1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Even by national political convention standards, the media had high expectations for Chicago. Not only were hordes of television and print media planning to be there, but writers were coming, too. Playwright Arthur Miller was a Connecticut delegate for McCarthy. Esquire magazine commissioned articles from William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. Terry Southern, who had written the screenplay of the antinuclear classic Dr. Strangelove, was there, as was poet and pacifist Robert Lowell. And of course Allen Ginsberg was there, half as poet, half as activist, mostly trying to spread inner peace and spirituality through the repetition of long, deep tones: “Om . . .”

  A mayor other than Daley might have recognized that bottled pressure explodes and made provisions for a demonstration that some said might involve as many as a million people. It was not necessarily going to be violent, but given the way the year was going, the absence of violence was unlikely. There might have been some tear gas and a few clunked heads, which he could hope to keep off television while the networks were preoccupied by what was certain to be a bitter and emotional fight within the convention.

  But Daley was a short, jowly, truculent man, a “boss” from the old school of politics. Chicago was his town, and like a great many Americans with working-class roots, he hated hippies. The first and insurmountable problem: He refused a demonstration permit. The demonstrators wanted to march from Grant Park to the Amphitheatre, a logical choice as the route from the hotel where the delegates were staying to the convention. Daley could not allow this; he could not allow a demonstration from anywhere in downtown to the Amphitheatre. The reason for this was that getting from downtown to the Amphitheatre required passing through a middle-class neighborhood of trim brick houses and small yards called Bridgeport. Bridgeport was Daley’s neighborhood. He had lived there all his life. Many of his neighbors were city workers who got the patronage jobs on which a local Chicago politician built his political base. Nobody was ever able to tabulate how many patronage jobs Daley had handed out. Chicago politics was all about turf. There was absolutely no circumstance, no deal, no arrangement, by which Daley was going to allow a bunch of hippies to march through his neighborhood.

  The argument that everything that happened in Chicago during that disastrous August convention was planned and under orders from the mayor gains some credibility considering an April antiwar march with an almost identical fate. That time also, no amount of cajoling or imploring could get the marchers a permit from city hall. And that time also, the police suddenly, without warning, attacked with clubs and beat the demonstrators mercilessly.

  The demonstrators were not what Daley and the police feared most. They were worried about another race riot, having already had a number of them. Relations between the black community and the city government were hostile; it was summer, the riot season, and the weather was hot and humid. Even Miami, which never had ghetto riots, had one during its convention that year. The Chicago police were ready and they were nervous.

  At first, refusing the demonstration permit seemed to work. Far fewer hippies, Yippies, and activists came to Chicago than were expected—only a few thousand. Participants estimated that about half their ranks were local Chicago youth. For the Mobe, it was the worst turnout they had ever had. Gene McCarthy had advised supporters not to come. Black leaders, including Dick Gregory, who went himself, and Jesse Jackson, had advised black people to stay away. According to his testimony in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial the following year, Jackson, who was already familiar with the Chicago police, had told Rennie Davis, “Probably Blacks shouldn’t participate. . . . If Blacks got whipped nobody would pay attention. It would just be history. But if whites got whipped, it would make the newspapers.”

  Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies arrived with a plan, which they called A Festival of Life—in contrast with the convention in the Amphitheatre, which they called A Festival of Death. On the weeklong schedule of events listed on their Festival of Life handout flyers were included the following:

  August 20–24 (AM) Training in snake dancing, karate, non-violent self-defense

  August 25 (PM) MUSIC FESTIVAL—Lincoln Park

  August 26 (AM) Workshop in drug problems, underground communications, how to live free, guerrilla theatre, self-defense, draft resistance, communes, etc.

  August 26 (PM) Beach party on the Lake across from Lincoln Park.

