Today, Explained - The Chicago DNC everyone wants to forget

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

When Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention in 1968, it descended into riots in the street and chaos on the floor. Historian Rick Perlstein talks about whether 2024 risks a repeat. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andi Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Photo credit: Bettman / Getty Images. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Noelle King at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Not in the convention hall, but out in the streets. It's Today Explained. Union Park is the starting point of this year's big protest against Israel's war in Gaza. Make no mistake, Joe Biden could turn off that tap of money and funding immediately. He could do it right now. And that he and Kamala Harris, they are responsible. This morning, the protest organizers were drawing this comparison to 1968.

This is the Vietnam War of our generation. In the late 60s, early 70s, hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the United States were in the streets to stop that war. When the DNC was in Chicago in 68, a massive Vietnam War protest spiraled into violence when police attacked protesters. Coming up, will 2024 be a repeat of 1968? Everybody's asking. So will we. Download the app today and discover why favorite player or your style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk,

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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with historian and journalist Rick Perlstein, who has spent much of his adult life chronicling American conservatives and examining the role that the 60s played in bringing them to power. Growing up in the 1980s Reagan land, you know, was kind of boring for me.

And the melodrama of the 60s was absolutely galvanizing. I couldn't believe how every day seemed to bring a new revolution. And so certainly I was fascinated by this idea of these kids sitting down in the streets and getting beaten within an inch of their lives by the cops and the whole pageant. All right, let's go back to the summer of 68. What was the backdrop to the convention in August of that year? The backdrop nationally was that the Democratic Party was divided down the middle on the issue of the Vietnam War. The whole question is, I mean, what happens if you do win in North Vietnam? what happens if you do win in North Vietnam? What happens if you do win in South Vietnam?

What then? You're faced with the same problem. How are you going to find a popular government that's going to run the place? And have it turn into eventually a communist government. Is that your idea? Well, that doesn't terrify me quite as much as it seems to terrify some other people. Of course, it had been escalated by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who believed he was continuing the wishes

of the martyred President John F. Kennedy. I have today ordered to Vietnam the air mobile division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately. And a lot of people who were Democrats saw it as part of this great anti-communist crusade. And a lot of people saw it as imperialism,

that basically we were interfering in another country's civil war. My own personal position is that the war in Vietnam is unjust, unnecessary, and immoral. And I feel immoral participating in it. The idea that we had to get out was very, very prevalent on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And Lyndon Johnson decided he wasn't going to run for president.

I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office. So by the time delegates arrived at the convention, Lyndon Johnson's loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was the nominee apparent. And he had kind of been coerced almost into loyally supporting the war even though he had grave reservations about it. I think that for the Democratic Party and convention to try to draw up military strategy and tactics is just a little bit beyond what the American

people would expect of a political party and beyond its capacity or ability to do. These are matters that must be left up to our commander-in-chief, to the American people would expect of a political party and beyond its capacity or ability to do. These are matters that must be left up to our commander in chief, to the officers. And the question of whether he would be nominated or Eugene McCarthy was nominated was live in the air. And it looked like Humphrey had it wired, but there was kind of a proxy fight in the form of a platform proposal that the Democratic Party go on the record to end the Vietnam War. My feeling is that should he accept it, it would go a long way towards assuring both his nomination and his election.

If he should decide to oppose the inclusion of a specific peace plank in the Democratic platform, I think it would conceivably turn it into a real battle royal. Of course, at the same time, protesters from all over the country flooded in. Members of the Youth International Party, Yippies, they called themselves, converged on Chicago. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills.

Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation, to draw attention from the convention to the streets. There's a separate Chicago context. Several months earlier that spring, there had been terrible riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. So there was dread and anticipation, not only within the convention hall, so it seemed, for the Democratic Party, and then outside the convention hall, what would happen when the city hosted, very reluctantly,

thousands of protesters who were much more radical than the kind of protesters we see now. They would talk about, you know, we want to overthrow society, you know, we want to overthrow capitalism. We are a people. We are all together. We are all under attack. America has decided to devour its youth. We will resist. We will not participate in America's children for breakfast program. Fuck them! And here everyone arrives, the city, which is run by this kind of almost oligarch,

Mayor Richard J. Daley, who intended no disorder in his city that he was putting on display for the entire world. They have no right to come into the city and tell us what they're going to do. intended no disorder in his city that he was putting on display for the entire world. They have no right to come into the city and tell us what they're going to do. We don't permit our own people to sleep in the park, so why would we permit anyone from out of the city to sleep in the park? We don't permit our own people to march at night, so why would we permit a lot of people going snake dances at night? Disorder came anyway. Tell me two things. What did Daley do to try to prevent

disorder, and how did it go so very wrong? One of the things he did to try to prevent disorder was to kind of string along these two groups of protesters who wanted to come to the city by not granting them official permission to, A, sleep in a park, which was Lincoln Park. And that was the intention of a group who identified themselves as hippies. They were led by a guy named Abbie Hoffman, the guy who had a year before promised to levitate the Pentagon during a protest. And when it gets about 300 feet in the air, it's going to start to vibrate. Slowly at first, and then a little quicker. And all the evil spirits are going to pour out.

