THE NAZIS AND THE POLICE

...Next day both Chicago newspapers lauded "efficient" police work at the park (and later in the week columnist Maggie Daly revealed that some cops had been more concerned about communist infiltration of the crowd than about any Nazi danger...

...borhood effort to explore alternative solutions, perhaps in the cooperative racial direction parts of South Shore were once headed, and if the media were less concerned with Nazi headliners and more with the intracacies of these neighborhood and city problems, areas like Marquette Park might be able to make some honest mistakes without getting ..too many arms twisted, and might be able to achieve the creation of truly humane neighborhoods, catholic villages...

...One faction chanted hate-sl0gans at the Nazis ("Death to the Nazis...

...Fishermen ply this lagoon too, often at the southeastern corner...

...In fact the neighborhood tough who did swim appeared later, wet and bedraggled, being led back to a paddy wagon just as police had finished pushing out into the crowd in order to distract it from a carefully-maneuvered back-door Nazi exit, as deftly handled as their appearance had been...

...Problems of this sort have increased in Chicago especially at junctures where the occurrence of blacks moving into previously white sections has been fanned into an e n masse movement...

...another chanted at the chanters, attacking all Jews and blacks, who--along with the rich purported to be in charge of the Chicago Tribunewhad been portrayed in the earlier debates (a recurrent theme) as members of a coalition threatening to take away the homes and the livelihoods of the working class people of Marquette Park...

...e.n the east, amid the trees, a mixture of curious neighbors, resident roughnecks in White Power T-shirts (a few of the boys wearing goldcross earrings), special interest groups like the revolutionary Black and White Defense Committee (only white members present), reporters, spectators...

...Frequent strident arguments or outbursts turned into frequent violent disordersmshoves or punches or curses aimed at one another and the police as well...

...From the front row pressed up against the saw horses you might catch an occasional phrase, like the injunction to "march into Niggertown" with which Collin ended his harangue...

...the police who routinely patrol Marquette Park and occasionally stop to acquaint themselves with some of the locals...

...The hospital and the Nabisco factory south of the park on Kedzie dominate the mostly flat terrain of Marquette Park, out of sight of Chicago's skyscrapers unless perhaps you ascend the bridge south between the cookie factory and the Double Drive-In, an ethnic patch of the city (heavily Lithuanian, many other Eastern Europeans, a few Irish and German, others--I saw a Commonweal: 527 couple of Spanish families outside houses today) capable because of its history, its geography and its ethos of conceiving itself a world apart, in Chicago but aligned against thefat cats who residents feel fill the Gold Coast and control ,the press...

...There too, though, lifelong residents with whom I've spoken cherish a sense of place smaller than metropolitan Chicago even while decrying the symptoms of decay and human disaffection...

...From their headquarters on 71st St...

...Could any of Chicago's neighborhoods have worked through biases to reasonable integration on their own...

...Lithuanian stores and restaurants, clubs and bars, and the Lithuanian Catholic church line 69th St...

...They were among the fifty plainclothesmen who made almost all of the 60or 70-odd arrests this Sunday afternoon...

...In other neighbor - hoods, apparently different situations...

...The cameras atop the two-story building, perhaps decoys, remained stranded there for the duration...

...Collin was also in the middle of an artificial square shaped by double blue barricades, lines of patrolmen in riot gear, mounted police, a battery of paddy wagons, and the buses that had been used to haul in extra police from as far away as the distant northwest side of the city...

...A token black also appeared, was chased by crowd members, and was jumped before being rescued by two civilians...

...Perhaps, for all our differences, the Nazi rally, its legality hassled over for two years, brought all the way to the Supreme Court, its site changed from Skokie, might serve as Exhibit A of the resilience of our Republic, its ability to deal with the most outlandish in its midst, and to do it fairly and justly...

...Resembling a battalion of Blue Meanies--though some more relaxed, less grimly game-face than most--and as nostalgic for my Grant Park-bled friend as Sergeant Pepper might be, this force of Chicago's Finest, reportedly 1500 strong in and around the park (i,f so, one cop to every three or so spectators), challenged the crowd and cowed most of it...

...One person I talked with is a lifelong Marquette Park resident who ten years ago, when he attended high school, had considered himself among the 'three or four radicals in his neighborhood...

