CHICAGO — Inside the convention hall, the choreography of American politics stumbled on.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic presidential nomination with 1,761 votes to 601 for Sen. Eugene McCarthy. The delegates adopted Humphrey’s platform, which continued President Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular Vietnam policies, and rejected McCarthy’s anti-war plank. But their attention was on the radios and television screens reporting chaos outside.
A few miles away, thousands of protesters streamed out of Grant Park into a sea of tear gas and billy clubs. Some were caught in a crush against the facade of a Hilton hotel and fell through the plate glass, cutting themselves on shards. People on upper floors threw crystal ashtrays, one of which struck a passer-by and shattered, embedding glass in his eyes. Blood ran from skulls into gutters. Someone tried to overturn a police van. All the while, the crowd was chanting.
“The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”
It was on this night, Aug. 28, that all the anxiety and rage of 1968 exploded. Numerous groups were involved, with different motives and tactics. There were Yippies who said they would get high and have sex outdoors, and black and Latino Chicagoans, including the Puerto Rican leftist group the Young Lords, who wanted to challenge police brutality; McCarthy supporters who sought change within “the system,” and Students for a Democratic Society activists who wanted to shred it.
Some protesters taunted the police, and a small number threw bags of feces at them. But an official report found that police acted out of proportion to the provocations and largely targeted people who had done nothing to provoke officers. It was, the report concluded, a “police riot” driven partly by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who had earlier given the police license to “shoot to kill” in certain circumstances.
Here is a look at that week and its legacy through the eyes of nine people who experienced it, condensed from interviews and from a panel discussion last week at the Chicago Public Library.
— Sunday, Aug. 25: ‘He was exploding with anger’
MARILYN KATZ, then 21, SDS security chief: I was pretty exuberant. We were having a good time. We had Allen Ginsberg and all these adults who were our idols coming to say how wonderful we were. It wasn’t just in Chicago — it was Paris, Mexico City, Prague. We were part of a worldwide youth movement, and we really thought we were the future.
TAYLOR PENSONEAU, 27, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter: There was some humor at the start. The Yippies brought a pig into the Civic Center [on Aug. 23] and nominated it for president. They demanded immediate Secret Service protection for the pig. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were arrested, and the pig was “arrested.” I watched them put the pig in a paddy wagon.
KATZ: That night, these fire trucks with big lights and tear gas come from the Lake Shore Drive part of Lincoln Park. Officers with batons are just running over this crowd. And that was where, for the first time, after being tear-gassed to death, people turned around and grabbed something from a garbage can and threw something back. People felt better not just taking it, and it was a pretty exhilarating moment.
MICHAEL KLONSKY, 25, SDS national secretary: I saw a kid who had come from Michigan, 16 years old, his parents are diplomats. After the police attacked, he picked up a brick, and he was so angry he was going to throw it through this bank window. You could see the look on his face. He was exploding with anger. The crowd started yelling, “Throw it, throw it.” And finally he took all his courage and threw it.
— Monday, Aug. 26: ‘This time we’re ready for a fight’
KATZ: During the day, we were practicing snake dances. The Yippies were passing out dope-laced brownies. Allen Ginsberg was meditating. There were speeches. We were probably under 500 people, hardly an occupying force.
But that night, people just poured into Lincoln Park, and this time we’re ready for a fight. This is not the era of the Weathermen. We were not two well-matched forces. The police cleared out the park, and there was a battle on the corner. People proceeded down Clark and Wells Street, Young Lords territory.
OMAR LOPEZ, 25, Young Lords information minister: We were already established in Lincoln Park as a street gang. At the beginning, we didn’t participate. We’re saying, “That’s not our fight.” It was primarily white youth. It’s not us.
But that night, when the fighting started, we said, “Wait a minute.” We saw that they were beating up the youth, and we related to that. For us, the convention was a trigger in terms of politicizing the youth, especially Puerto Rican youth, in the Lincoln Park community. By Monday we were participating, not in the big groups in Grant Park, but in whatever came into the neighborhood.
— Tuesday, Aug. 27: ‘You could see the fear in their faces’
DON ROSE, 29, National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam press organizer: We had an “anti-birthday party” for L.B.J. maybe until 9, and then we moved to the front of the Hilton. The whole area directly across from the Hilton was packed. We had a police cordon on the sidewalk that kept us back on the grass. They were all brandishing their nightsticks.
Suddenly we see coming down Michigan Avenue these bizarre jeeps with a huge mesh of barbed wire on the front. That’s when the National Guard takes over from the Chicago cops. They’re standing there with bayonets fixed, and we’re still chanting and trying to figure out what in the hell is going on.
