Several thousand protesters gathered outside the Democratic National Convention in Denver this past week, some calling themselves Recreate 68, and all those with long memories heaved little sighs of relief because these demonstrations included no particular spilling of blood.
In today’s momentary pause between political gatherings, the ghost of Hubert H. Humphrey must be wondering about this. Where were these gentle protesters 40 years ago, when the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago and such nightmarish riots ensued that they doomed Humphrey’s campaign for president, and gave us Richard Nixon and helped transform a generation of voters into conservative Republicans?
In Denver this past week, the demonstrators promised no violence, and the cops minded their manners, too. Maybe the Republicans will be as lucky this week in Minnesota.
In Chicago 40 years ago, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin marched their disheveled peacenik armies into the fray, 5,000 or so young people taunting and hollering, and the cops pulled out their tear gas and nightsticks and put them to random, wanton use.
Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, watched some of the battle from a hotel suite, and he had company from Baltimore: His private physician and pal, Dr. Edgar Berman, and Jerry Turner, the WJZ-TV news anchor who was Berman’s friend.
For years, Turner told the story of that night: How the three of them gazed down at the rioting from the hotel suite, and closed the windows to keep out the tear gas wafting up from below, and Humphrey muttered, “Look at those bums.”
He meant the protesters, said Turner: The long-haired hippies and yippies and peaceniks who had come to Chicago mainly to protest the war in Vietnam, and provoked the police into violence.
And then, Turner always said, a remarkable thing happened: Humphrey went before television cameras and turned his story around. He went all mealy mouthed and said it was terrible how these young people were getting hurt out in the streets of Chicago.
He said this because they were the children of his constituents, the liberal Democrats he was still trying to hold onto until November, and here it was August and the election was being decided right there in the streets, on everybody’s television sets.
In homes across the United States, we watched and found ourselves crying out loud. It didn’t matter which side you took. You cried out loud, because you were watching your country going through a nervous breakdown.
On the eve of the convention, thousands of the demonstrators tried to sleep in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. The police forced them out with tear gas and clubs. All the news reports described Chicago as an occupied city, with National Guardsmen joining the street cops, and federal troops gathering to join them.
The demonstrators said they would march to the big convention hall. The cops said, No, you won’t. The demonstrators, ignoring the order, believing this was still America and they could walk through the streets of a city, decided to march.
The television cameras captured the visuals, and reporters put it into words. Jimmy Breslin wrote, “The young people, these dirty, long-haired young, are the same kind of young people who passed out underground newspapers in Prague and shook their fists at Russian tanks.”
In Chicago, he wrote, “The professional agitators were a handful. The number of decent kids was large. The cops proceeded to riot … A demonstration which should have been handled as if it weren’t even there was turned into an international incident.”
Even as scores were clubbed to the pavement and carried off, a lot of those watching from home sided with the police. We seemed to be witnessing anarchy — weren’t the police there to protect us?
Now the old Democratic coalitions began breaking apart, so badly that, within weeks, Humphrey was changing his tune in public, saying the demonstrators had been nasty, they’d used bad language. Ultimately, he seemed a weak, befuddled man unable to make up his own mind.
And that confusion was his undoing. Twenty years earlier, he’d been a liberal firebrand, insisting that black people should have the same rights as white people in a time when many considered such a thought intolerable. Now he couldn’t make up his own mind on these riots.
And, in a year that had given us that motel balcony in Memphis, and the grubby kitchen floor of a Los Angeles hotel, and rioting in scores of cities, we were watching the mayhem in Chicago from homes across the United States that suddenly seemed more vulnerable than ever previously imagined.
