Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  During the high times of student activism and countercultural expression in the United States, Chicago’s hippie scene thus remained undeniably sedate, confined to a relatively small area around Wells Street in the Near North Side’s Old Town neighborhood, where white flight and undesirable commercial activity had made the area affordable for self-styled bohemian types. Here one could find a handful of head shops, record stores, coffee shops, and music clubs. The national chain Crate and Barrel got its start in this neighborhood around this time, finding an eager clientele of the young and disenchanted in need of affordable home furnishings imported from Asia, India, and Europe to help them escape the painful conformity of American consumer culture. The community had its own newspaper, The Chicago Seed, and with the national headquarters of SDS just down in the Loop, there was enough activity to keep things interesting. Yet Chicago was clearly a “second city” for hipsters; considering the city’s size and its role as the only real refuge for alienated youths and other social misfits looking to escape the suffocating conformity of the suburbs and small towns of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, it is surprising how few folk artists, writers, and activists hailing from Chicago made it on to the national stage. Chicago’s Old Town hippie scene was swallowed into the mainstream before it produced anything to distinguish it. “The aimless young and suburbanites swarm all over this area on weekends,” Studs Terkel mused in his 1967 book Division Street America. “It has the spirit of a twentieth century carnival, in which commerce overwhelms joy.”2 So it is ironic that beginning in the spring of 1968, Chicago became the destination for a generation of young radicals looking to vent their anger against the Democratic Party’s stubborn support of the escalating war in Vietnam, and it is even more ironic that beginning in the fall of 1968, when the show was over, it became the place that Americans would associate with the countercultural excesses and confrontational street politics of the antiwar movement and of the New Left in general.

  Chicago was an unwilling participant in the denouement of the student movement, so unwilling that its very reluctance became a crucial element in the plot—a primary reason why the antiwar protest around the Democratic National Convention would be interpreted across the nation as the last gasp of a dying movement. One can argue with good reason that the poor turnout of protesters doomed the Chicago campaign of 1968. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War (MOBE), under the leadership of movement veterans Rennie Davis and Dave Dellinger, had begun organizing for the convention more than ten months in advance, but they made a fatal error of expecting crowds in the hundreds of thousands, numbers that would have overwhelmed the capacity of the forces of order to contain them. Their optimism was based largely on the idea that students from all over the country would pour into Chicago for the event, but they did not come, in part, because of all the rumors about the dangerous tactics being plotted on both sides of the barricades and, in part, because of the multiple fractures dividing the New Left. Their hopes for a momentous show of opposition were also based on the expectation that a number of local protest organizations in black, brown, and white Chicago would participate, as well as students from the city’s colleges and high schools. Regardless of how many itinerant hippies and politicos from out of state made it to town, a city of Chicago’s size could have very well gone it alone.

  But when nominating night finally arrived and the movement got a chance to see itself massed in Grant Park awaiting orders to march (in which direction was a matter of debate), it was clear that the movement culture that the Yippies and MOBE had attempted to put together had failed to take root in the city of Chicago. In the days leading up to the convention the Yippies had planned a series of stunts and events to try to attract fellow travelers. They had arrived with a two-hundred-pound pig named Pigassus, whom they declared their Democratic candidate for president, they had circulated ribald rumors about dosing the city’s water supply with psychedelic drugs and recruiting an elite corps of handsome Yippies to seduce the wives and daughters of delegates, and they had planned a “Festival of Life” in Lincoln Park featuring the hip Detroit rock band MC5. Yet, even if the media found the Yippies good for a few laughs and, more importantly, for selling some newspapers, the whole campaign failed to spark much interest in the city. Almost one year later to the day, Woodstock would attract some five hundred thousand participants; most estimates of the crowd at the Festival of Life top out at five thousand. To be sure, many probably stayed away from the Sunday afternoon event because of the wild happenings of the previous nights, when the police had used teargas and brutal tactics to clear Lincoln Park of the thousands intending to use it as a campground. Organizers had been requesting that the city waive its park curfew rules in order to give protesters a place to sleep, but the city had equivocated and ultimately rejected the demand. The request of the Festival of Life organizers to drive a flatbed truck into Lincoln Park to provide a stage for MC5 had also been refused, so only a few hundred in the audience could actually see the band, a situation that led to pushing and flaring tempers. When the organizers attempted to bring the truck in anyway and were stopped by the police, things got out of hand once again, with police roughing up protesters and the concert being called off. That night the police again used teargas and nightsticks to clear the park, with protesters retreating to the surrounding streets to wreak havoc.3

  Many of the more than ten thousand demonstrators who made it to the afternoon rally in Grant Park before the big night of the convention, when the Democratic Party was going to name Hubert Humphrey as its nominee, were ex-combatants in this war of attrition. The crowd gathered here for what would turn out to be the final act of the drama included the more clean-cut supporters of the antiwar candidacy of Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy; the scraggly, sleep-deprived, nervy demonstrators from the Lincoln Park battles; and a host of high-profile intellectuals such as Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet. Organizers had been warned that they would not be allowed to get anywhere near the convention proceedings at the International Amphitheater, but police intelligence had learned they were going to try to make the four-mile walk anyway. Bolstered by some seven thousand National Guard troops outfitted with bayonet-tipped rifles, teargas masks, and jeeps mounted with barbed wire, the Chicago police once again moved into the crowd with astonishing speed and indiscriminate violence.

