MM#344---Chicago 1968 - The Whole World was Watching

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. This past week we have been exploring the Pivotal Tuesdays series all around the 1968 election and if there was one moment that encapsulated for the country a microcosm of what the whole year of 1968 came to be, it was this the 1968 Democratic National Convention would have to be high on that list.

0:55 And so what was it? Well, the DNC, the Democratic National Convention of 1968, occurred from August 26th to August 29th at the International Amphitheater in Chicago, illinois. It was perhaps the most pivotal and tumultuous political convention in American history. It was marked by significant internal party conflict, violent protest and, against a backdrop of national unrest. Now to understand all of this, let's get the key events in the context leading up to the convention.

1:59 Democrat incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced on March 31st 1968, that he would. Speech is roughly, I think, about 50 minutes long. It's an Oval Office address and probably the first 45 minutes is all him talking about Vietnam and how the policy is going to change and he's halting bombing or he's restarting bombing and the reasons behind that Can't remember, but what everybody does remember is the last five minutes is a complete pivot in him extemporaneously saying that he would not seek, nor would he accept, the nomination for the presidency of his own party. And that was him announcing he would not seek reelection, which startled everybody.

2:46 Nobody anticipated it. Even histories recorded that his actual the speech itself never had the words, as if he just announced it himself while going through the speech. Obviously he had to think about it beforehand, but anyhow, just fascinating political waves that were happening in 1968. Now Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He entered the race late in April of 1968, april 27th, so roughly about a month later. He did not participate in the primaries.

3:28 They were kind of new. Primaries were new. They weren't the formal process that they have now. Instead he secured the delegates through the caucuses and through the party bosses, which led to his nomination at the convention. It sounds a lot like this year's 2024 coronation of Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out just a couple of weeks ago. I guess a week ago. But back in 1968, the country had just gone through a huge trauma of widespread violence and national unrest. We had the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr in April and Robert F Kennedy Senator Robert F Kennedy, in June.

4:14 These events exacerbated the national mood of unrest and division. The Vietnam War was a central issue, with widespread opposition and protest against US involvement. The anti-war sentiment was heavily influenced with the atmosphere of the convention in Chicago. Now, inside the convention, which was held to nominate its presidential candidate following Johnson's withdrawal, the main contenders were again Vice President Hubert Humphrey, senator Eugene McCarthy, who was really the peace candidate that year, senator George McGovern, who entered the race after Kennedy's assassination, and Humphrey would ultimately be nominated for president, with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate.

5:11 Now. The key issues debated at the convention included the Vietnam War, voting reforms, particularly the expansion of voting rights for 18-year-olds, and if the party was going to endorse the peace movement and get out of the war. Now, outside the convention, anti-war protests were a significant feature, with some roughly 10,000 demonstrators gathered in Chicago to voice their opposition to the war. The protests were met with a heavy hand of response from the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois National Guard roughly about the same number of protesters as there was police 10,000, which just resulted in pitched battles and violent clashes.

6:02 Now, ultimately, these clashes were covered on television and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence later described these actions as a quote police riot, I believe the first time they've ever used that word. The three days of riots included the use of tear gas, violent use of batons against protesters, and it led to over 650 arrests and numerous injuries. The violent suppression of the protest was broadcast on national television. It shocked the public and led to widespread criticism of the authorities' tactics.

6:44 Cbs anchor, famous anchor, walter Cronkite, famously referred to the police as thugs after witnessing the violence. The chant the whole world is watching became emblematic of the protest and highlighted the global attention of the events in Chicago, and highlighted the global attention of the events in Chicago. Now our book of the day is 1968, the year that rocked the world, by Martin Kurlasky. And with that let's go to our first pull quote. The local newspaper read everything seemed inauspicious for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August.

