The tumult and destruction caused by the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago ensured that the event remains a milestone not just in the history of the party, but in the history of US politics. Young activists descended on the city to protest against the Vietnam War, but their demonstrations were suppressed by the Chicago police with shocking brutality. This eyewitness account recalls the horrors of a time that has never been forgotten.
6 September 1968
Such blood: released from bruised and broken veins, from foreheads, scalps and mouths, from eyesockets, shattered wrists and skulls. Broad bloodstreaks on the pavements showed where bodies had been dragged. We all bleed inwardly from the particular atrocities we witnessed. I saw seven policemen clubbing one girl – long after she had fallen; a row of sitting singers whose heads were cracked open by a charge of running cops; a photographer’s camera smashed thoroughly into his eyes. Each day, scores staggered bleeding through the streets and parks, reeling or dropping, their faces glistening with vaseline – for Mace. Gas rinses your lungs with the lash of iodine and vinegar: your own breath burns your throat. Outside the Hilton, a nice little old lady patted a rebel on the chest, murmuring ‘knock the socks off them’. Then she and I were suddenly hurled against the wall when 100 policemen seized their blue wooden barricades to ram the crowd (mainly onlookers and press) against the building with such force that many next to me, including the old lady, were thrust through plate-glass windows. People sobbed with pain as their ribs snapped from being crushed against each other. (I still have ribs, thanks to an unknown man’s magnificently fat, soft back. All praise to fat power.) Soon a line of stick-whipping cops swung in on us. Voiceless from gas, I feebly waved my credentials, and the warrior who was about to hit me said: ‘Oops, press’. He let me limp into the hotel, where people were being pummelled into the red carpet, while free Pepsi was offered on the sidelines.
Since delegates, McCarthy workers, newsmen, and spectators were thrashed along with the demonstrators, many learned what blacks have always known: that the democracy of savagery makes no distinctions – everyone's guilty for his mere presence or existence. The Chicago police made niggers of us all: rubble with no protection or defence. In future, we can easily share the ghettos’ fate: without uncoiling any imagination. Later, I watched beatings and gassings from a second-floor McCarthy room. Twelve policemen surged in, slammed the windows, drew the curtains and told us to turn away and watch the TV set, where Humphrey was starting to speak – ‘and that’s an order’. The Chicago cops, whose trucks advise ‘Reach out and grab the greatest summer ever’, direct traffic as though they were flogging invisible bodies. Seasoned Chicago reporters said that they’re extremely afraid of the local blacks. Hence they took a special revenge on the marchers, primarily because the police failed to subdue last April’s ghetto riots. Yet even Humphrey has defended them, and a recent poll suggests that 71.4 per cent of queried citizens ‘find police actions justified’.
Thus it’s delicate to determine what the protest accomplished. True, the world, the press and all free minds throbbed with a communal concussion. But, as James Reston noted, the young, the poor, the black and the intelligent ‘have the fewest votes’, and the demonstrations were probably deplored by the voting majority. Still, ‘voting with bodies’ wasn’t bootless. Tom Hayden: ‘We are coming to Chicago to vomit on “the politics of joy”.’ Indeed they did, and the image was distilled by a stinkbomb at the Hilton, which smelled as though dozens of gorges had risen. The motto is: ‘There can be no peace in the US until there is peace in Vietnam’ – and there won’t be. At a Black Panther rally, young white revolutionaries vowed ‘to joint the blacks – by putting ourselves in the same crisis that blacks are in’. And certainly a whole new collaboration is accelerating. A black militant replied: ‘The strongest weapon we have is all of us. United black-white opposition.’ Undoubtedly new militants were created; some liberals became radicals, some dissenters became revolutionaries. The most triumphant moral point came from Dick Gregory: ‘Had there been a bunch of young people who challenged Hitler the way you challenged Mayor Daley, there might be a whole lot of Jews alive today.’
After that statement, one’s pride in the throng kept dilating. (In this journal, J. B. Priestley wrote that ‘A mob tends to behave like the worst person in it’ – which is often true. But the Chicago crowd reflected its best members – who were also the majority.) The aims are so simple: peace, liberation for blacks, a radically new America where property is less valuable than human life. These goals must be repeated, because the tactics confuse older (often sympathetic) people. The movement seethes with such contradictions about method and leadership that, when Humphrey said it was ‘programmed’, one only wished that he were right.
A few leaders are lavishly irresponsible: they excite the most naive – hippies and teenagers – who don’t know that the mild term ‘personal risk’ can mean getting killed or maimed. These gentle waifs, plus a few glittering hysterics, usually rush to the front; at moments, one feared that they would be used as fodder. SDS – which decided that ‘mass confrontations don’t effect constituencies’ – didn’t demonstrate; instead, it worked to organise and protect the marchers. SDS ‘does not believe that a bop on the head is more educative than a pamphlet’. But some mobilisation workers generate a tension that splits bones instead of hairs. Different leaders springing to the microphones instructed the crowd to be cool, to get hot, that they were helpless, that they were powerful, to go home, to gather, to disperse in small groups, to mass for a huge non-violent march – in which other leaders warned that they’d be trapped. (And they were.) Many marchers were too inexperienced to choose clearly. Obviously, the need for organisation is as desperate as the ache for peace.
One comes lurching out of these vast flesh-packs with a reeking dilemma about violence’ – which is now a suitcase-word for assassinations, student protests, ghetto riots, mugging, and nut crimes. For the Right, these are indistinguishable. For SDS, violence means wrecking Selective Services files or bombing a draft board – at night, when no one’s there to be hurt. ‘We’re not non-violent; we’d like to take over the city. But we can’t. So we’ll use long-range political organisation. We’re ready to use force but ... does it achieve that end?’ For others, ‘revolution is a form of self-defence ... since our society is already founded on force.’
Meanwhile, for one who has never accepted violence and has always believed in working through the political process, Dick Gregory’s words keep echoing, underlining the realisation that the threat of black violence has become an excellent tool for Negroes. Yet how do you draw a dotted line between street fights and killing, between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence? Any brand of violence is contagious, as this land of assassination knows. However, since madness now seems to be the country’s most pungent odour, more people may become violent merely to get attention, merely to be heard. Many of us are wrestling with evaluations of the fact of force. If violence in the US could result in peace in Vietnam, then I would support it – with a ravaging disgust at a society which forces one to make such a choice. I haven’t the physical courage to fight in the streets, but I bless those who do. A Chicago clergyman was sympathetic; he said that the church hasn’t yet decided its own position: ‘Since no social change occurs without violence.’ Certainly, the new revolutionaries cannot remould America on their own. (And, at moments, some sound like the general who said that he had to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.) But their power could be a partial fuel for change – if a right-wing renaissance doesn’t stifle us all. That possibility hums in every wire of the mind. Chicago taught us what law and order can mean. After all, these protestors were not violent. The streets were dangerous because of the police.
Selected by Robert Taylor
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