August 28, 1968—In Chicago, as delegates at the Democratic Convention prepared to nominate Hubert H. Humphrey for President, television viewers were stunned at what they saw from the Second City—ugly discord in the nation and in the party in charge.
Outside, in the city’s downtown, 26,000 city police and National Guardsmen, on orders of Mayor Richard Daley, cracked down on 10,000 protesters against the Vietnam War.
Inside the convention, while nominating George McGovern for President, his colleague, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, noted pointedly that with the Senator from South Dakota in the Oval Office, “we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!” With an irate Daley shouting back “You faker” and “Jew SOB,” Ribicoff smiled and said, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”
The convention in Chicago had consequences that would reverberate through the years:
* Students for a Democratic Society, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), the Youth International Party (Yippies) did not mobilize middle-class youths through the protest, as they had hoped, but annoyed the majority of the 89 million viewers to side with the cops, according to polls taken after the event.
Outside, in the city’s downtown, 26,000 city police and National Guardsmen, on orders of Mayor Richard Daley, cracked down on 10,000 protesters against the Vietnam War.
Inside the convention, while nominating George McGovern for President, his colleague, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, noted pointedly that with the Senator from South Dakota in the Oval Office, “we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!” With an irate Daley shouting back “You faker” and “Jew SOB,” Ribicoff smiled and said, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”
The convention in Chicago had consequences that would reverberate through the years:
* Students for a Democratic Society, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), the Youth International Party (Yippies) did not mobilize middle-class youths through the protest, as they had hoped, but annoyed the majority of the 89 million viewers to side with the cops, according to polls taken after the event.
* The protest split the old-style, blue-collar elements of the Democratic Party from the “New Left.” As journalist Mark Stricherz chronicled in Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party (2007), the Democrats decided to embrace groups that had been disenfranchised at the convention--young people, blacks, and college-educated suburbanites--with new delegate-apportioning rules. The core issues of these groups—opposition to the war, combating racism, abortion—were alien to the economic concerns that motivated the blue-collar Northern ethnic Catholics and Southern white Protestants who played key roles in the New Deal coalition.
* The man who championed these “Dutton Rules” (named for party activist Fred Dutton) was Senator McGovern, who would take the arcane nominating rules that he had helped shepherd into being and win the 1972 Democratic nomination for President in the process. That reminds me a bit of one of the funniest columns by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in which she noted how Dick Cheney, hired to vet George W. Bush’s Vice-Presidential selections in 2000, ended up being the running mate—sort of like a beauty-pageant judge who ends up with the tiara herself.
* The protest played into the hands of Richard Nixon, who had been making political hay all year with the notion of “crime in the streets”—and who, upon being elected President, put it in a vastly more convenient spot for him: in the Oval Office.
* The sheer messiness of the cop-authorized rampage authorized by Daley—combined with that of the 1972, Duttton Rules-dominated Democratic Convention—has led both parties to move increasingly toward the kind of boring, choreographed convention derided by David Frum in a recent Wall Street Journal article.
(This past week, the Democrats may have done the unthinkable: instead of persuading the electorate to turn out an unbelievably unpopular incumbent party, they might have bored viewers to death with umpteen repetitions of the word “change.” It's hard to produce the kind of electricity Obama did four years ago when everyone this time was not only singing from the same hymnbook, but doing so with the exact same notes.)
Although Mayor Daley despised the protesters as privileged kids, he had something in common with them that neither recognized at the time, and that is not even realized very well to this date. According to Charles Kaiser’s 1968 in America, Daley had told Bobby Kennedy already that he hated the Vietnam War.
For a particularly vivid account of these turbulent days in Chicago by an extremely interested—and uncommonly perceptive—observer, take a look at Private Faces, Public Places, by Abigail McCarthy, wife of (though, four years after the events, she was separated from) defeated candidate Eugene McCarthy.
From 1974 to 1999, Abigail McCarthy was a columnist for Commonweal, a magazine for moderate-to-liberal Catholics. Judging from her memoir, I’m sorry I didn’t read her more often while I had the chance. I doubt that even to this day whether any spouse of a major candidate has written an account so wrenchingly honest about the costs of campaigning on a candidate’s family. She knew all too well about this, having been hospitalized three times during the long primary season.
It was Abigail’s misfortune to come to Chicago after her third convalescence. If that wasn’t enough to send herback to the hospital, I don’t know what would. Especially as she relates what was happening in Grant Park as she looked out from the Hilton that day:
“From our windows we could see the menacing blue lines of police and the massing of the National Guard, the constant passing of the weird jeeps armed with front screens of flesh-tearing barbed wire….I listened in dread as the announcements from the police bullhorns bounced against the hotel walls and the refusals echoed back….With each police incident, with each person stopped and questioned, with each one shoved aside at the hotel entrances, the demonstrators in the park had more and more sympathizers in the hotel.”
One of the worst legacies of Richard Daley was an economically and racially polarized city. Miraculously, this past week witnessed an African-American sojourner who set down roots in this same city—now being led by Daley's son Richard—who won the nomination of his party, at a convention far more peaceful than the one that convulsed the City of Broad Shoulders 40 years ago to the day.
Although Mayor Daley despised the protesters as privileged kids, he had something in common with them that neither recognized at the time, and that is not even realized very well to this date. According to Charles Kaiser’s 1968 in America, Daley had told Bobby Kennedy already that he hated the Vietnam War.
For a particularly vivid account of these turbulent days in Chicago by an extremely interested—and uncommonly perceptive—observer, take a look at Private Faces, Public Places, by Abigail McCarthy, wife of (though, four years after the events, she was separated from) defeated candidate Eugene McCarthy.
From 1974 to 1999, Abigail McCarthy was a columnist for Commonweal, a magazine for moderate-to-liberal Catholics. Judging from her memoir, I’m sorry I didn’t read her more often while I had the chance. I doubt that even to this day whether any spouse of a major candidate has written an account so wrenchingly honest about the costs of campaigning on a candidate’s family. She knew all too well about this, having been hospitalized three times during the long primary season.
It was Abigail’s misfortune to come to Chicago after her third convalescence. If that wasn’t enough to send herback to the hospital, I don’t know what would. Especially as she relates what was happening in Grant Park as she looked out from the Hilton that day:
“From our windows we could see the menacing blue lines of police and the massing of the National Guard, the constant passing of the weird jeeps armed with front screens of flesh-tearing barbed wire….I listened in dread as the announcements from the police bullhorns bounced against the hotel walls and the refusals echoed back….With each police incident, with each person stopped and questioned, with each one shoved aside at the hotel entrances, the demonstrators in the park had more and more sympathizers in the hotel.”
One of the worst legacies of Richard Daley was an economically and racially polarized city. Miraculously, this past week witnessed an African-American sojourner who set down roots in this same city—now being led by Daley's son Richard—who won the nomination of his party, at a convention far more peaceful than the one that convulsed the City of Broad Shoulders 40 years ago to the day.
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