...Walking down two blocks in any of a couple of dozen other Chicago neighborhoods, I might have been able to feel the same kind of insulation and sense of identity...

...Under the dictates of such power-which at Marquette Park strove to be the paragon of an urban super-ego, but did nothing to mediate the fears and frustrations and hatreds of the various factions gathered theremmiilions of us are continuing to grow up within neighborhoods without growing up...

...A mile north of Brighton in South Lawndale, l'd encounter a neighborhood radically changed since my youth there by influxes of latecoming ethnics (Mexican mostly, some Puerto Rican, a few Cubans and South Americans...

...but I don't think it would have been the silliest thing to do...

...the gangs that congregate of evenings near the footbridges, often drinking from quart bottles of beer or wine...

...Occasionally during the inaudible speech an authentic kook had turned up, like the woman in black who informed police that her family had been "murdered by Jewish freemasons" and insisted on seeing the real Nazis...

...Americans exercising their hallowed rights...

...Shortly after 2 p.m...

...Here, on the blocks I walked and the blocks around them, were the familiar neat bungalows, the occasional two- or three-flat, or multi-unit brick apartment buildings, the manicured lawns, and the grassy berms that front houses in most Chicago neighborhoods and seem to add distinction to each property, creating a space that sets off the families of a neighborhood from street traffic...

...At one point they chased a youth several blocks through neighborhood gangways and alleys...

...All this across the water from the softball fields, on the inside half of the perimeter of the park that its circular road bisects, on any given day...

...Near the end of Coffin's performance they pursued another to the edge of the lagoon, where he dove in and swam across to apparent safety and the cheers of the crowd...

...Nazi honcho Frank Collin, looking and sounding a little like like short, red-faced, histrionic Marty Faye, the Chicago bank exec who peddled dishware on TV in the early clays of the medium, eventually spoke from atop his van amid a handful or two of his brown-suited henchmen, who looked a little like the police roundup from your local porno parlor on an off day...

...And that so many people look upon this kind of power as a good, rather than as the sometimes necessary, sometimes overused evil that it must be by virtue of its inherent brute inhumanity, is a measure as well of the criteria for living a civilized life that we have come in America to take too much for granted...

...The writer of that article I'd read this morning, July 9, had checked out the Marquette resident's claims of deterioration east of Western and had concurred with some of them...

...On this, which was, however, not any given day, I had parked two blocks north of Marquette Park, along 65th St., where police were barricading all side street auto access to the park...

...A plains:lothesman led the boy into custody over the same footbridge I had crossed earlier and been prevented from recrossing since, first until police cleared the area, then until they removed one of their fellows who had suffered sunstroke from the opposite bank...

...In other instances, perhaps because national and international factors have become since the '50s more predominant influences on our lives, and certainly because negative factors, like the rapacity of a lot of city realtors, have remained human constants, this has not always proved beneficial...

...West, the other side of busy Kedzie Avenue, Marquette Park's public golf course and its flower gardens lay open to their weekend visitors...

...Like a lot of others---like a much-respected pastor I know, who grew up several miles east of Marquette Park and now runs a heavily Latino parish on the near west side--the reporter laid mush of ,the blame on FHA financing programs, as pushed by unscrupulous realtors, which lured some blacks who couldn't afford it into home ownership...

...Some neighborhoods have become hotbeds of contention in their effort to repulse so-called outsiders...

...neighborhood elders playing cards like to sit on or near its banks, where couples also relax, listening to radio or playing Scrabble...

...Just as there are sillier things by far that grown men do, besides playing 16-inch softball on a Sunday afternoon at Marquette Park...

...Repetition of these racially-based confrontations, in Marquette Park and elsewhere, might someday induce a Final Solution, also of the same order, if more drastic...

...71st and Sacramento had served to divert a good portion of the protesters from the arrival of the Nazis at the park...

...As I crossed the softball fields toward the south perimeter of the park--the east half of this featuring a copse at the corner of 71st and Sacramento and aplayground beyond it, the west formed of a meadow cut by a thin ditchua triple cordon of police, I found out later, was barring a black-led group from passing under the 67th St...

