When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968

Chapter 10. Chicago

[231] CHAPTER 10 Chicago On the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, Tom Hayden found himself in Chicago’s Grant Park, disguised in a false beard and a football helmet. A few hours earlier his friend Rennie Davis had been clubbed to the ground by Chicago police. Hayden then urged the assembled demonstrators to break into small groups and to make their way to the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Blocked by police lines preventing direct movement toward the Hilton, the crowd of some five thousand began working its way north and then west across an open bridge, at which point it looped south toward the hotel. “It was nearly dark, the city lights turning on,” Hayden remembered, when they reached the corner of Michigan and Balbo, “where all the swirling forces were destined to meet.” The Battle of Michigan Avenue was about to begin. Hayden had come to Chicago for a “giant antiwar march” and to protest business-as-usual at the Democratic convention, which would eventually nominate Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate in the waning hours of Wednesday night. Planning for the action had begun in December 1967, when Hayden and Davis met with the administrative committee of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, known as “the Mobe.” The Mobe would be joined by the guerilla theater of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, headed by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. The Yippies planned a Festival of Life as a contrast to what it called a Convention of Death. [232] CHAPTER 10 Arrayed against the planners was Richard Daley, the longtime mayor of Chicago. Daley had been angered and embarrassed by April riots in the city following the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr., disturbances in which eleven blacks had been killed and ninety policemen injured. He had tried and failed to quell the violence by issuing a “shoot to kill” order. Demonstrations and marches required permits, and by June it had become clear that the city intended to grant none. Police officer Will Gerald admitted as much: “Mayor Daley was pissed in April—that led to what happened during the peace march, and what took place on the streets during the convention .” As Daley continued to build an “iron curtain” around the event, Hayden found himself confronting the “bitter evidence,” as he wrote in Reunion, that “America was turning out to be more like Mississippi than not.” More driven by a racial politics, he meant, than either South or North wished to acknowledge. Daley had been elected mayor in 1955. He lived simply in a modest brick bungalow in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. He ran an efficient urban political machine, one that depended on personal loyalty and the dispensing of favors. Chicago, he believed, was his city; and what was at stake for him, as David Farber argues in Chicago ’68 (1988), was the issue of “jurisdiction.” Daley and his people saw Chicago’s urban space “as a concrete sphere of activity,” as local and indigenous, while for the incoming protestors it served more as a realm of “symbolic confrontation.” For the Mobe and the Yippies, the goal of the protests was “to create a visual image of the State in action.” Daley wanted to keep trouble out of his town. The “police riot” that resulted was, in William Styron’s words, “the triumphant end-product of his style.” The Mobe’s organizers vastly overestimated the hoped-for turnout, informing the city to prepare for two to three hundred thousand protestors. In the event, no more than ten thousand showed up, and half of that number lived in the metropolitan area. “My God,” Hayden said to himself,” on Saturday morning, “there’s nobody here.” The people who gathered in Chicago’s Grant and Lincoln Parks were outnumbered by an on-duty police force of 11,900. During the week of the convention, each man was to work a twelve-hour shift. All police on crowd control wore helmets and carried nightsticks, service revolvers, and cans of Mace. The batons and Mace were to be used only when necessary “to make the arrest.” Officers were ordered never to strike a person in the head with a baton. The police were backed up by over five thousand members of the Illinois CHICAGO [233] National Guard. Each Guardsman was equipped with an M-1 rifle. Some six thousand...