrontations began in Lincoln Park over the weekend preceding the convention. Groups of police repeatedly pursued the jeering protesters into the surrounding streets and neighborhoods, indiscriminately beating anyone they came upon.

Residents were attacked on their front porches and entry halls. Passengers alighting from city buses were beaten to the ground. News photographers and reporters were singled out, their equipment destroyed and their heads cracked.

Those clashes set the stage for the climactic confrontation outside the convention headquarters hotel, the Conrad Hilton, as the Democrats were nominating Humphrey at the Amphitheater several miles to the south.

Permits had been issued for a rally in Grant Park, across Michigan Avenue from the Hilton, during Wednesday afternoon. But when Dellinger sought to lead a march to the Amphitheater that evening, the battle was joined one last time.

In the words of the Chicago Study Team report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence:

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Chicago police were targets of mounting provocation by both word and act. It took the form of obscene epithet, and of rocks, sticks, bathroom tiles and even human feces hurled at police by demonstrators. Some of these acts were planned; others were spontaneous or were themselves provoked by police action. Furthermore, the police had been put on edge by widely published threats of attempts to disrupt both the city and the convention.

That was the nature of the provocation. The nature of the response was 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.

. . . As one police officer put it: “What happened didn’t have anything to do with police work.”

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Chicago a Convention Hot Spot

Chicago enjoys a long and storied history as the site of U.S. political conventions--a heritage brought to a temporary halt by the turmoil at the 1968 Democratic gathering. The return of the Democrats this year marks the 25th convention held in the Windy City, far and away the most for any city. Here is a look at some of the more memorable ones:

1860--Chicago’s inaugural convention: With Democrats riven over the slavery issue, the fledging Republican Party convened with victory within its grasp--and the nation about to divide. Sen. William H. Seward of New York was the frontrunner, but on the third ballot delegates opted for a more moderate choice--Illinois’ own Abraham Lincoln--as the galleries roared in approval.

1880--The GOP’s lengthiest convention--36 ballots needed to nominate: Former President Ulysses S. Grant, after four years out of office, sought an unprecedented third term. Despite a core of solid support, he could not quite get a majority as vote after vote was taken. As a compromise, weary delegates finally turned to Rep. James A. Garfield of Ohio, who was not formally in the race and initially won attention by giving a nominating speech for someone else.

1896--Scene of perhaps the most famous convention speech: Arguing the populist case against big business in general and, in particular, use of the gold standard in determining money supply, Democrat William Jennings Bryan ended already stirring remarks by declaring: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Myth would have it that the power of his words swept an unsuspecting Bryan to the nomination; in fact, the Nebraskan planned his address precisely for that effect.

1912--Climax of a bitter Republican battle: To the dismay of most GOP leaders, former President Theodore Roosevelt challenged the man he had annointed four years earlier as his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt enjoyed huge popularity but Taft, as the incumbent, controlled the party. Tension was thick--600 policemen stood ready as the convention began. As Taft neared re-nomination, Roosevelt delegates tooted whistles and rubbed sandpaper, imitating steamroller engines. Roosevelt returned to Chicago a few weeks later to accept the Progressive Party nomination.

1932--Held in the depths of the Great Depression: The clear favorite among Democrats was then-New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, though he still needed four ballots to win. Scoffing at what he called an “absurd tradition,” Roosevelt flew to Chicago to accept the nomination, rather than have party leaders come to him with it. In his acceptance speech, he first used the phrase that became synonymous with his policies, pledging a “new deal” for the American people.

1944--The big question for Democrats--who would run with FDR? Roosevelt’s declining health as he sought a fourth term made the choice especially important; many believed--correctly, as it turned out--that he would not live long. The incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace, was deemed much too liberal by party leaders. With Roosevelt refusing to publicly tip his hand, delegates arrived in what one historian termed “a delicious state of confusion.” The pick was based largely on who would least hurt the ticket--Sen. Harry S. Truman of Missouri.

1952--The first nationally televisied conventions: Republicans, thristing for the White House after 20 years out of office, rejected the hero of party conservatives, Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, for World War II Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Democrats, coming to town two weeks later, had 11 candidates placed in nomination. They selected Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson on the third ballot--the last time more than one was needed for a nominee.