And these were the people who wanted to, they would talk about fornicating in the park. They wanted to have a rock festival. The idea was they represented this new youth identity that was revolutionary and was going to completely overthrow bourgeois propriety. And another group of people wanted to parade to the convention hall, and they were much more kind of conventionally political, but a lot of them were kind of radical revolutionaries and the kind of people who would, you know, hoist flags of the enemy in Vietnam, the Viet Cong.

We say that if the government of the United States does not stop the war, we intend to stop the government of the United States. And Daley put his foot down and said, these long-haired miscreants aren't going to get the time of day in our city, which only ratcheted up the tensions, right, and made them even more determined. We'll sleep in the park even if you don't want us to. We'll march the convention hall even if you don't want us to. We'll put our bodies on the line in both cases.

And it'll be like a football game. Cops versus the Yippies or the National Guard or whoever. And people will be watching that on TV and they'll say, we don't want to watch that boring speech stuff. We want to watch the Rose Bowl out there. When did the violence begin? Immediately. And now moving off down Balbo Street, and the crowd is running, and the police are chasing them into Jackson, into Grant Park.

There is an odor of tear gas still left in the air here from tear gas shells that have been going off periodically for the last hours. So you basically had this kind of enveloping dread leading up to the last day of convention, even as the debates over the platform are leading to actual violence inside the convention hall. What's your name, sir? I'm a manhandler. And what is your name, sir? Take your hands manhandler. And what is your name, sir? Take your hands off of me. Unless you intend to arrest me, don't push me, please.

But don't— Well, Walter, as you can see, we got bodily pushed out of the way. This is the kind of thing that's been going on outside the hall. This is the first time we've had it happen inside the hall. I'm sorry to be out of breath, but somebody belted me in the stomach during that. What happened— So you had kind of these miniature civil wars breaking out kind of inside among the actual credential delegates and outside among protesters and police. What was going on inside the convention and how rowdy did it actually get? Hall to increase the tension is that that Thursday night when students who

were denied the right to march to the Convention Hall sat down right in front of that famous hotel and police just started you know wading into the crowd and just bashing people on the head. Go ahead! Come on! Go on, officer! And word got into the Convention Hall that that was what was happening. They were doing the final vote for, you know, who would get nominated as president. And there was a third candidate who was kind of running almost as kind of like a symbolic run. It was a guy named George McGovern, who later won the nomination in 1972.

But he was really the most anti-war of all the candidates. We ought to try to work out a coalition government now. If the South Vietnamese continue to veto it, we ought to put them on notice that we're going to limit our commitment, that we're going to reduce it. And he was nominated by a liberal senator from Connecticut named Abraham Ribicoff. And Ribicoff said, if George McGovern was the

president of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo statics in the streets of Chicago. And when he said that, this, you know, kind of corpulent, you know, cigar-chomping political boss, Mayor Daley, shouted something that you could not hear. And later, lip readers famously said that he had said something about how Senator Ribicoff was a no-good Jew bastard. And that was it. You know, the battle was on. We'll be back with Rick Perlstein in just a minute. I choose not simply to run for president. I seek.

Today explained. Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland. When we left off, you said on Thursday night of the 68th convention, there was fighting inside the hall. Some slurs were thrown about. What was going on outside the convention center? So, Michigan Avenue is, you know, the most famous street in Chicago, the Magnificent Mile. On the east side of the street is Grant Park, which is this, you know, kind of gorgeous, you know, 19th century Paris-style park. And the marchers mass for their march,

you know, several miles down to the convention hall. The police are standing in the street in their way. So what they do is the protesters kind of do a military flanking maneuver. They walk into the park and try and kind of walk around the policemen. And the policemen kind of chase them back across the street. Vice President Humphrey, at his 29th floor room, got some of the gas, which came up there. He choked and sneezed a bit. He said he had itched and took a shower and made a statement saying that he was dismayed by the outbreak. And what happens next is the students sat down, you know, did a sit-in strike, basically, blocking the street right in front of the TV cameras. And hundreds of white-helmeted

