The Whole World Is Watching - August 1968

What are your memories -- or knowledge -- of probably the most infamous Democratic National Convention, the August 1968 event in Chicago?

Memorialized in lyrics by Brit Graham Nash (Chicago), the convention attracted disgruntled Americans of many stripes; some were dismayed that Vice President Hubert Humphrey would be the party's nominee for president in the wake of the assassination of Sen. Bobby Kennedy.

An estimated 10,000 people arrived in Chicago to protest the war and events at the convention; a decade later, CBS reported that one-in-six was a government agent [1]. They were met by about 12,000 police, 7,500 Illinois National Guardsmen, 7,500 Army troops and 1,000 Secret Service Agents -- law enforcement outnumbered demonstrators more than 2-to-1.

Television was coming into its own; the convention and protests were beamed into the living rooms of 90 million American viewers. On 28 August 1968, images of police tussling with 3,000 anti-war protesters led to charges of police brutality.

Polls contemporaneous with the event "found that a majority of Americans sympathized with Chicago police" [2]. However, Daniel Walker -- head of the Chicago Crime Commission -- led an investigation based on official records, 180 hours of film, 12,000 photographs, and testimony of 3,427 eyewitnesses. The Walker Commission reached a different conclusion; its report, Rights in Conflict, was released 1 December 1968 (emphasis added):

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Chicago police were targets of mounting provocation by both word and act ... The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made more shocking by the fact that it was often inflected upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat ... To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at first-hand the events ... is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot [3].

Also from the Walker Commission, this testimony from a Los Angeles police inspector:

There is no question but that many officers acted without restraint and exerted force beyond that necessary under the circumstances. The leadership at the point of conflict did little to prevent such conduct and the direct control of offices by first line supervisors was virtually non-existent.

The report's executive summary makes it clear that most protesters were not aggressors; instead, they were "intent on expressing by peaceful means their dissent either from the society generally or from the administration's policies in Vietnam."

Rep. Wayne Hayes, speaking on the convention floor, dismissed the "peace plank" -- using rhetorical ad hominem -- as a move to "substitute beards for brains, license for liberty. They want pot instead of patriotism, sideburns instead of solutions. They would substitute riots for reason. [4]"

Moreover, the police did not discriminate between those demonstrating and those covering the demonstrations:

Out of the 300 newsmen assigned to cover the parks and streets of Chicago during convention week, more than 60 (about 20%) were involved in incidents resulting in injury to themselves, damage to their equipment, or to their arrest. Sixty-three newsmen were physically attacked by police: in 13 of these instances, photographic or recording equipment was intentionally damaged.

Subsequently, eight police officers and eight civilians were indicted. The cops (I have found no list of names and very little online material about their charges) were summarily acquitted:

Taking little time to deliberate, Chicago juries aquitted every cop in every case. In one case, a newsman was battered with a club for failing to clear the sidewalk quickly enough. In another, a local reporter's head and cameras were bashed as he was observing police hassling some students in a sport car...

The jurors permissiveness toward police was not limited to interactions with demonstrators or "Hippies". In the Old Town area on Monday night, two days before the downtown violence, the police decided to sweep the people from Lincoln Park and adjacent streets. One indictment was based on a startling series of photographs of a young black man alone in the center of an Old Town street. He had just come out of a neighborhood bar and had no connection with any demonstrators. Either he had been slow to follow the order to clear the street (the police version) or, in the course of complying, had run back to retrieve a dropped hat (his version corroborated by civilian witnesses). But there is no question about what happened next. The pictures show him surrounded by three white officers, hit in the head with a baton and kneed in the groin as he took refuge behind a telephone pole. Even though the victim was neither charged nor arrested, the jury apparently concluded that there was no excessive force here; he was just smacked around a little.

The demonstrators were charged with conspiring to violate the Anti-Riot provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act:

• Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
• David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam
• John Froines, a professor at the University at the University of Oregon
• Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Youth International Party (YIPPIES)
• Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panthers (Seale's case would ultimately be spit from the eight, resulting in the catch-phrase, The Chicago Seven)
• Lee Weiner, a research assistant at Northwestern University

Froines and Weiner, the University-affiliated defendents, were acquitted. Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman and Ruben were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot; they were acquitted of the conspiracy charge. They were each fined $5,000, plus court costs, and sentenced to five years in prison. All convictions were reversed in 1972; the Department of Justice did not appeal that decision. More.

The organizations were also investigated by the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). (Who knew it still existed after the McCarthy era? It was not disbanded until 1975; its functions were shifted to the House Judiciary Committee.)

John Turner, deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, called the events "worse than Selma." He writes, ironically, of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's involvement:

Once upon a time, through a series of blunders and miscalculations, the legendary political boss whose late- reporting precincts had insured the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, unwittingly became the instrument for electing his opponent eight years later.

• 1968 Police Riot - YouTube, TV clips and convention rhetoric from 1968
• Chicago by CSNY - YouTube