  Folksinging, barbecues, swimming, lovemaking

  August 27 (Dawn) Poetry, mantras, religious ceremony

  August 28 (AM) Yippie Olympics, Miss Yippie Contest, Catch the Candidate, Pin the Tail on the Candidate, Pin the Rubber on the Pope and other normal, healthy games

  Many of the items were classic Abbie Hoffman put-ons. Others were not. An actual festival had been planned, bringing in music stars such as Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins. The Yippies had been working on it for months, but the music stars could not be brought in without permits, which the city had been declining to give for months. A meeting between Abbie Hoffman and Deputy Mayor David Stahl was predictably disastrous. Hoffman lit a joint and Stahl asked him not to smoke pot in his office. “I don’t smoke pot,” Hoffman answered, straight-faced. “That’s a myth.” Stahl wrote a memo that the Yippies were revolutionaries who had come to Chicago to start “a revolution along the lines of the recent Berkeley and Paris incidents.”

  On the Yippie agenda was an August 28 afternoon Mobe march from Grant Park to the convention. It was the only event for which they had listed a specific time—4:00 P.M. But the entire program was in conflict with the Chicago police because it was based on the premise that everyone would sleep in Lincoln Park, an idea ruled out by the city. Lincoln Park is a sprawling urban space of rolling hills and shady, sloping lawns, where Boy Scouts and other youth organizations are frequently allowed to hold sleep-outs. The park is a few miles long, but it’s a very quick drive from Grant Park to the Conrad Hilton or, as Abbie Hoffman kept calling it, the Conrad Hitler. Even before the convention began, the police posted signs in Lincoln Park: “Park Closes at 11 P.M.” When all city avenues were exhausted, the demonstrators turned to federal court to seek permission to use the park. Judge William Lynch, Daley’s former law partner who had been put on the bench by the mayor himself, turned them down.

  The events the Yippies did go ahead with were those that would attract television. The snake dance was a martial arts technique supposedly perfected by the Zengakuren, the Japanese student movement, for breaking through police lines. The Yippies in headbands and beads continually practiced against their own lines and failed consistently. But it looked exotic on television, and few crews catching their martial arts practice in the park could resist filming what was reported as hippies practicing martial arts to prepare for combat with the Chicago police. One crew even caught Abbie Hoffman himself participating; he identified himself as “an actor for TV.”

  Another event that they did intend to carry out was the nomination of the Yippie candidate for president, Mr. Pigasus, who happened to be a pig on a leash. “The concept of pig as our leader was truer than reality,” Hoffman wrote in an essay titled “Creating a Perfect Mess.” Pig was the common pejorative for police at the time, but Hoffman insisted that in the case of Chicago, the “pigs” actually looked like pigs, “with their big beer bellies, triple chins, red faces, and little squinty eyes.” It was a kind of silliness that was infectious. He pointed out the resemblance of both Hubert Humphrey and Daley to pigs, and the more he explained, the more it seemed that everyone was starting to look like a pig.

  But there was a problem: There were two pigs. Abbie Hoffman had gotten one and Jerry Rubin had gotten one, and a conflict arose over which one to nominate. Typical of their differences in style, Rubin had picked a very ugly pig and Hoffman a cute one. The argument between them over the pig selection almost became physically violent. Rubin accused Hoffman of trying to make the Yippies his own personality cult. Hoffman said that Rubin always wanted to show a fist, whereas “I want to show the clenched fist and the
smile.”

  The arguing continued for some time before it was decided that the official candidate of the Youth International Party would be Rubin’s very ugly pig. Hoffman, still angry from the dispute, stood in the Chicago Civic Center as Jerry Rubin said, “We are proud to announce the declaration of candidacy for president of the United States by a pig.” The police then arrested Rubin, Hoffman, the pig, and singer Phil Ochs for disorderly conduct but held them only briefly. The next day another pig was loose in Lincoln Park, apparently a female, supposedly Mrs. Pigasus, the candidate’s wife. As the police pursued the animal, Yippies shouted, “Pig! Pig!” for the fun of it, because it was unclear whether they were shouting at the pursuers or the pursued. When the police finally grabbed the pig, someone shouted, “Be careful how you treat the next First Lady.” Some of the police laughed; others glared. They threw the little pig into the back of a paddy wagon and threateningly asked if anyone wanted to go with the pig. A few Yippies said yes and jumped into the wagon. They closed the door and drove off. Some journalists took the bait and started interviewing Yippies. The Yippies said that they were unstoppable because they had a whole farm full of pigs just outside Chicago. A journalist wanted to know how they felt about losing their pig, and one of the Yippies demanded Secret Service protection for both their candidate and his First Lady. A radio reporter asked with great earnestness just what the pig symbolized. Answers were hurled back: Food! Ham! Parks belong to pigs.

