Chicago is hosting the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this year. It’s the first time the city has hosted a major party convention since 1968, when the DNC descended into riots in the streets and chaos on the convention floor.
That year, Americans, and Democrats in particular, were up in arms about US involvement in the Vietnam War. Democratic presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier that year, and the party entered the convention divided between pro-war and anti-war candidates (Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, respectively). And unlike contemporary major-party conventions, 1968 was not the coronation of a candidate: it would come down to how the delegates voted.
This year, protesters have come out in force to raise their voices against US involvement in the Gaza war. The two young activists we spoke to even mirrored language from 1968, “the whole world is watching.” Thousands of people are marching through downtown Chicago today. With this in mind, Today, explained We reached out to historian, journalist and Chicago resident Rick Perlstein to find out if there is a risk of a repeat of the 1968 disaster in 2024.
Listen to the entire conversation and follow Today, explained Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora or wherever you find podcasts.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Noel King
Let’s go back to the summer of ’68. What was the context of the conference in August of that year?
Rick Pearlstein
The Democratic Party was split down the middle on the issue of the Vietnam War.
[The party’s infighting was] A Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who believed, was boosted by [that by supporting the war] He continued to wish martyred President John F. Kennedy. Many Democrats have seen it [the war] As part of this great anti-communist crusade, and many people saw it as imperialism—that we were intervening in another country’s civil war. On the left wing of the Democratic Party, the idea that we had to get out was very prevalent.
Johnson decided not to run for president. So by the time the delegates arrived at the convention, Johnson’s loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was the nominee. He was forced to loyally support the war, even though he had serious reservations about it. The question is whether he or Eugene McCarthy will get the nomination [a Minnesota senator who was vocally anti-war] The nominations were live in the air. It looked like Humphrey was wired, but [the struggle between the two men] There was a proxy war.
At the same time, protesters flooded in from across the country. Chicago has a different context. A few months earlier that spring, there had been a terrible riot [on the city’s south and west sides] After the assassination of Martin Luther King. A few weeks later there was an anti-war rally and there were terrible beatings [by police]. So there were fears and expectations: what would happen when the city hosted thousands of protesters, who were far more radical than the kind of protesters we see now? And everyone has arrived in this city, which has this almost oligarchic mayor, Richard J. Run by Daly, who didn’t want to cause any chaos in his city that he was displaying for the whole world.
Noel King
Chaos ensued anyway. Tell me two things: What did Daley do to prevent the disorder and how did it go so wrong?
Rick Pearlstein
One of the things he did to prevent chaos was two groups of protesters who wanted to come to town without official permission to sleep in Lincoln Park. And that was the purpose of the group who called themselves “hippies”. They thought they represented this new youth identity that was going to completely overthrow revolutionary and bourgeois complacency.
And another group wanted to parade in the convention hall, and they were much more conventionally political. Many of them were radical revolutionaries and the kind of people who would raise the flag of the enemy in Vietnam, the Viet Cong.
Daley put his foot down and said these long haired thugs wouldn’t get the time of day in our town, which only added to the tension and made them even more determined. The protesters basically said: “We will sleep in the park even if you don’t want to. We will march towards the convention hall even if you don’t want to. In both cases we will put our bodies on the line.”
Noel King
When did the violence begin?
Rick Pearlstein
Immediately. On the first night of the convention, the police came to this park, Lincoln Park, on the lakefront, and started beating people who were trying to sleep there. An immediate collision [with] The police happened. At that point a young man started chanting, “The whole world is watching” as the police began beating the hippies. A colleague named Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of the revolutionary party, was arrested. His colleagues tried to march to the police station in solidarity with him. The man who was running the countercultural part of it, Abby Hoffman, joined the march. He wrote a four-letter word beginning with F on his forehead so he could distort images on TV, a media guerilla warrior.
Later the protesters wanted to walk several miles [from Lincoln Park] The convention hall and the city didn’t want them to do it. So this mount was pulled.
The last day of the conference was Thursday, and that’s when they said, we’re going to conference come hell or high water. Mayor Daley said there is no way. Meanwhile, his cops, who have been wound up since April, were feeling an itchy trigger finger. Both sides had all kinds of horrible words.
Abby Hoffman promised she was going to dump LSD into the Chicago water supply, which was a joke — it turns out there wasn’t enough LSD to affect the water supply in the world — but Chicago’s righteous burgers were horrified. And Tom Hayden would say something like, “If blood is going to flow, it should flow all over town.” By which he meant that if the protestors were attacked, we would have to go to all the neighborhoods. But it was interpreted as an attack on innocent people across the city.
By the last day of the convention you had such a sense of dread, even as debates over the platform led to actual violence inside the convention hall, including the arrest of CBS news correspondent Dan Rather and all kinds of shoving and shoving and questions about what credentials people would need. People are being beaten up for bringing protest signs inside the hall. So you have these kinds of mini-civil wars breaking out between protesters and the police, in and out of actual credentialed representatives.
Noel King
What exactly was going on inside the convention and how exciting was it really?
Rick Pearlstein
The most dramatic incident inside the convention hall was that on Thursday night, when the students were denied the right to march towards the convention hall, they sat right in front. [The Hilton Chicago] And the police just started going into the crowd and hitting people over the head. That’s what’s happening if the word convention. They were casting their final vote on who would be nominated for the post of President. There was a third candidate — George McGovern, who later won the nomination in 1972 — nominated by a liberal senator from Connecticut, Abraham Ribicoff. And Ribicoff said that if George McGovern were president of the United States, “we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” And when he said that, Mayor Daley yelled something you couldn’t hear. Later, lip readers famously said that he said Senator Rybikoff was “a good Jewish bastard”.
Noel King
What else was going on outside the convention center?
Rick Pearlstein
Marchers gathered a few miles down the road from the convention hall. The police are standing in their way. The protesters tried to walk around the policemen, and the policemen chased them across the street. Afterwards, students staged a sit-in strike, blocking the street in front of TV cameras, and hundreds of white-helmeted Chicago police began systematically taking their nightsticks and beating these seated protesters. Police wagons are lined up and they will grab the youth by the neck and throw them into the police wagon. When they had enough to fill, they would throw a tear gas canister inside and then close the door.
All this was on TV. It was on all three channels. And this was the terrible response. Most of the country believed that the Chicago police were right and the protesters were wrong. It was the strength of civil rights and antiwar activism and the very reaction against cultural change that Richard Nixon ran for president as the Republican candidate.
Noel King
We decided to do this episode about the ’68 convention months ago, even before this year’s convention seemed exciting, because we kept reading in the op-eds, “The DNC is in Chicago. 2024 is like 1968.” How true do you believe that to be? And what causes people to make that comparison?
Rick Pearlstein
Until I started getting these calls from people like you, I didn’t think to go back to what I had studied and written and understand the 2024 convention in my hometown of Chicago. [about] 1968. To me, everything from how presidents are elected now compared to then; How street protests work now compared to then; How politicians respond to protests; How the entire law enforcement and security apparatus works compared to then; How Chicago works, is just so different.
One of the things that made 1968 so poignant and galvanizing was that you could go to a convention and not know whether the presidential candidate would be Hubert Humphrey or Eugene McCarthy. Part of what the protesters were trying to do was influence how the convention would turn out. Perhaps there were glimpses of such a possibility before the Democratic Party lined up behind Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
History is a process, it is not parallel. We can’t have 1968 again because we already had 1968. Many things that happened in 1968 are unthinkable in 2024. This is not to say that interesting and even melodramatic and perhaps even violent things will not happen in 2024, but that they will happen because of 2024. These will not happen because of 1968.