KATZ: What was scary is they’re our age, and they’re as scared as we were. You could see the fear in their faces.
ROSE: I started singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” and everyone picks it up, and we’re singing it to the National Guard.
KATZ: The SDS faction was not joining in.
ROSE: One young guardsman picked up his rifle as if he was going to use the butt as a club, and he was immediately pulled away and replaced. We started negotiating. The first concession, they said we could stay there all night — and people started breaking up. It was scary, but there was no violence.
— Wednesday, Aug. 28: ‘The tear gas comes in’
KATZ:We were all in Grant Park at the bandshell. It’s hot, it’s sunny. The crowd is massive.
ROSE: People are just coming in. I actually saw the flag coming down, the famous flag drop, which later turned out to be the work of a police mole. I saw the police attack people from the rear. As they’re getting into their seats, they’re being clubbed from behind.
KATZ: This phalanx of cops comes into the back of the crowd and just is whaling into the crowd. People are running and getting knocked to the ground. There is just no way our puny little snake dance and locking arms blocks any of that.
EDWARD BURKE, 24, Chicago police officer: Some cops did lose their cool, but to put it in proper perspective, everybody was working 12-hour shifts. All days off were canceled. Cops didn’t have body armor like they do today.
BERNARD SIERACKI, Roosevelt University student who witnessed the protests: Before the convention, there were threats that they [the Yippies] were going to kill the candidates, kidnap delegates’ wives, pose as cabdrivers and take the delegates God knows where. I think we have to look at the whole mosaic.
ROSE: Then David Dellinger says we’re going to have a nonviolent march on the convention, and we have to walk on the sidewalk and obey the traffic laws. We go a block or two, and we’re stopped at Balbo [Drive]. The police are not letting us go. And after half an hour or so, I heard some explosions. The tear gas comes in, and that’s where this group of marchers starts breaking up and running toward Michigan Avenue.
TODD GITLIN, 25, former SDS president: The police had arranged it so there was only one direction to exit. So you had lots of people, including me, running through the clouds of gas until you could find a way out of the park.
The police had built a cage, essentially. They were surrounding the crowd on three sides, walking right into the wall of the Hilton. There was a big plate-glass window for the Haymarket lounge. There was nowhere to move. Had somebody not had the wit to smash the window, there could very well have been a stampede and a lot of deaths.
ROSE: People were being thrown into the vans. I saw blood flowing in the streets. There was a young guy who we found out later was a seminarian, who had been knocked out. His head was split and he was bleeding into the gutter.
KLONSKY: I got a billy club across my back as I was high-tailing it. I remember barely escaping their wrath by running to the L station and jumping on a train, and I ended up uptown someplace.
LOPEZ: The police came all the way to Lincoln Park, and the only reason the Young Lords came out was because of that. And we did pick up rocks. We did pick up bottles. We did attack the squad cars. For us, that was a natural thing to do.
PENSONEAU: Even at 1 or 2 in the morning, I saw police chasing protesters down the middle of the street and alleys. I saw clubbings. Sometimes I saw protesters who had gotten a billy club away from a cop and were beating a cop.
GITLIN: It was just holy hell for the rest of the day.
— Looking back: ‘Our numbers began to swell’
RICHARD SIMPSON, Illinois campaign manager for McCarthy: The first impact of the clash was Humphrey lost. The convention had simply torn apart the Democratic Party.
GITLIN: It was the beginning of the rollback. It was the Southern strategy, it was the Dixiecrat conversion to the Republicans, it was the feebleness and division of the left.
KATZ: We did not lose the vote for Hubert Humphrey. The backlash began in ’64 when five Southern states, [most of them] for the first time since Reconstruction, voted for a Republican. After the civil rights legislation, it was over. The turning point comes in ’64 but is blamed on the “lawlessness” of the convention.
ROSE: I think it played a part. It was only 69 days before the election. The polling was clearly on Daley’s side and the police’s side and against the hippies and dippies. Race is the largest factor, but there are many factors.
KLONSKY: The events here radicalized a lot of kids who grew up in middle-class families. The system would give them everything if they had gone straight, but because of the times, they didn’t want to go straight.
KATZ: Our numbers began to swell. Every college campus suddenly had a growing SDS chapter. Fred Hampton formalized the black movement and the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. The Young Lords began to grow.
KLONSKY: Without the protests, you wouldn’t have had those grass-roots changes.
KATZ: One of the myths is that we were just spoiled kids, we didn’t accomplish anything. We changed the world! You can disagree with what we did and why we did it, but we were very impactful. History is not a straight line.
GITLIN: I think once you step back, what really happened here was not the beginning of the revolution but the beginning of the counterrevolution.