  What happened next inarguably played a role in changing the course of American political history—if not in the way one might have expected at the time. After the police had dispersed the crowd in Grant Park, a mass of marchers re-formed at the intersection of Balbo and Michigan Avenue, where the media had set up fixed cameras to cover the delegates leaving their rooms at the Conrad Hilton, and that was when things got utterly and spectacularly ugly. A battalion of blue-helmeted policemen rushed the crowd, and, with no attempt whatsoever to distinguish marchers from onlookers, began smashing heads, legs, and arms. Piecing together a number of eyewitness accounts, historian David Farber describes the scene:

  A police lieutenant sprayed Mace indiscriminately at a crowd watching the street battle. Policemen pushed a small group of bystanders and peaceful protesters through a large plate glass window and then attacked the bleeding and dazed victims as they lay among the glass shards. Policemen on three-wheeled motorcycles, one of them screaming, “Wahoo!” ran people over.4

  In the midst of it all, people started spontaneously chanting, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.” The delegates, however, did not have to wait the ninety minutes it took for the networks to get the images to television screens. Looking down from his fourth floor room at the Hilton, Senator George McGovern reportedly said, “Do you see what those sons of bitches are doing to those kids down there?” Hours later, on the floor of the amphitheater, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff—a man not known for his oratorical flair—used his nominating speech for McGovern to tell the convention, “With George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of
Chicago,” a comment that provoked Daley and his entourage to jump up and shout a litany of barroom obscenities whose precise nature is still a matter of debate. Some close by heard the mayor shout, “Fuck you, you Jew-son-of-a-bitch!”—a phrase that lip-readers not employed by the city of Chicago would corroborate from the video footage of the outburst. Supporters of the mayor would later claim he had called Ribicoff a “faker,” and during the convention’s final session the next day, he made sure to pack the amphitheater with machine diehards who were under orders to engage in rousing choruses of “We love Daley!” Yet, regardless of what the mayor had said and regardless of the show of adoration he had orchestrated, Daley appeared to be in trouble for the second time in five months.

  Chicago had been awarded the convention, in part, because it had avoided civil unrest in the summer of 1967, when ghetto riots raged in Detroit and New Haven, and Daley was seen as a man who knew how to keep a lid on things. Even before the summer, Daley’s tough talk on law and order, combined with the growing realization among working-class whites that the open-housing summit had hardly been the catastrophe that hardcore anti-integrationists had feared, had enabled Daley to regain the support he had lost in the Bungalow Belt. The result was a staggering landslide election victory that saw the Boss capturing 73 percent of the overall vote and winning all fifty wards. Even after breaking the promises he had made to Martin Luther King at the summit, Daley had run strongly in the black wards, taking nearly 84 percent of the vote. The mayor seemed as invincible as ever, and many within Chicago’s homegrown left began half-seriously pondering guerrilla warfare. But then in April, he seemed to have gone much too far in his reaction to widespread rioting on the West Side following King’s assassination in Memphis. After Daley had publicly excoriated new police chief James Conlisk for not following his orders to “shoot to kill any arsonist . . . and to maim or cripple anyone looting,” even some of the machine’s loyal black aldermen spoke up against him. After the damage and destruction of the West Side riot—hundreds of arrests, eleven deaths, thousands homeless, and a twenty-eight-block stretch of West Madison Street burned—it was no longer possible to claim that Daley had managed to appease black Chicago with all the money he had garnered from the federal government’s antipoverty programs.

  The riot, which broke out after mobs of West Side youths went from high school to high school, disrupting classes and urging students out into the streets, revealed the extent to which the West Side’s working-class black population remained marginalized in Daley’s Chicago despite the best intentions of the federal government’s antipoverty programs. As was the case for the federal urban renewal initiatives of the 1950s, the Daley machine had hijacked Chicago’s Community Action Program, which had expressly sought to bypass the machine by placing power directly into the hands of neighborhood people. Black communities would have their representatives—this, after all, was the law—but Daley made sure that their representatives would also be his representatives and that the black man running the whole program, Deton Brooks, was his black man. By the spring of 1967, the situation prompted a Senate subcommittee to look into allegations that Daley was not adhering to the spirit of “maximum feasible participation” required by the law. But Senator Robert Kennedy, who needed Daley’s support for his presidential run (which would end nearly three weeks later with Kennedy’s assassination), defended the mayor, and when riots ripped through New Haven and Detroit, it was hard to find a liberal in Washington who would support the idea of empowering black ghetto communities.

