Chicago: Blood and Disaster
Rosenberg, Bernard
IN CHICAGO, Allen Ginsberg declared that the 35th National Democratic Conven tion was a mass hallucination. Maybe he is right, and the whole thing never happened. His account should be...
...A more sanguine commentator would emphasize the plus factors...
...I am afraid not, but you must make allowances for my bitterness...
...The youth who a few days before would have turned a deaf ear, listened respectfully to Tom Hayden's plea in Grant Park for an abandonment of nonviolence...
...Those in khaki were noticeably more impassive than Chicago's finest in the face of jeers they both had to endure...
...They were ultimately allowed to carry him away...
...Porkie's fate subsequent to arrest is unknown...
...One observer remarked that when Norman strode among the young it was as if Jesus Christ had materialized in the Vatican...
...Abuse them and they get angry...
...By that decision Kennedy guaranteed that Humphrey would be the nominee...
...The appalling circumstances that surrounded a garrison convention immeasurably weakened a none too attractive candidate...
...One could write a book, a black book, consisting solely of such questions...
...Pop politics probably did lasting damage to delicate eardrums, and yet it was the least serious of several grave hazards from which no one was exempt...
...To forestall the calamity which in fact he invited, Daley put his cops on 12-hour shifts, airlifted 6000 U.S...
...Well, sure...
...Challenges did not go entirely unheeded, and more planning might have yielded slightly better results...
...For what we who were on the spot saw, smelled, and felt for nearly five wretched days was authentic Theater of Cruelty, a superproduc tion compared to which Marat/Sale is kids' stuff...
...Apologists for the cops, the guardsmen and the troops persisted in the refrain-after-Eichmann: "They were just doing their jobs...
...The second is easy to affirm...
...As it turned out, the surviving Kennedy did not allow Unruh, Daley, and his brothers' old team to draft him...
...How to sort out the multitude of impressions...
...Humphrey supporters claimed against all reason that their aspirant was forced to take a position that in fact he characteristically championed with masterly ferocity...
...He thereby set forces in motion which, if we are able to survive the next Administration, may do much to reconstruct his party and help save an affluent nation whose petty bourgeoisie has gone more than half mad...
...And those circumstances were avoidable...
...Offer 'em one thing and give 'em the opposite: his mentor in the White House who never had a more obsequious servant cannot have failed to teach him that much...
...How to tell the ocean from the waves so soon after they have swept over your con sciousness...
...Those closest to McCarthy constantly find fault with him, but they are not looking for an angel to lead their "government-in-exile...
...And it will cost their oppressors a lot, perhaps more than the democratic process can bear...
...Friend on the street, or on the beat, watch out—or we will all be caught in the same fearful net...
...Worse is worse, damn it...
...With more than one ballot, against all odds, the party might even have been able to beat the machine that asphyxiated it as surely as Mace did the same job on the kids downtown...
...Shooting is reserved for blacks who got their share of it in Chicago after Martin Luther King's assassination, and steered pretty clear of the current scene...
...Are we going to see more of the barbed wire, submachine guns, tear gas canisters, bayonet-tipped rifles, and chemical sprays directed at unarmed youth in burnooses, Indian blankets, and beads, at doctors in their "whites," at snoopy journalists, and solid citizens who happen to be in the way...
...But who knows...
...Maybe he is right, and the whole thing never happened...
...Said Cronkite, in a riposte for which I am practically willing to forgive mass culture all its sins, "Mayor Daley, you've been reading my mail...
...Permanent abolition of the unit rule should facilitate further beneficial change...
...Chicago, after all, is the hog butcher to the world...
...Who, especially if he happens to be a diehard McCarthyite like myself, with gas still affecting his respiratory system because he ventured too close to the action...
...McCarthy simply stepped into the breach when a whole flock of doves, beginning with Robert Kennedy, would not or could not do so...
...King raised two question: Can America be saved...
...Now who played into the Dellingers' hands if not Mayor Richard J. Daley...