7:26 The convention center had burned down, the most exciting candidate had been murdered, leaving mostly a void filled with anger, and the mayor had become notorious for his use of police violence. Notorious for his use of police violence. Dang, there is not an omen of things to come from that first paragraph of the newspaper. Going back to the book, chicago's McCormick Place Convention Center was what Studs Terkel might have called a real Chicago story. It had been built a few years earlier at the cost of $35 million and named after the notorious right-wing publisher of the Chicago Tribune, one of the few backers of the project.

8:12 Besides Mayor Daley, environmentalists fought it as a degradation of the lakefront and most Chicagoans regarded it as abysmally ugly. Then, mysteriously or, according to some, miraculously it burned down in 1967, leaving the Democrats without a location in Chicagoans wondering exactly how the $35 million had been spent. Mayor Richard Daley who, in his 1967 re-election bid, faced what was close to a serious challenge because of the McCormick Place scandal, and he was certainly not going to let a fire or a scandal rob his city of a major convention, of a major convention by the old Union Stockyards, the beef center of America.

9:08 Until it was closed down in 1957, stood the amphitheater Miles from downtown. Since the closing of the Stockyards, this had become an out-of-the-way place in part of Chicago, where such events as wrestling and the occasional car or boat show took place. The convention could take place in the Chicago Amphitheater once daily. Had it wrapped in barbed wire and surrounded by armed guards, the delegates could stay as planned in the Conrad Hilton Hotel, about six miles away by the handsomely landscaped downtown Grant Park. For almost a year, tom Hayden, rennie Davis and other new left leaders had been planning to bring people to Chicago to protest.

9:52 In March they had met in secret in a wooded campground outside Chicago near the Wisconsin border. About 200 invited activists attended the meeting sponsored by Hayden, among them Davis, david Dellinger and the Reverend Daniel Bernagin, the Catholic chaplain at Cornell. Unfortunately, the secret meeting was written about in major newspapers. Davis and others had talked about closing down the city, but Mayor Richard J Daley dismissed such comments as boastfulness. Now they were coming to Chicago Hayden and Davis and the SDS and Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in the Yippies.

10:35 David Dellinger in the MOBE vowed to bring in hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters. The Black Panthers were going to have a contingent too. Dellinger had been born in 1950 and the World War I armistice was one of his earliest memories. Jailed for refusing the draft in World War II, he had almost 30 years of experience demonstrating against wars and was the oldest leader in Chicago. Everyone was going to Chicago, which may have been why Mayor Daley had made such a show of brutality In the riots against, in the riots After Martin Luther King's Shooting the previous April.

11:25 Holy smokes. Now this book does really capture the feel of Chicago 1968. Now I won't go through blow by blow and pitched battle by pitched battle on how everything unfolded. There was a lot of shenanigans. There's a lot of shenanigans outside, a lot of shenanigans inside, a lot of shenanigans, with the rules of the Democrat National Convention in 1968. And then there was protest and threats to walk out from some factions in the convention. There were sometimes quick gavels on administrative items and not recognizing speakers on the floor purposely.

12:11 So the blow by blow account would be a little too much. But suffice it to say in and outside the convention it was bedlam. Now in my research. This book does a good job of giving you the overview, and then I will post two videos that I have found in my research to give you a good sense of what happened both in and outside the convention. I'll put those links in the show notes for all three. Let's go back to the book for more details. The convention had not yet begun and already the talk and the reporting was of the clash, the violence and the showdown.

12:53 This language was used to refer to the convention itself, where 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. Downtown Chicago kept miles away from the convention. At 11 pm, tuesday night, august 20th, some full six days before the convention actually started, soviet tanks made their move across the Czech border. By Wednesday morning, czechoslovakia had been invaded. Television images of Soviet tanks and Czech towns were being broadcast In Chicago.

13:33 The Soviet invasion was immediately seized as a metaphor. Abbie Hoffman, the radical, gave a press conference in which he called Chicago Chechago and said it was a police state. It looked like one, with police everywhere and the barbed wire-ringed amphitheater awaiting the delegates. Hoffman invited the press to film the day's Czechoslovakian demonstrations. John Connolly of Texas argued that the Soviet invasion showed that the party should support the Vietnam War. 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.

