The Chicago DNC everyone wants to forget

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 street and chaos on the convention floor.

That year, Americans, and especially Democrats, were up in arms over the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier that year, and the party entered the convention divided between pro- and anti-war candidates (Hubert Humphry and Eugene McCarthy, respectively). And unlike a contemporary major-party convention, 1968 wasn’t a coronation of one candidate: It would come down to how the delegates voted.

This year, protesters are out in force to raise their voices against the US involvement in the war in Gaza. Two young activists we spoke with even mirrored language from 1968, saying, “The whole world is watching.” Thousands are marching across downtown Chicago today. With that in mind, Today, Explained reached out to historian, journalist, and Chicago resident Rick Perlstein to ask whether 2024 risks a repeat of the disaster of 1968.

Listen to the full conversation and follow Today, Explained on 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 backdrop to the convention in August of that year?

Rick Perlstein

The Democratic Party was divided down the middle on the issue of the Vietnam War.

[The party’s infighting was] escalated by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who believed [that by supporting the war] he was continuing the wishes of the martyred president, John F. Kennedy. A lot of Democrats saw [the war] as part of this great anti-communist crusade, and a lot of people saw it as imperialism — that we were interfering in another country’s civil war. The idea that we had to get out was very prevalent on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Johnson decided he wasn’t going to run for president. So by the time delegates arrived at the convention, Johnson’s loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was the nominee apparent. He had been coerced into loyally supporting the war, even though he had grave reservations about it. The question of whether he would be nominated or Eugene McCarthy [a Minnesota senator who was vocally anti-war] would be nominated was live in the air. It looked like Humphrey had it wired, but [the struggle between the two men] was kind of a proxy fight.

At the same time, protesters from all over the country flooded in. There’s a separate Chicago context. Several months earlier that spring, there had been terrible riots [on the city’s south and west sides] after the assassination of Martin Luther King. There had been an anti-war rally a couple of weeks later, and there were terrible beatings [by police]. So there was dread and anticipation: What would happen when the city hosted thousands of protesters who were much more radical than the kind of protesters we see now? And everyone arrives in this city, which is run by this almost oligarchic mayor, Richard J. Daley, who intended no disorder in his city that he was putting on display for the entire world.

Noel King

Disorder came anyway. Tell me two things: What did Daley do to try to prevent disorder, and how did it go so very wrong?

Rick Perlstein

One of the things he did to try to prevent disorder was to string along these two groups of protesters who wanted to come to the city by not granting them official permission to sleep in Lincoln Park. And that was the intention of the group who identified themselves as “hippies.” Their 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 conventionally political. A lot of them were radical revolutionaries and the kind of people who would hoist flags of the enemy in Vietnam, the Viet Cong.

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 and made them even more determined. The protesters essentially said: “We’ll sleep in the park even if you don’t want us to. We’ll march to the convention hall even if you don’t want us to. We’ll put our bodies on the line, in both cases.”

Noel King

When did the violence begin?

Rick Perlstein

Immediately. The first night of the convention, the police came to this park, Lincoln Park, on the lakefront and started rousting the people who were trying to sleep there. An impromptu confrontation [with] the police happened. That was when a young person started chanting, “The whole world is watching” as the cops started beating up hippies. A fellow named Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of the revolutionary contingent, was arrested. His comrades tried to march to the police station in solidarity with him. The guy who was running the countercultural part of it, Abbie Hoffman, joined the march. He wrote on his forehead a four-letter word starting with F, so he could subvert the images on TV, a media guerrilla warrior.

Later, the protesters wanted to walk the several miles [from Lincoln Park] to the convention hall and the city didn’t want them to do it. So there was this mounting tension.

The last day of the convention was Thursday, and that’s when they said, we’re going to walk to the convention come hell or high water. Mayor Daley says, no way. Meanwhile, his police, who have been seething since April, were feeling an itchy trigger finger. There was all kinds of fearful rhetoric on both sides.

Abbie Hoffman had promised that he was going to dump LSD into the Chicago water supply, which was a joke — it turns out there was not enough LSD on earth to affect the water supply — but the upright burghers of Chicago are terrified. And Tom Hayden would say things like, “If blood is going to flow, it should flow all over the city.” By which he meant if there are attacks on protesters, we should go in all the neighborhoods. But that was interpreted as an intent to attack innocent people all over the city.

You 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, including the arrest of Dan Rather, the CBS news correspondent, and all sorts of shoving and pushing and questions of what kind of credentials people would need, people getting beaten up for bringing protest signs inside the hall. So you had kind of these miniature civil wars breaking out inside among the actual credentialed delegates and outside among protesters and police.

Noel King

What exactly was going on inside the convention and how rowdy did it actually get?

Rick Perlstein

The most dramatic thing that happened inside the convention hall is that that Thursday night, when students were denied the right to march to the convention hall, they sat down right in front of [The Hilton Chicago] and police just started wading into the crowd and bashing people on the head. Word got into the convention hall that that was what was happening. They were doing the final vote for who would get nominated as president. There was a third candidate — George McGovern, who later won the nomination in 1972 — he was nominated by a liberal senator from Connecticut, Abraham Ribicoff. And Ribicoff said if George McGovern was the president of the United States, “We would not have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” And when he said that, Mayor Daley shouted something you could not hear. Later, lip readers famously said that he had said Senator Ribicoff was “a no-good Jew bastard.”

Noel King

What else was going on outside the convention center?

Rick Perlstein

The marchers massed several miles down from the convention hall. The police are standing in the street in their way. The protesters try to walk around the policemen, and the policemen chase them back across the street. Next, the students did a sit-in strike, 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. Police wagons lined up and they would grab young people by the scruff of their necks and throw them into police wagons. When there were enough for them to be full, they would throw a tear gas canister inside, and then smack the door closed.

This was all 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 in the right and the protesters were in the wrong. That was the very backlash against the forces of civil rights and anti-war activism and cultural shifts that Richard Nixon was running for president on, 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 op-eds, “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?

Rick Perlstein

Until I started getting these calls from folks like you, it never occurred to me to understand the 2024 convention in my city, Chicago, by going back to what I studied and wrote [about] 1968. To me, everything from how presidents get chosen now compared to then; 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 then; how Chicago works, are just so different.

One of the things that made 1968 so shocking and galvanizing was 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. Part of what the protesters were trying to do was influence how the convention would come out. Maybe there was a glimmer of possibility that that might have happened before the Democratic Party lined up behind Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

History is a process, it’s not parallels. We can’t have 1968 again because we already had 1968. 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.