...I would not bet on it...
...I think we got a foretaste of something worse...
...Crash helmets and the lock step are in evidence as a certain amount of youthful insurgency moves dialectically toward the militarization of its own cadres...
...I confess that the events are too much for me...
...Shortly before his death, the Rev...
...Their preferred candidate looked singularly bad in the big states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania...
...It was mostly the work of a "liberal Democratic mayor" who typically sided one day with the doves in supporting Ted Kennedy and, a day later, with the hawks in supporting Humphrey...
...And victory for the Dellingers would hardly be less horrendous than victory for their opponents...
...The Negro caucus or ganized by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and John Conyers was effective enough to produce 337 Negro delegates, out of 5611, thus approximately doubling the black 2 per cent the Republicans could claim in Miami Beach...
...As a result, escalation toward guerrilla warfare in a country sufficiently torn by racial, regional, and generational conflict has been notably advanced...
...A detached realpolilik judgment at this moment would seem to be that, although gains were made and more are in the offing, they are outweighed by losses...
...Dump the Hump," protesters chanted on Monday and Tuesday...
...Was it to protect the candidate from his own staff that a dawn raid had to be made on McCarthy headquarters...
...Until that last straw, a superficial way out of the impasse seemed possible: McCarthy would withhold his endorsement, seek a meeting like the one Taft had with Eisenhower in '52, and attempt to wring a peace commitment out of Humphrey...
...Accelerated procedural reform ought to keep some Democrats from straying too far afield, while disembarrassing the party of those like Governor Maddox, the fried chicken vendor who was so recently embraced by Vice-President Humphrey...
...Lacking that equipment, quite a few delegates and alternates left the hall early and never returned...
...But there you have it...
...But Wednesday, when he had it clinched, their slogan became, "Humpty Dumpty is heading for a great fall...
...Should deep green and ubiquitous khaki become the national colors...
...Jack Mabley, a Chicago American columnist with no love for yippies, hippies, or flippies, but indignant at the sight of their unnecessarily bruised bodies, also reported— to take one example—that a Detroit newsman, overcome by gas, lay unconscious on Clark Street, that the police supplied neither a wagon nor any other assistance, and finally that white-clad physicians were unable to get their own ambulance past police lines...
...Babbling, shouting, milling, and churning were omnipresent...
...If their way prevails, they will get little-league Hitlers, Ronnie Reagans and Dick Daleys, and then the real thing—first and last...
...To some extent, the Tet offensive made him, and the rape of Czechoslovakia unmade him...
...I believe we got a taste of unbridled police power...
...Police brutality in Grant Park, in Lincoln Park, and in the Amphitheater transformed a large number of peaceful kids who had never heard of Maoist, Guevarist, Leninist, or Trotskyist ideology, into militant proponents of revolutionary violence...
...It was clear for some weeks that their man could not be nominated, and he was resigned to it...
...They were...
...Was the derangement merely episodic or has it settled into a chronic condition...
...And so on...
...The Republicans and the Democrats have accommodated us...
...They want Hitler first and the millenium next...
...Less than 24 hours after the Convention ended, Humphrey asserted that he would not be inflexibly bound by the planks in his platform...
...Leaving Chicago, many of us felt unsure about the first...
...as if journalists, ambulance drivers, and physicians who were blocked from, and slugged for, doing their jobs had no right to do them...
...Behind them stood the equally truculent and immensely more powerful figure of LBJ who put his chosen successor in a strait-jacket from which Harry Houdini could not have escaped...
...AND WHAT OF THE GADFLY, anathema to all party regulars, quirky, prickly, perverse, dogged, and unflappable, successful when he fails, down and out when he succeeds: "I got 42 per cent of the vote in New Hampshire, and they said I won...
...Next time there will doubtless be more progress along these lines...
...The police are only human...
...S S O WHERE ARE WE...
...A little public posing and a little surreptitious maneuvering would have provided a plank to which the disaffected could have rallied, whether rightly or wrongly...