  The Yippies quickly found that there was so much media and they were so hungry that any put-on at all could get coverage. Their threat to put LSD in the Chicago water system and send the entire city on a “trip” was widely reported. Other threats included painting cars to look like independent taxis that would kidnap delegates and take them to Wisconsin, dressing up as Viet Cong and walking through town handing out rice, bombarding the Amphitheatre with mortar rounds from several miles away, having ten thousand naked bodies float on Lake Michigan. The city government seemed to understand that these threats were not real but followed through on them as though they were. Unfortunately, there is no record of the police response to Abbie Hoffman’s threat to pull down Hubert Humphrey’s pants. Each Yippie threat, no matter how bizarre, was reported to the press by the police. The Sun-Times and Daily News talked to the New Left leaders and knew the threats were put-ons, but the Tribune papers, after having spent years uncovering communist plots, reported each plan with menacing headlines that only scared the police. The Yippies were gleeful about the media attention that police precautions drew. In truth, of the few thousand demonstrators who were in town, with probably fewer than two thousand from outside the Chicago area, most were not affiliated with the Yippies or anyone else, so that the Yippie presence itself was somewhat mythical. The law enforcement presence, however, was not. Twelve thousand Chicago policemen were being backed up by five thousand soldiers from the army and six thousand National Guard. The military were closer in age to the demonstrators and many were black, and the demonstrators expected them to be more sympathetic. In fact, forty-three soldiers were court-martialed for refusing to be sent to Chicago for riot duty. Generally the military had a calming effect, as opposed to the Chicago police, who from the beginning were prepared for war. Had it not been for the police response, the Chicago demonstrations would have been noted as a failure, if noticed at all.

  Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko wrote, “Never before had so many feared so much from so few.”

  The convention had not yet begun, and already the talk and the reporting was of the clash, the violence, the showdown. This language was used to refer to the convention itself, where the Humphrey forces were meeting McCarthy and the peace delegates, but also to the thousands of demonstrators and police in downtown Chicago, kept miles away from the convention.

  At 11:00 P.M. Tuesday night, August 20, Soviet tanks made their move across the Czech border. By Wednesday morning Czechoslovakia had been invaded. Television images of Soviet tanks in Czech towns were being broadcast.

  In Chicago, the Soviet invasion was immediately seized as a metaphor. Abbie Hoffman gave a press conference in which he called Chicago “Czechago” and said that it was a police state. It looked like one, with police everywhere and the barbed-wire-ringed Amphitheatre awaiting the delegates. Hoffman invited the press to film the day’s “Czechoslovakian demonstrations.” John Connally of Texas argued that the Soviet invasion showed that the party should support the Vietnam War effort, but Senator Ralph Yarborough, also of Texas, argued to the credentials committee that political power should not be misused by them to crush “the idealism of the young” the way the Soviets were using military power. The demonstrators had started referring to Chicago as Prague West, and when they heard that Czechoslovakian protesters were walking up to Soviet tanks and asking, “Why are you here?” they began walking up to Chicago police with the same question. Incredibly, the police gave the same answer: “It’s my job.”

