 from the Cleveland Current

In late December of 1967, a leftist group of cultural//political radicals known as the Yippies (Youth International Party), presented America with an ominous Christmas gift--the announcement that a Youth Festival would be held at the August, 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. This event was designed to protest the war in Vietnam and present the millions who watched with a new view of where their country was going, It turned out to be nothing short of a televised revolution.

There's a Dutch proverb which states that a man will risk walking through an unknown door only because he has nowhere else left to go. So it may have been with America in the late '60s. The generations that survived the Depression and won World War II had spent most of the previous 20 years savoring one of the great economic expansions in the history of the world. They had also spent a growing amount of time in their living rooms with their children and grandchildren basking in the phosphorescent glow of TV Land, where everyone loved Lucy and father knew best.

But things were gradually changing as the country started to get accustomed to viewing, in place of mere escapist entertainment, riderless horses and race riots and a nightly news that was beginning to bring the war into their living room. Also, an ever-more-troubling youth culture seemed to be gathering momentum in its psychedelic challenge to the sweet status quo. Yet, everything considered, during the holiday season of 1967, it still seemed relatively early in the "American Century" and the world was still at our doorstep. Eight months later, at Chicago, it was already too late-- and there was no place else to go.

In many ways the year 1968 itself was like a door, but a magic one, because once you went through it things were never the same. Here are some of that year's electrifying and tragic events which led up to the Democratic Convention's prime-time bloodbath — perhaps the precise moment when America passed from a nation that looked forward to one whose people would treat it as a memory.

In January, the North Vietnamese launched the TET offensive, a shocking, co-ordinated attack on American troops that stunned the nation, shaking it once and for all out of its complacency as to how smoothly the war was going and planting the first devastating seed of doubt as to America's military invincibility. The next month, fueled by the groundswell of concern over TET and running on a peace platform, Eugene McCarthy finished a strong second to incumbent Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Primary, setting the stage a few weeks later for another, more charismatic anti-war candidate, Bobby Kennedy to challenge LBJ. On the last day of March, Johnson — by this time literally a prisoner inside the White House, unable to go anywhere because of the omnipresence of virulent demonstrators — announced to the nation he would not run for president.

Five days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis and the black sections of many major American cities erupted in flames. At the end of April, students at Columbia took over the dean's office and shut down the university. Two weeks later students in Paris took to the streets shouting "All power to the imagination" and were bludgeoned into submission. Shortly thereafter in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Russians invaded to sadistically quell a democratic revolt that was the first brave wind in the gathering storm that would eventually blow down the walls of the Soviet Union.

In early June pop icon Andy Warhol was shot by a super-radical feminist. The next day Bobby Kennedy was assassinated and the nation watched — in either frozen or wailing grief — as the train carrying his body slowly traversed the countryside of America, now a land with dried blood on its tracks. Everywhere, anti-war confrontations were growing. Priests and clergymen were apprehended and locked up. Even kindly Benjamin Spock — the baby doctor who had instructed a generation of parents to spare the rod — was arrested and sentenced to jail for protesting. Late that July in Cleveland, Carl Stokes — the first African-American mayor of a major American city — who had successfully kept order after the King assassination by walking the streets of the black sections of town, now discovered he was helpless in stopping the ghettos from going up in flames. It just couldn't be done.

In the twinkling of an eye, a sense of fear, frustration and powerlessness had begun to commingle on the American landscape with the passions of rebellion. The stage was set for Chicago.

During the Democratic Convention this week, there should be plenty of analyses and video clips of those surreal late August days and nights of electric hatred 40 years ago when, as Tom Wicker wrote, "through the wonders of television...all America was radicalized." And how one interpreted that week's hellish events — either as a collective dive into the vortex of social malfunction or as just one more awkward, stumbling half-step forward in the long painful march toward human freedom — depended solely on your point of view. But, in reality, the most critical perspective that smoldering week came through the lens of the ubiquitous TV cameras.

With millions and millions of young and old Americans sitting side-by-side in their easy chairs prepared to watch Hubert Humphrey nominated for president, what they saw instead was essentially the systematic brutalization of about 12,000 mostly youthful, white, middle-class demonstrators by approximately 30,000 Chicago police, army troops, National Guardsmen and federal agents. Middle America was somewhat used to seeing blacks treated this way, but — well —that was different, wasn't it? And they were getting somewhat accustomed to this kind of nonsense in Berkeley or Columbia, but not in Chicago. Evidently some very nice people's sons and daughters were beyond their command.