...Right now, Hanoi and Moscow determine the shape of American politics almost as much as Washington and Chicago...
...His supporters are worried...
...Not by nature irreconcilable politicians, McCarthy and his forces, once defeated, need not have been humiliated, throttled, drowned out, and sequestered...
...The stand he took on gun control and his reaction to the Czech tragedy were indefensible...
...Intelligent amendments sponsored by Clark Kerr and Walter Reuther of the National Committee for a Political Settlement in Vietnam, tied to no specific group of partisans, were sympathetically received at several state caucuses by those already converted to the cause...
...Is that why a billy club broke in two when it cracked a young aide's skull...
...Those of his staffers who contend that the movement matters more than the man, and that it can outlast him, are certainly right...
...If the pre-Convention glow nevertheless was followed by an afterglow that shows no sign of dimming, neither one is to be mistaken for a halo...
...As the polls and the primaries made clear, housewives and suburbanites and other large segments of the electorate also got involved...
...after the last, they called Prague Chicago West...
...Can't cops, whether or not they are organized in unions that deserve to be renamed Police men's Malevolent Associations, learn a nursery rhyme that begins, "Sticks and stones may break my bones...
...But aren't the rest, even the worst of us, human too...
...barn...
...How to dispel the specter of Fortress America which Dick Daley's megalomania has conjured up for us...
...Didn't the bosses want a winner...
...His account should be interesting...
...No image, however cockeyed, surreal, and extravagant is inappropriate.— or equal—to the occasion...
...Was the Battle of `Soul Mich" and Balbo (after Mussolini's intrepid airman) a passing abberation...
...The Kennedy boomlet must have caused President Johnson to tremble...
...for if pragmatism had prevailed, we would not now have to consider voting for a bubbly hawk, a pink-faced evangelist, the conventional orgman from hicksville...
...Better to lose the election than take McCar thy, a loner and a cool exponent of the new politics...
...But Johnson dictated the hard-line majority report...
...I got 58 per cent of the vote in Wisconsin, and they said I lost...
...Recently, he explained this expensive and elaborate operation on the basis that Presidential candidates had to be protected from assassins...
...Furthermore, if the meetings were interminable and intemperate they also focused now and then on controversial issues about which rational discourse could sometimes be heard above the general uproar...
...Gene McCarthy captured the idealism not just of the educated youth and academic intellectuals who were at the forefront of his movement...
...Something else should deeply concern lovers of freedom and democracy...
...Thanatos is more at home in the Republican party...
...Was it just chance that provoked the only tumultuous applause for Presidential candidate Humphrey when, in his acceptance speech, he pledged eternal opposition to crime...
...boom...
...troops to O'Hare Airport (of whom 100 Negro GI's from Fort Hood declined to join the others and were suitably punished), mobilized over 18,000 Illinois National Guardsmen, and welcomed approximately 2000 FBI and secret service men...
...A local drama critic likened the proceedings to a concert reading, in Finnish, of Shaw's Back to Methuselah...
...The Democratic party, although, far from restructured, did move to democratize itself...
...Of course they did...
...No more than his momentary "success" is his apparently impending debacle cause for jubilation...
...Not that this would necessarily have been worth much, but it is now less likely to take place at all...
...That voteless Washington, D.C., put a Negro in nomination for the Presidency deserves applause...
...They must be credited with a certain romanticism (except in their selection of Edmund Sixtus Muskie...
...And since when, his aides demanded, do platforms mean anything...
...Chicago presented a panorama of a likely alternative to McCarthy...
...one touch of generosity or of adroitness and finesse rather than the dominant primitivism and, for what it was worth, the Democrats would have had a reasonably united party...
...With the Kennedy threat, they executed a smart about-face, delivering the 400 votes required to put Hubert over...
...The week before, Humphrey, out scrabbling for votes, variously maintained that his personal views did not appreciably differ from those of Dean Rusk, Robert Kennedy or the pestiferous Senators McCarthy and McGovern...