14:23 The demonstrators had started referring to Chicago as Prague West, and when they heard the 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 radical 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 United States that was truly progressive.

15:17 There is no truth to the assertion that the Russians had launched the invasion to dump on the McCarthy campaign, but such was the chaos in the DNC in 1968. Now our next quote will give you the feeling of just how chaotic it all was. In this quote there's a lot of cussing from a lot of people on the convention floor and the radicals the radicals are especially given voice and how they viewed everything. So I will do my best as I go to clean it up where I can, just as in the last episode. I humbly ask, if you have kids, to be sure to pause the podcast here. Let's go to the book.

16:01 In Grant Park, facing the Hilton, leaders were struggling that evening to control the demonstrators, but no one was restraining the police. The police later claimed the demonstrators were filling balloons with urine and bags with excrement to throw at the police. Some demonstrators denied this, but it was clear that after four nights of being beaten up by the police, they were tired and losing patience. Renee Davis tried to calm one group of demonstrators but the police, recognizing Davis, began clubbing him, hitting him so soundly on the head that he had to be hospitalized. The police began clubbing everyone and the demonstrators started fighting back and what turned into pitch battle of hand-to-hand combat.

16:50 City hospitals were warning demonstrators not to bring in injured demonstrators because the police were waiting outside and stuffing them into paddy wagons. Grant Park filled with tear gas. In the wounded A sit-in began in front of the Hilton and overflowed into the park. The white lights of the television cameras were nearly blinding. The police said objects were being thrown at them, but none of the numerous films of that evening's events show this. They do show the police and the National Guardsmen wading into the crowd with clubs and rifle butts, beating children and elderly people and those who watched behind police lines, beating even those who had fallen where they lay on the ground.

17:38 They dragged women through the streets. A crowd was pressed so hard against the windows of the hotel restaurant middle-aged women and children, according to the New York Times that the windows caved in and the crowd escaped inside. The police pursued them through the windows into the restaurant, clubbing anyone they could find, even in the hotel lobby. Demonstrators, reporters, mccarthy workers, doctors all began to stagger into the Hilton lobby, blood streaming from head and face wounds. Mailer reported the police had run amok in front of the hotel and the television cameras that had been mounted on the entrance awning had caught all of it.

18:24 17 minutes of police mayhem could be bounced off of a satellite called Telestar to show the world. The police smashed cameras, seemingly not realizing or not caring that other cameras were documenting the assault. They also went behind the camera's range, pursuing the crowd into the streets of downtown Chicago, clubbing whomever they could find. It was one of those moments of 1968 television magic, something ordinary enough today but so new and startling at the time that no one who had their television sets on has ever forgotten.

19:09 Rather than taking the time to edit, process, analyze and package the film for tomorrow night's news, what people were used to television doing? The networks just ran it. Dellinger had urged the demonstrators not to fight back, saying the whole world could see who was committing the violence. While the cameras recorded the police violence, they also picked up the crowd chanting. Absolutely right, the whole world was watching. The whole world is watching, in fact. An estimated 89 million Americans watched as protesters clashed violently with Chicago police and the National Guard troops, roughly in a country of about 200 million, so just short of half.

20:01 Who was at fault? Who knows? As many described it as schoolchildren fighting on a playground when one punches the other and the other reacts. The second child is usually the one caught by the teacher, and the media was capturing all of that. In fact, some accounts say the radicals of the new left were telling their compatriots to stay close to the journalist, antagonize the police, so the reporters could indeed get the overreaction of the police. So who was at fault? Again, who knows? Going back to the book, in the amphitheater, the convention stopped to see what was happening.