Chicago police just methodically started taking their nightsticks and beating these seated protesters. The interesting thing about this is that almost universally the bystanders have been power-stricken, apparently, by this action of the police. Police wagons lined up, and they would grab young people by the scruff of their neck, throw them into police wagons. These are scenes similar to those we saw earlier on videotape of the demonstrators being hustled, which is the kindest word for it, into the police wagons. And then when there were enough of them to be full,

they would throw a tear gas canister inside, and then they would smack the door closed. And this was all, you know, on TV. It was on all three channels. And there was this terrible backlash. The majority of the country very much believed that the Chicago police were on the right, the protesters were in the wrong,

and that was the very backlash against, you know against the forces of civil rights and anti-war activism and cultural shifts and all that stuff that Richard Nixon was running for president on as the Republican candidate. It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change there is no cause that justifies resort to violence so i pledge to you we shall have order in the united states and so could a person say that richard nixon who ended up winning, ended up winning that year because of the way the events of the 1968 DNC played out in Chicago? Vietnam War that he had grave reservations about from Lyndon Johnson, who just demanded the most intense obeisance and loyalty on the part of his underlings, that he refused to denounce the Vietnam War. The American people are not going to stand for any kind of a peace arrangement or any

kind of a tactical arrangement relating to the peace discussion that leaves our men in South Vietnam at the mercy of the enemy. So I think that was the biggest cause for the Democrats' loss was not, you know, that the protesters, it was kind of like not listening to the protesters. And the big message that he took to the country in his TV commercials was that the first civil right of all Americans, quote unquote, was to be safe in their own homes. So he was campaigning against skyrocketing violent crime rates. He was campaigning with commercials that, you know, showed these violent protests. And of course, we're blaming the protesters for them. And generally speaking, that if he was elected president,

he would bring law and order to the White House, as opposed to the Democrats who couldn't even control their convention. We decided to do this episode about the 68 Convention months ago, even before this year's convention seemed exciting, because people kept saying, you know, you keep reading op-eds, oh, the DNC is in Chicago, 2024 is like 1968. How much do you believe that to be true? And what is causing people to make that comparison? It's so interesting. You know, I know a ton about the 1968 convention. And in my book, I kind of document it hour by hour and sometimes minute by minute. And I'm, of course, you know, fascinated by what will happen in politics in 2024. And until I started getting these calls from folks like you, it never occurred to compared to them, how protests in the

street work now compared to then, how politicians respond to protests, how the entire apparatus of law enforcement and security work compared to them, how Chicago works compared to them are just so different. Right now the biggest priority on the agenda is the build-out of the DNC security perimeter. Once the perimeter is in place, no cars or foot traffic will be allowed inside without proper clearance. You've been to conventions. You know that, like, a quarter mile away from the arena, there's going to be iron fences, and you can't get anywhere past those iron fences without going through metal detectors. And protests themselves, one of the things that made 1968 so shocking and so galvanizing for the public was this was a new thing.

People hadn't seen it before. The idea that you could go into a convention and you didn't know whether the presidential candidate was going to be Hubert Humphrey or Eugene McCarthy. You know, maybe there was a glimmer of possibility that might have happened before the Democratic Party lined up behind Kamala Harris. But, you know, part of what the protesters were trying to do was influence how the convention would come out. And after 1968, they completely changed how presidential candidates were chosen. They went to a primary system where they used to have these kind of backroom kind of caucus systems. And finally, you know, no one really cares about these conventions. I mean, there's just this kind of like, you know, they show up for a night on TV and people watch the speeches. And, you know, the idea that this could be this kind of cataclysmic, galvanizing event that, you know, don't forget the slogan of the protesters as they were getting beat up.

Their chant was the whole world is watching. Right. Well, the whole world won't be watching. So, you know, I'm always saying, you know, history is a process. It's not parallels. We can't have 1968 again because we already had 1968. It completely shaped the politics we have now and the way the Republican Party does business. But because we're that far down the road, a lot of the things that happened in 1968 are inconceivable in 2024. It doesn't mean that interesting and even melodramatic and even possibly violent things might not happen in 2024.

But those will happen for 2024 reasons. Those won't happen for 1968 reasons. Historian Rick Perlstein. All right. So the comparison between today and 68 isn't exactly one to one. But the echoes of that year are certainly alive here in Chicago. In fact, two young activists I talked to even mirrored the language of 68. They told me the whole world is watching. You know, the United States is usually on the news everywhere in the world,

but this is a big deal, right? It's a Democratic National Convention. They're going to nominate their presidential candidate, right? There's a lot of momentum, of course, with the Kamala Harris announcement, you know, to challenge Trump and to defeat Trump. So the world is all affected by the policies of the United States, right? The world looks to the United States to put a stop to the genocide. People want a stop to this. The United States have derailed it. They've slowed it down, right? Oh, we're going to achieve a ceasefire. We're going to achieve a ceasefire. Ten months of saying the same thing. We don't want that. We don't want no more talks. We want action. You know, it's how many more need to die for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put an end to this. They can put an end to this in one phone call. What these activists are not expecting

is a repeat of the violence. Our marshals have been preparing for this. Our communities keep us safe. We keep each other safe. And we're going to continue to be out here all day rallying in sight and sound of the DNC to make the demands heard that we need to end U.S. aid to Israel immediately and that humanitarian aid needs to go into Gaza. And we are going to continue fighting for the liberation of Palestine until all of historic Palestine is

liberated. That was Hussam Marajda and Nazik Sankari of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, the Chicago chapter. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Miranda Kennedy. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter. Thanks to Amina El-Sadi in Washington. I'm Noelle King in Chicago. Today Explained will be reporting from the DNC all this week. Thank you.