  By the summer of 1967, newspapers across the country were painting every urban disorder and inflammatory black power declaration as evidence of the failure of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and of liberalism in general, and few pursued this polemic more zealously than Chicago’s own Tribune. If, as longtime Chicago columnist Mike Royko has argued, Daley was a “white backlash” mayor years before anyone was even using the term, one could extend this observation to the city that had been so strongly supporting him since his election in 1955.5 Not only was Chicago—despite its Democratic stripes—in the vanguard of the white backlash that decisively captured the American political center with the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968, but the city itself had been the main stage upon which the dramas of a surging reactionary populism played out before the eyes of the nation. It was in Chicago that the black struggle for equality ran into the wall of white homeowners’ rights during the open-housing marches; it was in Chicago that one of the cornerstones of Great Society liberalism—the idea of redistributing power and resources downward to neighborhood people—was shattered by a Senate subcommittee investigating a gang called the Blackstone Rangers for embezzling federal funds; it was in Chicago that a big-city mayor told his police force to shoot at young African Americans for stealing transistor radios and to, in effect, summarily execute black arson suspects; and it was in Chicago that battalions of policemen bloodied and teargassed college kids, hippies, members of the media, and innocent bystanders in front of the whole world. And finally, it was in Chicago that most of the mainstream media and much of the population cheered the mayor’s campaign of repression every step of the way as liberals throughout the nation were decrying it.

  What was transpiring in Chicago defined the “backlash” structure of feeling and reactionary politics that had taken hold of the country’s political culture by the middle of 1967—and has not relinquished its hold ever since. Students of modern American conservatism usually recognize Richard Nixon as one of the key architects of this approach. Campaigning and taking office in a media landscape inhabited by gun-toting black militants, flag-burning student radicals, bra-burning feminists, and liberated gays and drag queens, Nixon claimed to be representing the “silent majority” of law-abiding, hard-working, patriotic Americans whose voices had been silenced by the clamor of extremists in the streets. And yet, if Nixon was the one who actually uttered the clever phrases, he was taking his cues from Richard J. Daley, who, unlike Nixon, was a pure product of the backlash. Although some scholars have highlighted the importance of hard-core segregationist George Wallace’s surprising northern success in the 1968 presidential primaries, which, according to some, pushed Nixon and the Republican Party towards a “southern strategy” that instrumentalized racial fears in order to lock up the South forever, it was Daley—a northern Democrat no less—who revealed the prescription for backlash politics moving forward.6 It was Daley who showed the nation that most people were bothered more by rioting blacks than by mayors who ordered the use of lethal force to stop them, and that most people identified less with antiwar protesters than with the police officers beating them with nightsticks.7 Facing reporters after the convention, the straight-talking mayor defended the actions of his police force by referring to the nasty insults that antiwar protesters hurled at the police and repeatedly asking, “What would you do?” When anyone mentioned antiwar protesters, he would ask, “What programs do they have?” and “What do they want?” Apparently these were the same questions being posed by Americans throughout the nation. Thus, it was of little consequence that Daley was being slammed in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other major northern media outlets and that a federally appointed investigative commission had blamed the police for the violence at the convention and condemned the mayor for failing to reprimand them for it. By the fall of 1969, a Newsweek poll revealed that 84 percent of white Americans felt that college demonstrators were being treated “too leniently” and that 85 percent felt the same way about black militants.8 Daley had played a critical role in making the backlash, and now it was making him a living legend.

  BESIEGED BY LAW AND ORDER

  Chicago was thus a backlash city years before anything looking like a backlash had spread across the metropolitan United States, and as such, it was an ill-fated choice for the site of the antiwar movement’s last-ditch battle. The massive scale of Chicago’s black migration in the 1940s and 1950s, which multiplied the color lin
es throughout the city as well as the border wars that came with them, certainly played an important role in producing its precocious backlash sensibilities. Such circumstances shaped a siege mentality long before the urban disorders of the mid-1960s had normalized such thinking in most major U.S. cities, and this siege mentality created an insatiable appetite for law enforcement and an aversion to the intervention of city government in any other form, especially when it involved constructing housing for the poor. Even the illustrious University of Chicago, which, with so many liberal luminaries on its faculty, could have provided a powerful bulwark against backlash sensibilities, was seized by this siege mentality. This had not always been the case. The Chicago School sociologists were great leaders in the intellectual struggle against racial theories of black and immigrant poverty, and their students were not infrequently arrested while defending blacks against white mobs in the 1940s and 1950s. Saul Alinsky had enrolled here to study archaeology, but after spending four years in UC classrooms had set out to work as a community organizer. But by the time he returned to Hyde Park in 1960 to defend the people of neighboring Woodlawn, his alma mater had switched sides, aligning its interests with the machine and thus becoming his adversary in his fight for social and racial justice.