20:41 When Wisconsin was called for voting, the head of the delegation, donald Peterson, said that young people by the thousands were being beaten in the streets and that conventions should be adjourned and reconvened in another city. A priest then rose to lead the convention in prayer, and it seemed to Allen Ginsberg, who was in the convention hall, that the priest was blessing the proceedings and the system it represented. So he jumped to his feet and, though no one had heard more than a raspy whisper from his tired voice. That day he blasted out a yoga um so loud that it drowned out the priest, and he continued without stopping for five minutes.

21:28 According to Ginsburg, he did this to drive out hypocrisy. Mayor Daley was now glaring out on the convention floor, looking as if he was ready to call in his police and take care of these delegates. Then Abraham Ribicoff, senator and former governor of Connecticut, went to the podium to nominate George McGovern a last-minute alternative peace candidate. With George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn't have those Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago, announced Rybakov. The convention seemed to freeze for only a second, but it was the most memorable second of the convention.

22:15 Television cameras sought out and found the necklace, fleshy face of boss Richard Daly, and Daly perhaps oblivious to the cameras, but it seemed almost playing to them shouted something across the hall to Ribicoff, something not picked up by the microphones. Millions of observers and viewers tried their lip-reading skills. It seemed to involve a pejorative for Jewish people and a sexual relationship. According to most observers who studied the film, he said F-U-U-Jew-S-O-B. Many thought he also added you, lousy MF, go home.

22:59 In 1968, even Abe Ribicoff was a MF. Daley, however, insisted that he had said none of those things. George Dunn, president of the Cook County Board, explained that they were all yelling. The Chicago people surrounding Daley was yelling. They had all been shouting faker, ribicoff was a faker. It was not their fault if it sounded like the other F word. The violence continued Thursday into early Friday morning when the police went to McCarthy headquarters on the 15th floor of the Hilton and dragged campaign workers out of bed to beat them.

23:40 Senator McCarthy used his private plane to fly his workers safely out of Chicago. Chicago was, along with the Tet Offensive, one of the seminal events in the coming of the age of television. The star was not Hubert Humphrey, it was the 17-minute film in front of the Hilton Hotel. The Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Times and most other print media wrote about the historic significance of the television coverage. This was the yippy dream, or Abby Hoffman's dream.

24:27 Later he explained to the Walker Commission the government appointed task force to study the violence in Chicago. We want to F up their image on TV. It's all in terms of disrupting the image, the image of a democratic society being run very peacefully and orderly and everything according to business. Holy smokes. Now that sounds a lot like Antifa in the BLM riots of 2020, doesn't it? The new left? Back in 1968, the radical left just wanted anarchy. Back in 1968, the radical left just wanted anarchy. No democratic society, no civil society, no roles. Now we will study more on Antifa coming up soon, but the biggest consequence coming out of the 1968 chaos at the Democratic National Convention was moving forward.

25:21 The reforms were implemented on future conventions and how to solve everything that happened in Chicago of 1968. Now the conventional historian says that future conventions would be quote opened up to the whole Democratic Party. Let's turn quickly to Stephen Hayward and his brilliant history about this time period that was mentioned yesterday the age of Reagan and the fall of the old liberal order because he has a different take, and let's turn quickly to reveal what happened and the conservative view of the whole thing. Go on to the book the Age of Reagan the Fall of of the whole thing.

26:02 Go on to the book the Age of Reagan the Fall of the Old Liberal Order. Yet the riots outside the convention hall had an indirect influence on a quiet revolution going on inside the convention hall. There was great unhappiness among liberals in the Democratic Party over a nomination process that not only enabled Humphrey to capture the nomination without having entered a single primary, but that also generated a delegation that thwarted popular support for a change in the Democratic platform's position on the Vietnam War. On the Vietnam War, president Johnson and Humphrey had strong-armed delegates into defeating an alternative plan calling for the complete bombing halt.