...But I wonder how much the police force's mechanical mastery of this Nazi-instigated problem had helped in turn to instigate the crowd to some of its worst behavior and to validate for a lot of fence-sitting residents their fears that the Nazi performance signified a tempest not just in a teapot but in the whole racial stew of Chicago-which is exactly what Collin, an advocate of race warfare, wanted it to be...

...In those which have changed racially, some gradually, some suddenly, the change has seldom been organic...

...Long before that, though, it didn't really matter...

...Across the water just to the north of the game, a few people were jogging on the cinder oval, a few were using the exercise bars, some were shooting hoops, two were playing tennis...

...Across the park, on a corner of 67th St., I noticed a square concrete base in the grass, and upon it a five-pointed concrete star, hollowed out in the middle...

...Today it had seemed a Nazi rally sponsored by the Chicago Police Department...

...At one of the blockades along 65th St.,still in place, two black cops were talking to one another...

...People ~vere converging here, lining both sides of Sacramento where it crosses into the park---on the west side mainly Jewish War Veterans, some from Delaware and New York, readying anti-Nazi signs...

...Crossing one of the stone footbridges over the lagoon and passing the softball game, and after it a coed pickup game at another diamond, I forgot to notice whether the remote-control boaters were out today, at that northeastern part of the lagoon where it spreads to greater width...

...Most of the action, though, appeared to be going on closer to 71st St., at the copse...

...The pole and flag had long been missing from this relic of a memorial garden, the kind that had been kept up with flowers and markers during my youth, in the aftermath of World War II...

...of A. Democracy in action...

...If a less unnatural police presen:e, an effort to "serve and protect" (as the Chicago police motto states) rather than to overpower, were combined with a greater neigh...

...I did see, today, on one front lawn, a discarded Old Style can displacing several blades of grass...

...Yet both these new peoples, and the old who have stayed, retain some sense of the neighborhood as a place they belong to...

...Sunday, July 9, this seemed like a lot to hope for...

...South Shore walked that tightrope for a while, with notable 61an at times...

...Lawndale proper, nearly all-black, has appeared on the surface to be suffering for years from urban diseases like absentee landlordism...

...viaduct and into the Marquette Park neighborhood...

...I crossed another footbridge, and just past it came upon scores of police unloading the blue horses that they were going to use as barricades, setting them up between the lagoon and a small stand of trees across the park road...

...I had walked two blocks through part of the neighborhood that is also called Marquette Park, touted just that morning in the paper as a neighborhood of immaculate houses and lawns, contrasted by one resident ("Every blade of grass is in place...

...His favorite word was "manipulation...

...Elsewhere, as at the bridge I crossed, reeds skirt the lagoon's narrow waters...

...On this warm sunny afternoon, while helmeted police began to move the crowd back to the curbs as if paving the way for the Nazi parade, the recurrent debates--marked often by shouts of "Let him talk," or "Everyone's got a fight to speak"--struck me as some anachronistic scene from Dos Passos or Saroyan...

...And I'd taken note of the consummate military stagecraft of the cops in establishing the conditions for this audience to meet itself, for .ushers and crowd to butt a few heads, for all to disband by order...

...18 August 1978:530...

...Not far away, in a schoolyard, police reinforcements were lolling on and around their squad cars...

...Heated by anticipation and the rush many made to get to the rally site, restrained firmly by the mammoth show of police force, and releasing its ~e~ngs now outside the courtesies of one-to-one debate, the crowd had gotten riled...

...That the power they have wielded is required as a matter of course in our cities today is a measure of the quality of life and civilization in our Republic and a sure sign that Saroyan's Human Comedy of America is anachronistic, maybe always has been...

...Cameramen had taken over the roof of a two-story building facing the Sacramento Avenue entrance to the park...

...Among these people knots of debaters would form, their rhetoric grow to a crescendo, 'their argument dis18 August 1978:528 solve as one side turned away in disgust or moved on to proselytize elsewhere, or said all there was to say...

...Collin manipulating everyone by sending up the Skokie smokescreen, then hitting his original target, Marquette Park, with the intent of mobilizing local discontent with blacks and the Chicago economy into Commonweal: 529 support for his own organization,.in spite of its meager numbers and its: blatantly inhuman platform that, under less highly emotional circumstances, most residents probably wouldn,t .buy...

...But panics, pressures and blockbusting have been the rule the last three decades...