  The New Left was so parochially fixated on the fight in Chicago that some even argued that the Russians had deliberately timed the invasion of Czechoslovakia to ruin the McCarthy campaign, because what the Soviets really feared was a United States that was truly progressive. Few Moscow decisions have ever been dissected more carefully and no evidence of a wish to sabotage McCarthy has ever been unearthed, but the invasion was bad for the antiwar movement in the same way it ruined de Gaulle’s idea of a Europe “to the Urals.” It reinforced the cold war view of hegemonic communists bent on world domination, which was in fact the justification for the Vietnam War. This did not stop David Dellinger and a handful of other antiwar activists from picketing the Polish tourism office, it being the only office in Chicago they could find that represented the Warsaw Pact. But McCarthy made it worse for himself by attempting to defuse the crisis with his classically tin ear for political orchestration. He insisted that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was no big thing, which only served to reinforce the suspicion that the senator was a strange one.

  On Saturday night the demonstrators seemed particularly reluctant to leave Lincoln Park and chanted, “Revolution now!” and, “The park belongs to the people!” The police amassed their troops, and just as they seemed ready to attack, Allen Ginsberg mystically appeared and led the demonstrators out of the park, loudly humming a single note: “Om.”

  On Sunday the convention began and Hubert Humphrey arrived in town. Humphrey had a progressive record on social issues, but he was associated with Johnson’s Vietnam policy and refused to break away from it. Even without the Vietnam issue, Humphrey, at fifty-seven, would have been a victim of the generation gap. He seemed almost cartoonish with his vibratoed, tinny voice, his corny midwestern wholesomeness, and his halfhearted good cheer; with the way he could in all seriousness use expressions like “Good grief”; and with his perpetual smile that looked as if he had just bitten something. This is how his biographer, Carl Solberg, described the politician nicknamed the Happy Warrior as he left for the Chicago convention:

  On the elevator to the street he kissed his wife, danced a little two step, and punched his friend Dr. Berman on the arm. “Off we go into battle—and I can hardly wait,” he said.

  This was not a candidate whom McCarthy and Robert Kennedy supporters could turn to, not a personality to calm the young demonstrators who had come to Chicago.

  The Happy Warrior frowned, and not for the last time, when his plane landed in Chicago. Daley had sent a bagpipe band to meet him. There is no lonelier sound than bagpipes without a crowd. Few supporters were there to greet him, and even more upsetting, the mayor himself wasn’t there. McCarthy had been met by an energized crowd. “Five thousand supporters,” according to Humphrey, who was muttering about the contrast. An even bigger disappointment was that Daley was holding off on endorsing Humphrey. Daley found it hard to believe that Humphrey was a man who would attract all the voters who had gone for Robert Kennedy in California. Daley and a few other party bosses were last-minute shopping for another candi
date, especially the last brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Humphrey was as terrified of taking on a Kennedy as was Nixon.

  Sunday night the police started forcibly to clear Lincoln Park at 9:00. Abbie Hoffman went up to them and in a mock scolding tone of voice said, “Can’t you wait two hours? Where the hell’s the law and order in this town?” The police actually backed off until their posted 11:00 curfew.

  Remembering the Paris students of May, the Yippies built a barricade of trash baskets and picnic tables. The police squared off with the demonstrators and ordered them and the media to leave the park. In a long line three men deep, the police looked ready to attack, so the television crews turned on their camera lights, making the flimsy barricade look more substantial by giving it deep black shadows. The newsmen had started wearing helmets. There were flags, the Viet Cong flag, the red flag of revolution, and the black flag of anarchy. The police were beginning to appear. The Yippies, though visibly afraid, held their ground. Suddenly a strange humming sound was heard, and Allen Ginsberg once again appeared leading a group in “Om.”

  But the om, designed to render both sides peaceful, didn’t work this time. The police started pushing back the crowd, the crowd shouted, “Pigs!” and, “Oink-oink!” and the police began swinging clubs. As the police attacked they were heard shouting, “Kill, kill, kill the motherfuckers!” “Motherfucker” was everybody’s word that year. The police swung at everyone in sight. After driving the crowd out of the park, they beat them in the streets. They yanked bystanders off their steps and beat them. They beat journalists and smashed cameras. They roamed a several-block area around the park, clubbing anyone they could find. After that night’s battle, the police went to the Lincoln Park parking lot and slashed the tires of every car that had a McCarthy campaign sticker on it.