...An honest man will do...
...The phantasmagoria unfolded as planned by a trio of impresarios: Daley, Bailey, and Albert...
...It would take an inspired Artaud to do them justice...
...Fascism, including the Red variety, is precisely that condition in which agents of repression have a job to do that transcends everyone else's...
...and Norman Mailer will have much to say...
...Those who stayed, exposed themselves to a noise level many decibels above that of any discoteque going full blast...
...Lazy and passive," McCarthy for almost nine months was the most active politician in America...
...Convinced that "worse is better," confrontationists seem to want to be beaten...
...The unfathomable police hostility to medics administering first aid can be abundantly documented...
...Whether the principle performance took place inside or outside the Interna tional Amphitheater, that stockyard converted into a stockade, is debatable...
...If the South had not rescued Humphrey, as it did Nixon, a hermetically closed convention would have cracked open...
...You needed a portable TV set to orient yourself on the floor...
...Beholden to Johnson and to Daley, the Democratic standard-bearer is compromised up to his neck, round which an incubus has been added to the albatross already strangling him...
...The pots were affected by the polls (and as Muskie's presence on the ticket indicates, by the Poles as well...
...Nor would I take his tarnished word for it...
...Porkie,' our candidate has been arrested...
...Playful, all that, even if it does enrage the dunderhead behind a shield...
...A front-page story told Chicagoans to anticipate that Communist agitators were going to poison the water supply, dynamite natural-gas lines, strew boulevards with nails, and stage stall-ins of old jalopies on expressways...
...IN CHICAGO, Allen Ginsberg declared that the 35th National Democratic Conven tion was a mass hallucination...
...Our objective was to elect a pig President of the United States...
...The fix was on, and only another, more desirable fix could have prevented it...
...Should America be saved...
...Did his bully boys think Dan Rather and Mike Wallace of CBS or Hugh Hefner, the Playboy king strolling in his own neighborhood, were assassins...
...Which is why Ted Kennedy was the savior they would only too gladly have accepted...
...More power to Humphrey if this "decent and warm-hearted man," who long ago personified American liberalism, can squirm out of his predicament...
...He was being charitable...
...But this was before the last outrage perpetrated at McCarthy headquarters by Daley's storm troopers—during which the Senator's 21-yearold niece asked on what grounds she and her friends were being clobbered, only to be told, "Coffee grounds," followed by pow...
...Its advent coincided with a Southern rebellion: nine racist delegations, piqued by their little frustrations before the Credentials Committee, were preparing to desert Humphrey...
...Hope for "a breath of fresh air"—the McCarthy slogan transformed into a reality when his followers literally sprayed the Conrad Hilton with a sweet smelling substance to counteract the pungent odor of vomit mixed with tear gas and stink bombs—that hope went down the drain when a majority of delegates rejected the peace plank...
...Jean Gen et's more so...
...But, either way now, a pig will occupy The White House...
...The party kept its word on Mississippi, incursions were made in Alabama despite "Bull" Connor, and to have had Julian Bond's Georgia loyalists seated was altogether heartening...
...Some before the convention, while he publicized what was in store for his city...
...A hippie leader, after news of the nomination reached him, announced exultantly, "We have won the Battle of Chicago...
...The provocateurs were there, no doubt about it...
...But Teddy who, for all they knew or cared, might be more radical than the quietly subversive Senator from Minnesota, was their boy...
...After the first round of police brutality, graveyard humorists called Chicago Prague East...
...I hope they keep saying this— and act on it...
...Daley, oleaginously justifying the mayhem he had let loose, asked Walter Cronkite on network TV, "How would you like to be called a pig and a fourletter word...
...The Bourbons' grip on states like North Carolina and Texas will be loosened...
...T T HE DANGEROUS GAME of confrontationism as a prelude to violent insurrection as played by Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger, and their cohorts, worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams because officialdom cooperated so fully with it...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