...Every so often those milling on the fringes of the audience had to dodge someone charging through, and shortly behind the prey two or three others--one-in mock cycle-gang attire, another suited as a jogger, a third in nondescript discount store mufti--who always wore little red, white and blue ribbons on or near their wrists...

...In Gage Park or Brighton Park, both north of Marquette, perhaps exactly the same feelings, those of whites hemmed in by forces they perceive as threatening the integrity of their everyday lives...

...Ultimately the solution today was of the same order, if staged differently, as it was more than a "decade ago, when blacks marched in Marquette Park and cars were tipped into the lagoon...

...Granted, there hadn't been many exhibits like this in recent American history, but maybe today, at least, we could hope...

...I finally was free to recross ihe footbridge and the softball fields, go back over the first bridge, pass someone jogging on the cinder track, a middle-aged man sunning on one of the knolls, and head up the side streets to my car...

...Occasionally I'd seen someone I recognized...

...During the past ten years the black-white border along the southwest side of Chicago has moved from Ashland, two miles east of Marquette Park, to Western, just past the viaduct in sight down 67th St...

...Today he wryly observed the goings-on...

...I didn't...

...Perhaps such massive police action happened of necessity...

...The U.S...

...The Nazis manipulating the media...

...As villagers many Chicagoans have enjoyed the wholeness of a tribal life unavailable to much of mobile America, and have too been victimized by the clannish intolerance typical of such life...

...I had passed these and places like them thousands of times...

...the boys and girls out preening...

...Vacant houses and attendant blight have followed some loan forfeitures...

...in a Chicago of its own...

...the crowd at Sacramento noticed action to its rear, where I had earlier seen the police assembling barricades...

...Dick Daley used to extol Chicago, from his own perch in Bridgeport, as a city of neighborhoods, and it's true that for generations millions of Chicagoans have lived with the possibility of being both citizens in the land of an urban giant and villagers (South Lawndale has in fact been renamed Little Village...

...The group had amassed to help protest Frank Collin's Nazi rally, scheduled for the park at 2 this afternoon...

...with the area east of Western Avenue, a half-mile from the park, which has become black over the last several years...

...I guess, as I drove away, I could have tried to look upon all that I'd seen with some of that naive faith in mankind I find so attractive in The Human Comedy...

...Through their handling of Marquette Park and of a previous Loop encounter with the Nazis, the Chicago police have established solidly their role this year in handling potential mob violence...

...The bottom line of the Human Comedy...

...Except for the White Power hoodlums posing for photographers along 71st St., and the photographers, the scene was nearly idyllic, hopeful...

...from Western to the park's eastern boundary, California, the site also of Holy Cross Hospital, one of the largest local buildings...

...I remembered the large tenement on California Avenue north of the park, whose front courtyard garden each summer abounds with a carefully tended jungle of greenery from which rises a high-flying Lithuanian flag...

...THE NAZIS AND THE POLICE JOHN DRUSKA A Sunday afternoon at Chicago's Marquette Park Sunday afternoon, July 9, grown men wore playing a 16-inch softball game on one of the diamonds encircled by what everyone calls the lagoon at Chicago's Marquette Park...

...Mostly I'd ~ followed the monotonous schizoid plainsong of this audience divided against itself, complete with regular baroque explosions of petty violence and police, chase scenes...

...Over the park, police helicopters now circled...

...The police manipulating the crowd and spooking or inspiring especially the kids who had never experienced mob actions before, as he had at Grant Park in 1968...

...Along with the cyclists...

...Others rested in lawn chairs or on blankets upon the slight hilis that rise along the northern edge of this eastern section of the park...

...Many Chicagoans never outgrow their neighborhood, in some instances a real plus in the quality of life there...

...the sober-looking men who cruise down the park road on weekday afternoons...

...A minimal speaker system (it looked like a single horn) stood not far from Collin and projected his voice not far into the crowd...

...Next day a newspaper story asserted that a Jewish-sympathizer had escaped local toughs by swimming the lagoon...

...east of the park (where a large painted sign, "Stop the Niggers," used to adorn the side of a brick building), the police had snuck the Nazis around and into the park from west of our location, via the Kedzie Avenue entrance...

...Small groups, then great elongated waves of people, began hustling through the deep grass, leaping the ditch, to reach the spot where the rally would actually occur...