26:46 In negotiations, under pressure from restive liberals, humphrey and other party leaders acquiesced to the demand for a special party commission to reform the rules by which convention delegates were chosen. It would be headed by Senator George McGovern. And here's our golden nugget of wisdom. Going back to the book, the commission was intended to quote open up the Democratic Party, but in fact the effect of the rules change adopted in the aftermath of Chicago was to close the party to many of its traditional core constituencies and capture it for a new set of mostly left-leaning factions.

27:27 In the hearings held in 1969, activist groups complained to the McGovern Commission that women and minorities were quote underrepresented in the convention delegation. Women had composed only 13% of the delegates to the 1968 convention and blacks only 5%. The now familiar cry went up discrimination. So when the commission issued its directive to state parties in late 1969, its first priority was to overcome the effects of past discrimination by affirmative steps to encourage minority group participation, including representation of minority groups on the National Convention delegation, and a responsible and reasonable relationship to the group's presence in the population of the state.

28:21 Did this mean quotas? The commission said no in a footnote. But in fact the commission's guidelines led immediately to quotas. Even as McGovern himself admitted to a reporter quote, the way we got the quota thing through was by not using the word quotas. So although more delegates to future conventions would be committed to candidates as a consequence of primary election results, the kind of people who would serve as the delegates would come increasingly from the ranks of younger single or narrow issue constituencies with views far to the left of previous democratic convention delegations.

29:05 Four-fifths of the delegates who would attend the 1972 democratic convention would do so for the first time. With so many newcomers, many old-time party regulars had to lose the biggest loser, organized labor, who had been the traditional backbone of the Democratic Party get-out-the-vote efforts in industrial states. The roles being promoted were clearly the left's revenge for the 1968 riots. Historian Ronald Radish wrote in his History of the Modern Democratic Party for the left there would be no need to riot at future democratic conventions.

29:47 At the next convention, the riot would take place inside the convention hall, as we shall see. So there you get a sense of what the conservatives viewpoint was of the aftermath of the 1968 election and the aftermath of what happened in Chicago in 1968 at the DNC. So the new left, the radical left, had indeed taken over the Democratic Party, had indeed taken over the Democratic Party. They would force their views on the American people by nominating George McGovern in 1972 as its standard bearer. And McGovern got blasted 520 electoral votes to 17.

30:30 A complete landslide. Sadly, everyone forgets that landslide Because the Watergate national nightmare just two short years later would drown it all out. Now, the greatest impact coming out of the chaos in Chicago was that both parties significantly shifted the primary system, shifted to the primary system, rather using the state by state election process for delegates as the best and most balanced way to ensure there was an orderly process. So it is quite interesting this year, in 2024, that the Democrats have dumped Biden and given the coronation to Kamala Harris, and that goes completely and directly against everything that was so-called reformed in 1968 and was utterly defeated in 1972, with a radical at the top of the ticket and, interestingly enough, the Democratic National Convention will be held back in Chicago this year, just as it was in 1968.

31:42 So there might be some sparks fly and fireworks happen, because Kamala Harris never gained a single delegate vote, either in 2020 or in this latest primary season, because she didn't run. Biden received 14.5 million votes and they are just going to transfer those from him to her. So we will indeed be watching. Whereas the radicals said in 1968 in Chicago, the whole world is watching. Now Kamala is a radical's radical from the left coast, from California, so maybe those that will pull the motion in against will feel finally that they have their person running for president.

32:31 This person behind this microphone hopes it is their George McGovern moment from 1972 all over again. We hope she gets clobbered of 520 electoral votes to 17. We will cover more on Radical Kamala in a later podcast, so in today's Mojo Minute. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago remains a symbol of the turbulent 1960s, reflecting the intense societal and political conflicts of the era. America was indeed changing and most Americans didn't like where it was going.

33:15 There would be a revolt, there would be a revolution of sorts, and it would come in the Reagan revolution of 1980. And we will see you next week when we take up what happened in the pivotal election of 1980. And for now, keep fighting the good fight. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.