As Democrats gather in Chicago, the spirit of ’68 is a painful memory
"The party is returning to the scene of a convention conflagration, featuring fighting inside the hall and rioting outside on the streets.
The Democrats are converging on Chicago, scene of their greatest convention disaster. Even after 56 years the party can’t forget the fiasco of 1968, when police battered protesters on Chicago streets, jeering and fistfights broke out in the convention hall and the bitterly divided delegates sent their nominee careening toward a defeat by Richard M. Nixon.
The return to Chicago this week comes amid echoes of 1968. The party has once again had to find its footing when the sitting president made a stunning decision to not seek reelection. Thousands of protesters are expected to march outside the convention and law enforcement is prepared for the possibility of violent disruptions. Cultural and generational divides in the party are pronounced. And there has been gunfire on the campaign trail, a jangling reminder that an election year can be turned upside down at the speed of an assassin’s bullet.
And yet despite those echoes, the Democrats are gliding into Chicago with little or no resemblance to the polarized and grieving party of 1968.
Unlike in 1968, the Democratic ticket is settled. The poll numbers are rising. The party activists are euphoric, with enthusiastic crowds greeting Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on the campaign trail.
And, unlike in 1968, there’s just not much left to decide in Chicago. When President Joe Biden stepped aside, some party leaders and pundits advocated for a protracted nomination contest culminating at the convention. With stunning speed that idea evaporated. In just days, Harris became the consensus choice and is already officially the nominee.
“Democrats have already done the main thing that was necessary to avoid the chaos of 1968: They’ve unified in advance,” said David Farber, a historian at the University of Kansas.
“[Vice President] Hubert Humphrey could not pull that off in 1968. He could not unify the party. And he had many months to do it,” Farber said. “Harris did it in 48 hours.”
The four-day convention of 1968 turned into such a bitter, televised spectacle that the word “Chicago” became shorthand among political professionals for a catastrophe. The entire process of nominating presidential candidates was overhauled in the aftermath, shifting power from party bosses to state primary voters.
The debacle set in motion a multi-decade trend in which conventions in both parties became rigidly preprogrammed, designed to demonstrate party unity, avoid controversy and build momentum for the fall election.
“The memory of ’68 is always there,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and political affairs at Princeton University. “The potential for chaos is why these conventions become so scripted.”
Although this year has been chaotic, it has not seen the levels of violence and horror of 1968.
For America, 1968 was the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. The war split the Democratic Party. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an antiwar candidate, ran a stunningly close second to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York announced his opposition to Johnson’s war policies and jumped into the race. Johnson, painfully aware that he was bleeding party support, shocked the nation on March 31 with a televised announcement that he would not seek reelection.
Four days later an assassin murdered Martin Luther King Jr. Amid civil unrest, cities burned. Two months later another assassin killed Kennedy, who had just won the California primary. His last public words, minutes before he was struck: “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!”
By that point Humphrey had entered the race. But Humphrey did not compete in any primaries, which in those days were few in number. Party bosses and governors controlled most of the convention delegates. Humphrey went to Chicago with what appeared to be enough pledged delegates to get the nomination.
But it wasn’t a done deal. The situation invited plenty of backroom negotiations and Hail Mary schemes by Democrats opposed to Humphrey. McCarthy had hundreds of delegates from the primaries. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, also a war opponent, had entered the contest just two weeks before the convention. Some party leaders hoped to lure Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, still shattered by the assassination of his brother, into the race.
“I was actually counting delegates for the AP, and no one had enough delegates at the beginning of the convention to win,” recalled reporter Carl Leubsdorf, who later became Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.
There was even some possibility that Johnson himself — nursing his political wounds at his Texas ranch — might storm into Chicago to reclaim what he felt was rightfully his. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley hoped to lure him back into the race.
“They had a helipad ready for him,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor of communication studies and journalism at Northwestern University and author of “When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America.” “The Secret Service thought it was too dangerous because everything was so crazy in the streets.”
No one this year is talking about Biden reentering the race — except for former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump, who on his social media platform recently floated a scenario in which Biden “CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination.”
This summer, a coalition of 200 organizations is planning protests and marches in Chicago during the convention. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to demonstrate against the Biden administration’s support for Israel.
“We recognize the Democratic Party as a tool of billionaires and corporations,” declares the website for the March on the DNC 2024.
The number of protesters this year could be greater than in 1968, when many antiwar protesters chose to stay home amid signs that Chicago could become a bloodbath. Protest organizers had predicted 100,000 people, maybe even 300,000, would descend on Chicago. The actual number was closer to 15,000.
Earlier that year, Daley had notoriously ordered police to shoot to kill arsonists amid the urban uprisings following the assassination of King. Police also should “shoot to maim or cripple” looters, he’d said. For the convention, Daley put 11,000 police officers on 12-hour shifts, supplemented by 5,600 National Guardsmen and 7,500 regular Army troops on standby, according to reporter Jules Witcover’s book “Party of the People,” a history of the Democrats.
“This is happening in the midst of one of the worst periods of urban unrest that the country has ever seen,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. “America is on fire. America is burning during this period.”
From the start of the week, police roughed up protesters. Informants infiltrated the antiwar groups. Some protesters pelted police with rocks and bags of urine.
