Chicago, ‘68: Democrats Flirted With Anarchy in Convention, on Street

CHICAGO —  It was the last week of August, 1968. It was the Democratic National Convention. It was a mismatched assembly of epic proportions, and it was being televised live.

Some five months earlier, Lyndon Baines Johnson had announced that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for a second term. The President’s popularity had become another casualty of the Vietnam War.

Four months after that, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot to death in Memphis, igniting riots in the inner cities across America.

In June, Robert. F. Kennedy had been shot in the head while walking through a California hotel hours after winning that state’s Democratic primary. He died the next day.

In the heat of late summer that year, pacifists, anarchists and hedonists, hippies, Yippies, poets and mystics, delegates, Dixiecrats and bureaucrats filled the streets of Chicago. Each group had its designs on the convention and all were certain they could cure what ailed America.

Two Convention Camps

At night, those who had learned to live with the war bunked in luxurious hotels along Michigan Avenue, where they might hear Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox warn of the danger of letting misinformed socialists and power-mad politicians take over the party.

Those who opposed the war slept in the city’s lakefront parks, where Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman promoted the politics of confrontation, Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg chanted Hindu hymns and folk singer Phil Ochs reminded them: “It’s always the old who lead us to war; it’s always the young who fall.”

Before the week was out, each camp would command center stage in a drama that reached into living rooms across the nation.

Twenty years later, there are still reminders of the Democratic Party’s brief flirtation with anarchy. The New York Times commented in mid-June: “This is a party that . . . has been quite willing to destroy itself to thrash out the most divisive issues that the country faced, among them civil rights and the war in Vietnam.”

Among the outcomes of 1968 were far-reaching reforms that, in effect, broke the power of old-line party bosses, devised new nominating procedures and kept the White House in Republican hands in three of the next four elections.

McCarthy Recalls Scene

“It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way,” recalled former Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a presidential aspirant and principal player in the events of 1968.

“There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway--the growing women’s movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.

“But in 1968, the party became a kind of bloc of unrelated factions . . . each refusing accommodation with the others, each wanting control at the expense of all the others.”

McCarthy, who now lives in Virginia, is finishing his 12th book of essays, titled “Required Reading.”

“Nobody,” growled Mayor Richard J. Daley, “is going to take over this city.”

But as darkness fell on Wednesday, Aug. 28, with three days of skirmishing already behind them, thousands of would-be revolutionaries tried to take the streets in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel from who-knows-how-many cops wielding their night sticks.

The hotel’s aging facade reflected an eerie glow from television lights as line after line of helmeted police followed tear-gas canisters into the crowd, a sky-blue scythe cutting a blood-red swath.

“I remember finding a room high up in the hotel so I could watch. Thinking back,” recalled Mike Royko, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the Chicago Tribune, “it’s hard to believe that spasm of, well, silliness, turned out to be a pivotal point in American history.

“That’s not to minimize the goals of some of the people in the anti-war movement. There were people in there with genuine social consciences, and many were active in the civil rights movement.

“But because people saw this on TV, the fight for the Democratic Party came down to a confrontation between bullheaded cops and a bunch of nervous, tired kids following leaders who talked about revolutionary theory and suddenly had everybody paying attention.

“I remember the chant: ‘The whole world is watching!’ Well, most of America was anyway, and except for Jimmy Carter squeaking through, they have put Republicans in the White House ever since.”

From a five-room suite on the Hilton’s 25th floor, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey watched the scene below. His political fate already was in the hands of men whose job was to keep the chaos in the streets from reaching the convention 4 miles to the south.

Humphrey had won none of the 15 party primaries, had not even entered the campaign until two days after LBJ said he was getting out.

But everyone who came to Chicago that week--the supporters of the dovish McCarthy, the backers of earnest South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, the idealists who hadn’t recovered from Bobby Kennedy’s assassination--knew that Humphrey likely would emerge the standard-bearer.

In 1968, delegates ran on primary ballots without a stated preference, and the political professionals--the governors, the mayors, the state party chairmen--exercised an inordinate influence on how the entire delegation voted.

That enabled Humphrey to court the local heavyweights and come away with all the delegates in states such as Pennsylvania, where 90% of Democrats had voted for McCarthy in the “beauty contest” primary.

It was as crude a display of power as had been seen in many years, punctuated by the televised sequence of Daley drawing a finger across his broad neck in a signal to cut off the microphones as Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff gave the speech nominating McGovern and spoke of “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”

Soon afterward, those same party professionals delivered Humphrey’s first-ballot nomination with the same sanguine efficiency the police had displayed in their 20-minute sweep of the demonstrators downtown.

By the end of the week, 691 demonstrators had been arrested. About 200 protesters were treated for injuries and an estimated 200 others never sought treatment for their wounds. The police also paid a price, with 161 injuries.

Dellinger would spend a good part of the next few years in Chicago as one of eight defendants charged with inciting violence at the 1968 convention.

The Chicago Seven Trial--Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s case was quickly severed from the rest--opened in September, 1969, and quickly became one of the most publicized of recent history.

The defendants and their attorneys were cited for contempt of court nearly 200 times. They became a cause celebre . Their convictions were overturned in 1972 by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and their paths since have been as divergent as the motives that brought them together 20 years ago.

“I have no regrets about the ‘60s whatsoever,” Abbie Hoffman, who works as a political organizer, said recently.

“The only regret I have is that we didn’t do it deeper, make it last longer.”