Chicago 1968 Was a Gift to the War Hawks

1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet offensive and My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s abdication and Richard Nixon’s election, the Chicago Democratic convention. It’s not surprising in 2018 that we’ve been inundated with TV specials, films, and articles to commemorate episodes of the single most tumultuous year of the past century. 

It’s certainly good to be reminded of historical events. Yet media repetitions of the same images reinforce stereotypes and caricatures and cripple our chances to draw lessons from the past. Unfortunate, since we can learn much from 1968 because of its many parallels with the turbulent Trump era.

This month’s flashbacks will be about the infamous Democratic Convention in Chicago, certainly one of the most dramatic party conventions in US history. We’ll see well-worn pictures of taunts, tear gas, bloodied heads, demonstrators running through the streets, the police wildly clubbing everyone in their path, including bystanders and reporters, and chants of “The whole world is watching.”

Such retrospectives will give the false impression that the Chicago demonstrators represented the whole resistance movement to the Vietnam war. On the contrary. The Chicago actions got no support from most of the groups that participated in the broad coalition that sponsored the massive nonviolent rallies the previous year. More than a quarter-million people joined Martin Luther King Jr. in an antiwar march in New York City in 1967. By contrast, fewer than 10,000, possibly only about 5,000, showed up in 1968 for the Chicago confrontation. 

Some historical context helps explain the paltry turnout. By the middle of 1968 the war in Vietnam had been in full swing for nearly four years, with news arriving daily of massive US slaughter of villagers, napalm, B-52s, torture, corrupt Saigon officials, high US casualties, and a tenacious Vietnamese resistance that had recently attacked every city in the country at the same time. 

Our government seemed impervious to reason, to facts, to public opinion. (Sound familiar?) We had lobbied and petitioned, marched and rallied, burned draft cards and mounted huge demonstrations, including a remarkable one at the Pentagon. By August 1968 the momentum was on our side. Public opinion was turning against the war. Johnson had announced he was not running only a few months earlier, a decision we considered a great victory at the time.

But organizers of the Chicago actions believed we needed to go beyond the massive peaceful rallies of the previous year and confront the warmakers with more militant tactics. Where better than the Democratic convention? After all, President Lyndon Johnson had promised “no wider war” when he ran against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater four years earlier. The organizers insisted we had to upset his plans for a coronation party for his successor, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.

Many of us shared their anger at LBJ. But we thought street protests at the convention didn’t make good political sense. Senator Gene McCarthy – whom many peaceniks passionately embraced – was still considered a viable candidate when the convention opened. Were the protests pro-McCarthy? anti-McCarthy? anti-Humphrey? anti-Democratic Party? anti-war? anti-police? Or were they simply anti-American? 

Promoters of the Chicago action didn’t have coherent answers to such obvious questions. So most of us stayed away. Into this void strode the Yippies, a tiny media-savvy group, that used the occasion to flaunt their version of anti-mainstream American culture by nominating a pig (a real live farm animal) for President, threatening to put LSD into the city’s water system (a threat that city officials took seriously), and encouraging young folks to have sex in the parks (some did). Many other Chicago-bound activists spouted language that was often violent and menacing. They routinely called cops “pigs.” They talked openly of “bringing the war home” and fighting in the streets “by any means necessary.” And more than a few hurled objects (including feces) at the rampaging police.

As a result, when demonstrators chanted, “The whole world is watching,” while being attacked by the police, they naively thought the public would sympathize with them. Since the organizers had not presented a clear message, people watching the Chicago spectacle had to interpret the scene for themselves. According to the polls, the overwhelming majority supported the police. No matter that a national commission that investigated the week’s events denounced the “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence.” Most Americans would have agreed with one young student who later remarked: “How could those students think they wouldn’t get their asses kicked for calling the cops names and throwing rocks at them?”

We saw in Chicago how violent rhetoric backfires. It provides the police with an open invitation to use any means necessary themselves to shut down the protests and not worry about the public’s concern with police brutality. Groups that talk that way draw agents provocateurs like flies. In Chicago there were so many police agents disguised as demonstrators that the whole affair could be described as a riot between police dressed as demonstrators and police dressed as police.* Even if not a single real protester had done anything violent, the foolish talk and lack of disciplined planning would have made it possible for the police to stage a fake show for the world to watch. 

Richard Nixon also loved the Chicago street riots. He used them as the perfect foil for his “law and order” campaign that paved his road to the White House. To top it off, the Chicago demonstrations split an already fragile antiwar coalition and encouraged a radical faction to embrace violent tactics that the government and the mass media were only too happy to exploit. 

In short, Chicago was a gift to the war hawks.

Undoubtedly the violent talk and actions stemmed from the frustration many of us were feeling in 1968. But we were engaged in a struggle against the world’s most powerful military in time of war. We needed patience and persistence. 

Today there is no single issue that preempts all others, as in 1968. Yet more and more voices are being raised against Trump’s reactionary policies, against economic and social inequality, global warming, and systemic racism and sexism. The intersecting progressive movements are now immense. More than 20,000 protests involving millions of have taken place since Trump’s inauguration, representing by far the biggest citizens’ movements since a half century ago. 

The last thing we should do is lose patience, abandon our nonviolent discipline, and repeat what happened in Chicago. That’s just what Trump and the forces he represents want.

* CBS News reported in 1978 that army sources claimed that "about one demonstrator in six was an undercover agent." That is cited in Todd Gitlin's book, The Sixties, page 323. Gitlin thought the number may be "excessive," attributing it to "military braggadocio." But he wrote that it shows how vulnerable the Chicago demonstration was to infiltration. During the trial of the Chicago 7, numerous undercover agents testified for the government.