The protesters were a motley bunch. Some wanted to overthrow the entire establishment, which they deemed irredeemably corrupt. Others were focused on ending the war in Vietnam. In the mix were the Yippies, who combined counterculture politics with street-theater hubris. They ceremoniously nominated a pig (“Pigasus”) for president, earning a spot on the evening news before getting hauled off by police.
Inside the convention hall, Vietnam supercharged divisions among the delegates. Hundreds of antiwar Democrats pushed a peace plank calling for an immediate bombing halt, but they were outnumbered by delegates loyal to Johnson and Humphrey. Johnson demanded Humphrey’s fealty to the administration’s hawkish war plan, and Humphrey was reluctant to chart his own path.
On Wednesday, the third night of the convention, Humphrey was formally nominated after midnight, by which time the situation both inside and outside the hall had gone totally out of control.
Fistfights broke out among delegates. Reporters got roughed up by plainclothes security agents working for Daley. At one point early in the week Dan Rather, working as a floor reporter for CBS News, was punched in the stomach by a security agent when he tried to interview a delegate being forcibly hauled out of the hall.
Rather recalled the atmosphere as poisonous from the start.
“From the moment I stepped onto the convention floor, it was like a boiling pot,” he said. “It came to a total big-time boil on Wednesday night.”
On the podium, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who was making a nominating speech for McGovern, glared at the nearby Daley and said, “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”
Lip-readers in the television audience could see Daley cursing Ribicoff, including several f-bombs.
A strike by city electrical workers greatly limited what networks could televise live from the streets of Chicago. The live reports from inside the hall were interspersed with delayedfootage showing police beating protesters and, later, journalists and bystanders. An official investigation later described the events as a “police riot.”
“The whole world is watching!” protesters chanted.
The news of the mayhem downtown spread among the delegates. After Wednesday night’s raucous session concluded, antiwar Democrats took buses downtown to join the protesters.
“We were chanting ‘Dump the Hump,’” said Curtis Wilkie, who attended the 1968 convention as a Mississippi delegate, wound up staying up all night among the antiwar protesters and later became a political reporter for the Boston Globe.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say that Chicago and the convention were sheer hell,” said Al Spivak, who worked for Humphrey’s campaign that year and remembers smelling the tear gas that infiltrated Humphrey’s headquarters at the Conrad Hilton.
So many things today are radically different from 1968.
“As historians one of the things that we know is that history rarely repeats itself,” said Wright Rigueur, the Johns Hopkins professor. “There might be parallels. I tell my students that history often remixes itself.”
In 1968, the Democratic delegates were overwhelmingly White men, and some southern states remained resistant to racially diverse delegations. The Democratic Party was in the midst of a historic realignment, rapidly losing its Southern bloc in the wake of civil rights legislation. The segregationist Democrat George Wallace of Alabama emerged as a third-party candidate and would go on to win five states in November.
There is more realignment happening today as the parties continue to evolve, or, as Wright Rigueur would put it, remix.
“The Democratic Party has really become the party of more affluent, college-educated people, and the Republican Party has become more of a working class party, especially a White working class party,” said Bruce Schulman, a historian at Boston University.
Historically, Democrats were known for disputatious conventions. They were the scruffier of the two major political parties. They had a broader, more diverse coalition, one that ranged from conservative Southerners to Northeastern liberals to blue-collar union members. As the party has grown more ideologically uniform, and its leaders more determined to project unity, the Democratic conventions have become less cantankerous.
“They began to take on the appearance, dare I say, of Republican conventions. Abided by their timetables. Very little strife on the floor,” said Wilkie, the journalist.
“There’s no such thing as a rowdy convention or one that’s much fun to cover anymore,” Wilkie said.
The way people consume news is totally different from 1968. Back then, broadcast networks produced gavel-to-gavel coverage of the proceedings. The story of the day was whatever anchors Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and leading media pundits said it was.
Now, niche audiences have overtaken mass audiences, Hendershot said. The political narrative today can take the form of a meme, a phrase or an image of an awkward moment, propelled by algorithms across social media.
“You can’t predict which memes will go viral and seem meaningful to people,” she said.
Another significant difference between 1968 and 2024: the opponent. In 1968 the Republican nominee, Nixon, was a two-term former vice president and the narrow loser of the 1960 presidential election. Nixon had devised a “Southern strategy” to pick off Democrats opposed to racial integration, and he claimed to have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.
Nixon was despised by Democrats but did not loom large over the proceedings in the way that Trump will this week. For Democrats, the idea of another Trump presidency “has overwhelmed any serious fissures over the Middle East” or any other conflicts that might threaten to divide the party, Zelizer said.
This is not the first time the Democrats have returned to Chicago for their convention. They did so in 1996, and exorcised a lot of the demons of ’68 as they held a lovefest for the incumbents, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
The country was at peace, and the polls for Democrats were blissful. The party partied. After 28 years, Chicago ’68 looked like a terrible but fleeting phase the party had endured.
But for some Democrats, 1968 remains a vivid, disheartening memory. Spivak, the Humphrey campaign aide, is shocked that the Democrats would again go back to the shores of Lake Michigan. He is now 96, long retired and living in Florida.
“I don’t understand why the Democrats chose to have their convention in Chicago,” Spivak said. “I’m not the only American with memories of the ’68 convention. It was a disaster.”
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