Police/student confrontations, tear-gassed skirmishes and sporadic beatings had been going on for several days before Wednesday night of the convention, the night when Humphrey was nominated. It was also the night of the Massacre on Michigan Avenue, the night when America — live, up close and personally intermixed with Ivory soap commercials — appeared to be coming apart at the seams.

Grant Park, where the demonstrators gathered late that afternoon, was a few hundred yards from Michigan Avenue and the Conrad Hilton Hotel, which housed many of the convention delegations. A dozen or so hours earlier around 5000 young people stood in front of the 25-story Hilton's looming facade in the middle of the night and exhorted those anti-war supporters in the bedrooms above to blink their lights. With the National Guard rifle-stationed in the streets and poised in barbed-wire fendered jeeps, hundreds of lights flicked off and on — as if the silent audience from above was candle-calling the battered performers back for an encore in what became, Wednesday night, a nationally-televised horror show.

The crowd of about 8,000 demonstrators mobilized to leave Grant Park around seven that evening and march the four miles down Michigan to the convention at the Chicago Amphitheatre as the police watched through the Plexiglass face shields they had clamped down from their helmets. Nearing the Hilton, sporting armbands and clasping wetted handkerchiefs for their certain-to-be-tear-gassed mouths and rubbing Vaseline on their faces as an antidote to Mace and mixing pacifist hymns with mystic chants while exhorting everyone on the sidewalk to join them, the marchers were suddenly surrounded by a line of police on three sides, compressed and trapped right beneath the windows of the huge hotel and — live via the networks' cameras —smack dab into the living rooms of America.

What was seen for the next 15 minutes had the impact of a thousand Rodney King tapes on the American psyche, not only because it was live and the victims were primarily middle/upper class whites, but because at that moment we were all, every glad, sad, sorry and still somewhat innocent one of us, forced to choose — as if an invisible gun were pointed at our heads — which side we were on.

What follows is a collaged description of the Massacre on Michigan Avenue taken from Norman Mailer's brilliant account, “The Siege of Chicago.”

"The police, exploding out of their restraints like the bursting of a boil, attacked — with tear gas, Mace and clubs — like a chain saw cutting through wood or a scythe through grass....lines of 20 and 30 policemen striking out in an arc, pounding and gassing and clubbing and beating — with the absolute ferocity of a tropical storm — the screaming rivulets of running children, youth and middle-aged men and women...the swarming cops, maddened by the uncoiling of their own storm and surrounded by the smell of vomit, swatted — like elemental forces of nature — at the crumpled figures on the slippery-with-blood street...it was as if some great power had ordered 'do not let them march another ten blocks and be dispersed onto a quiet street, no, let it happen before the whole land; let them see with their own eyes what it will cost to continue to mock and defy us; there are millions more behind us who will beat and crush and imprison and poison and gas and obliterate and kill before relinquishing any power.'"

Much later on, a task force would determine that what happened on Michigan Avenue was a "police riot." Eighty percent of Americans supported the actions of the police. Inside the convention a speaker referred to the "Gestapo tactics" employed in Chicago. Eighty percent of Americans supported the tactics ordered by Mayor Richard Daley. That fall, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black power fists on the podium of the Mexico City Olympics and were stripped of their medals. Eighty percent of Americans supported their banishment. On college campuses student activities grew more restless and authorities more vengeful. Eighty percent of the country supported the authorities.

These numbers really didn't matter, however, since they would shift and swirl over the years. What mattered was that the "culture wars,'' which have dominated the social landscape for the past four decades, instantly took form as the individual members of those millions of families who watched in their living rooms that night woke up the next morning and started on their separate ways —some committed to an impossible future, the rest longing for an irretrievable past.

But all, having passed through the magic door of Chicago/1968, now looked back to the America on the other side and saw — with either bitter disillusionment or nostalgic yearning — a country that seemed like a fairy tale land.

_______



About author Larry Durstin, Cleveland Current editor, has covered politics and sports in Cleveland for the past 15 years. A Lakewood resident, Durstin was co-founder and executive editor of the Cleveland Tab, and associate editor of the Cleveland Free Times. Winner of 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first-places in different writing categories, he has written for a number of area publications. Durstin is also the author of "Still Looking: a Novel Concerning Single Men."