Convention of ’68 pivotal in U.S. history

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By John Willard | Tuesday, August 26, 2008 8:05 PM CDT | () comments

CHICAGO, Aug. 28, 2008--Chicago police charge into a big throng of Hippies and Yippies today as they try to clear Grant Park in Chicago. One demonstrator is felled at left as another lies on the ground at right. Others huddle in the foreground during the confrontation. (AP Wirephoto) Buy this Photo

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Stewart Winstein, a delegate to 1968 Democratic National Convention, reca…
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Forty years ago this week, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago with National Guard trucks rumbling through the streets and police officers guarding hotels.

For the first time in American history, a national political convention was threatened by outside demonstrators.

From Aug. 26 to 29, 1968, Chicago was a war zone. Thousands of protesters battled an equal number of police, Illinois National Guard soldiers and regular Army troops in public parks and streets. Several hundred police officers and civilians were injured, many of them innocent bystanders, reporters and doctors offering medical help. Nearly 600 people were arrested.

The struggle framed the breakdown of both social order and political discourse in the 1960s, historian David Farber writes in his book, “Chicago ’68.”

“Chicago ’68 was seen by almost all who participated in it and by most of those who watched it on TV as more than just another protest marked by violence, intolerance and excess,” he wrote. “Chicago ’68 marked a crisis in the nation’s political and cultural order.”

Forty years later, the 1968 Democratic National Convention stands as a pivotal moment in American history.

“The convention uncovered the polarization of America,” said Lendol Calder, an associate professor of history at Augustana College in Rock Island, who teaches a course on the 1960s. “It put it on television for everybody to see.”

Stewart Winstein, 94, a retired Rock Island lawyer and an Illinois delegate to the convention, and his friend, John Gianulis, 85, who served as Rock Island County Democratic chairman for 47 years, had ringside seats from their hotel on North Michigan Avenue.

“Bloody Chicago,” Gianulis recalled. “I was not afraid, but I was concerned. I had never been to a convention before.”

Winstein said the violence surrounding the convention damaged the Democratic Party.

“It hurt our chances immensely for a win in ’68,” he said.

John Punkiewicz, 57, an outdoor recreation planner and district compliance coordinator for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, unexpectedly found himself caught up in the battle after stopping at Chicago’s Grant Park on a camping trip. “I got my first taste of tear gas,” he said.

Shirley Davis, travel editor of the Quad-City Times, covered the women’s angle of the convention for the Davenport Times-Democrat, a predecessor of the Quad-City Times. She reported that security was so tight that female delegates had to show their credentials to female police officers as they left the restrooms.

The convention came when the Vietnam War was at its peak and the nation was recovering from the assassinations that spring of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, brother of slain president John F. Kennedy.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was the primary cause of the demonstrations. Planners included David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Rennie Davis, head of the Center for Radical Research, Vernon Grizzard, a draft resister, and Tom Hayden, a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society.

Also involved were young people marshaled by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, both leaders of the Youth International Party, or “Yippies.”

The worst violence occurred on the night of Wednesday, Aug. 28, in downtown Chicago as Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic presidential nomination. Dubbed the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” it involved 3,000 demonstrators who fought an equal number of police and Illinois National Guard troops in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the Democratic headquarters. The images of club-wielding police and rock-and-bottle throwing demonstrators shocked the world.

“Quad-Citians seemed glued, well, maybe stuck in front of their television sets Wednesday night, watching the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Their reaction ranged from an unstifled yawn to an uneasy feeling that Chicago may have become an asylum where the inmates have taken over,” wrote Tom Kuncl in a front-page story in the next day’s issue of the Times-Democrat.

That Friday, a large group of young people assembled in Davenport’s VanderVeer Park to stage a silent vigil in protest to what they described as the brutality demonstrated by Chicago police during the convention.

Paul Meincke, a Rock Island native and a veteran reporter with WLS-TV news in Chicago, said Chicago ’68 ended the “boss-run” convention.

“The convention gave birth to a reformation of the political scene, the idea of progressive policies. Different races and interests that had been excluded became part of the process,” said Meincke, who recently produced a piece on the convention for his ABC-affiliated station.

The turmoil that characterized Chicago ’68 likely would have been difficult to avoid, said Porter McNeil a Moline-based political consultant who attended both the 1996 and 2004 Democratic National Conventions.

“History will remember the 1968 Democratic National Convention as one that was unleashed by the raw emotions of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Vietnam War,” he said. “They were all reflected in the intense feeling of this truly historic convention.”

The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.

1968 timeline

Aug. 8: At their party convention in Miami Beach, the Republicans nominate Richard Nixon to be their presidential candidate. The next day, Nixon appoints Spiro Agnew of Maryland as his running mate.

Aug. 20: The Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia with more than 200,000 Warsaw pact troops, beginning a period of enforced and oppressive “normalization.”

Aug. 26: Mayor Richard J. Daley opens the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On that Monday night, demonstrations are widespread but generally peaceful. The next two days, however, bring increasing tension and violence.

Aug. 28: By most accounts, Chicago police take action against crowds of demonstrators without provocation. The police beat some marchers unconscious and send at least 100 to emergency rooms while arresting 175.

Sept. 7: Women’s Liberation groups, joined by members of New York NOW, target the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City.

Oct. 2: Police and military troops in Mexico City react violently to a student-led protest in Tlatelolco Square. Hundreds of the demonstrators are killed or injured.

Oct. 3: George Wallace, who has been running an independent campaign for the presidency, names retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay to be his running mate.

Oct. 11: Apollo 7 is launched from Florida for an 11-day journey that will orbit the Earth 163 times.