Charles Tasnadi/AP Photo
Chicago police guard the area around the convention hall prior to the opening of the Democratic National Convention, August 26, 1968.
The Democratic National Committee’s decision last week to hold the party’s 2024 convention in Chicago has prompted an unsurprising knee-jerk response from Republicans. Chicago-based National Review writer Jeffrey Blehar came forth with this prediction: “Democratic conventioneers are in for an entirely new experience in either highly militarized downtown security or exciting street-crime adventure.”
This just goes to show that a basic knowledge of America’s political history is not a requirement for National Review writers. The Democrats’ nightmare Chicago convention of 1968 featured a highly militarized downtown and (not “or”) exciting street-crime adventures. Both were provided by the Chicago police, and imposed upon, among other people, me.
Lest you think I exaggerate, consider, please, the Walker Report on the convention, which was commissioned by the federal government’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Vietnam War protesters had flocked to Chicago that week to protest the convention’s presumed nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as its presidential standard-bearer, even though Humphrey and his surrogates had failed to win a single primary (of which, at the time, there weren’t many), even as anti-war senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy had won them, and even as Humphrey, as the vice president to the man who had escalated the war, supported its continued course. (Kennedy, of course, had been assassinated just minutes after he’d claimed victory in the California primary.)
The protesters were numerous, voluble, demonstrative, and young, and their assemblages and marches, while nonviolent, were theatrically and often humorously provocative. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was determined to stomp on them, and he mobilized round-the-clock, militarized policing from the city’s force.
On the convention’s third night, as Humphrey was nominated, demonstrators rallied in Grant Park, across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel, which housed the headquarters for Humphrey, McCarthy, and other Democratic and media pooh-bahs. Here’s how the Walker Report described the police response on that evening and, indeed, throughout convention week:
[O]n the part of the police there was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest. To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events … is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot.
On that Wednesday night, the “gratuitous beatings” weren’t limited to the demonstrators. The cops were so charged up that they also clubbed random pedestrians who had the misfortune to be walking down Michigan Avenue at the time, some of whom the cops managed to propel through the Hilton’s ground-floor windows.
The street-crime adventure had already attracted the attention of the TV networks; when action in the convention hall grew dull, they switched live to Grant Park. Hence, the police riot was aired in real time to a nation already glued to its sets, as the demonstrators whose teeth hadn’t been broken by a nightstick to the mouth chanted, “The whole world’s watching!”
Chicago Sun-Times/AP Photo
A demonstrator falls to the pavement as he is pursued by Chicago Police officers during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 27, 1968.
Among the watchers were many of the convention delegates, who saw it on the TV sets at the eateries and drinkeries in the vicinity of the convention hall. Which led Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff to ad lib in the middle of his speech seconding the nomination of Sen. George McGovern (to whom delegates pledged to Kennedy had switched their support after Kennedy’s murder), “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have to have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” The opportunistic TV cameras got a quick reaction shot of a furious Mayor Daley, in the front row of the delegates, shouting out to Ribicoff the official response of Chicago city government, which millions of lip-readers could clearly discern as “Fuck you!”
I was in Chicago that week, culminating my half-year as one of the youngest kids in the McCarthy operation (I was 18). Shuttling between McCarthy headquarters in the Conrad Hilton and the convention hall, I’d seen not just the verbal altercations among politicians and delegates, but also the regular bursts of police thuggery on the streets. On the convention’s final night, following Humphrey’s tone-deaf acceptance speech (he’d hailed “the politics of happiness,” which had been conspicuous by its absence from that week and, indeed, from all of 1968), my observation of the police riot became up close and personal.
Around 2 a.m. that night, having run out of demonstrators or even pedestrians to clobber, the cops suddenly burst from the elevators on the 15th floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where the McCarthy campaign’s junior staff was domiciled. Interrupting what was a mournful night of farewells for staffers who’d worked together for the previous half-year, the cops greeted us all with swinging clubs (I caught one to the chest) until we’d been herded into the elevators and sent down to the lobby, where presumably we were less of a threat to public order and the status quo.
I mention this history not just to correct any misimpressions that National Review readers may have picked up, but because it’s not just history, at least as concerns the general orientation of the Chicago police. To be sure, Chicago just elected the decidedly progressive Brandon Johnson as mayor, both despite and because of his criticism of the current force. But when it comes to the actual guys in blue (they are preponderantly guys) who patrol the once-Second City, it’s clear that not a lot has changed. Their local union endorsed both of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns as well as the conservative law-and-order candidate Johnson defeated, Paul Vallas. And shortly before this year’s election, the police union’s leader threatened a de facto strike if Johnson won. “If this guy gets in we’re going to see an exodus like we’ve never seen before,” said Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara. There will be “blood in the streets,” he added.
I’ve covered a lot of national conventions, and the politics of the police assigned to patrol during convention weeks have often been plain to see. When Republicans gathered in New York City to renominate George W. Bush in 2004, I saw many incidents of cops going out of their way to fawn over the delegates and proclaim that they, too, were Republicans, and would gladly defend them against the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic residents.
At the only Democratic convention held in Chicago since 1968—the supremely uneventful 1996 convention that renominated Bill Clinton—it was hard to find demonstrators, or even interested passersby, and the police didn’t seem to be more than normally vexed and aggrieved. As the manufacture of vexation and grievance among white working-class men in general and cops in particular reaches new heights every week, I don’t expect Chicago’s finest to be so convention-friendly this time around, the best efforts of the mayor to project a new face on the city notwithstanding. Just how aggrieved, vexed, racist, and snarling those men in blue will be is something we’ll have to find out.
