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| Nothing set the Chicago Police off more than the sight of Viet Cong flags like these flown from the General Logan equestrian statue in Grant Park. Their charge to clear the hill was an iconic moment of Convention week. |
Note: This
is the seventh installment in my series of memory posts about the Democratic
Convention in Chicago in 1968 and my small role in the streets action
surrounding it. In today’s episode I
attend LBJ’s Birthday Party at the Coliseum, witness the Battle around General
Logan’s Horse, and am plied with Malort by old radicals.
I woke up sore as hell on Tuesday morning in
the Church basement. Even when you are 19, days of fitful sleep on a cold, hard
floor will get to you. Not that anyone slept a lot.
Coffee by the gallon in big white enamel pots boiling on the
stove was the order of the day. Sugar was in short supply. So was milk that
wasn’t powdered. Kids who had never had a cuppa joe black hung on to heavy mugs
with both hands.
The big event of the day was LBJ’s Birthday Party. This was an Abbie Hoffman extravaganza to be held that afternoon at the old Chicago Coliseum. Big name musicians
and speakers were advertised. And since the event was held in a rented and paid
for hall, even the most jaded of us expected that it would come off.
The kids scattered either to head for the Coliseum or Lincoln
Park. After cleanup, I headed out, too. I jumped on the EL at the Diversey Station right
across the street from the Church. The trains were still running despite the wildcat CTA strike. I had no sense then
that I was scabbing on the strike by hopping on board.
By the time I got to the Coliseum on Wabash south of the Loop and
only a block west and a couple south of Police
Headquarters at 11th and State, it was already pretty full.
The castle-like stone exterior of the Coliseum had been the
facade of the infamous Libby Prison in
Virginia where thousands of Northern prisoners of war perished in
harsh conditions. After the Civil War,
the victorious Yankees had
dismantled it stone by stone and re-assembled it after the Chicago Fire on burnt out ground south of the Loop. Inside the
walls promoters built a sports arena, which also doubled, ironically enough as
a convention hall. Democrats had assembled there in 1896 to hear William Jennings Bryan declaim his
famous Cross of Gold speech.
But by this time the Coliseum was pretty rundown and only a
couple of years away from demolition. It was still used for occasional
wrestling matches and as a rock concert venue and rented out on the cheap to
outfits who could not afford better digs for their events. Which, of course,
fit the Yippies to a tee.
In Hoffman’s view it also had the advantage of putting a large
crowd closer to the Convention site at the International
Amphitheater at 43rd and Halstead than
any permitted demonstration was able to get. That is except for a bunch of old
time pacifists led by the Quakers who
did get a permit and staged the only picketing near the Convention Hall all
week with nearly 1000 participants on that very day. Neither the Yippies nor
the media paid the slightest attention to those pacifists and their
demonstration has vanished from memory.
I had last been in the building in April of ’67 where it was the
site of a rally following one of the biggest of Chicago’s anti-war marches. I had
seen Dr. King that day giving one of
his early anti-war speeches.
The place was pretty much as I remembered it. Except because it
was a cloudy day the sun shining through holes in the roof did not dapple the
crowd.
My main memory of the program was Country Joe McDonald and the Fish Cheer:
For it’s one, two,
three
What are we fighting
for?
Don’t ask me I don’t
give a Damn!
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7, open
up the pearly gates
Well there ain’t no
time to wonder why
Yippie!
we’re all gonna die.
Phil Ochs was there, of course, and the literati from the night before—Ginsberg, Genet, Burroughs, and Southern. How they were going to
justify their press credentials after this was anyone’s guess. Hoffman, and Dave Dellinger and Rennie Davis of the Mobe provided
the oratory. At the end comedian Dick
Gregory took the stage and invited everyone over to his house on the South Side, which would take them by or
near the Amphitheater.
We surged out of the Coliseum and headed south. The vanguard of the
2000 people or so got no more than a couple of blocks before it was turned back
by police. Reversing course the cry was now “Grant Park! Grant Park.!”
As we headed north, I found myself near the rear of the crowd.
At some point we cut over from Wabash to Michigan
Ave. I was still on the east side of Michigan in front of the Conrad Hilton. The majority of the
crowd before me had surged across the street and made a bee line to the raised
equestrian statue of Union General John
Logan. This had been the site of scuffle between demonstrators and police a
day earlier. This time the crowd occupied the hill and several climbed the
statue where two or three waved Vietcong
flags against the grey sky.
It was my experience that week that nothing set Chicago cops off
like the sight of those Vietcong flags. I watched as massed police attacked the
hill. This time there was no tear gas, but batons were swinging with zeal. It
didn’t take them long to take the hill and chase most of the crowd across the Balboa Bridge into Grant Park.
A couple of hundred of us were stranded across the street on
Michigan. Some tried to cross to join the main group but were turned away. A
smaller knot of cops seemed to be making a move to get us away from the Hilton,
which was convention headquarters and where many delegates, including most of
the McCarthy delegation stayed. We
started moving north eventually scattering in small groups.
I cut over to State
Street and began walking north from there. Pretty soon I was alone. Across
the river somewhere I moved over to Clark
St. It is a very long hike from the south end of Downtown to the North
side. By the time I got to Division
I was tired and thirsty. I ducked into the bar of the old Mark Twain Hotel for a beer. Unknown to me, it was a hangout for
the remnant of the old Bug House Square
radicals, several of whom had gathered from the cheap rooming houses nearby to
watch coverage of the convention on the saloon TV. When they saw me, it was not
hard to for them to tell I was a demonstrator.
Three or four of them, yammering in various European accents,
surrounded and peppered me with eager questions. They were also glad to stand
me for a round or three or four. Beer, brandy, even Malort, once described as “incredibly bitter, with notes of earwax,
fire, poison, and decaying flesh” offered to me out of respect for my
supposedly manly willingness to face “the damn bulls.” I gagged down the
Malort, although I think I would rather have been tear gassed. After an hour or
so I stumbled out of the saloon and resumed my journey,
I must have passed through Lincoln Park that night, although I
have not a shred of memory of it. That was the evening the Black Panther Bobby Seals showed up just long enough to give a
little speech about “resisting the pigs by any means necessary.” That little
episode, the only thing he did all week in conjunction with the convention, was
enough to get him indicted and eventually tied and gagged in Julius Hoffman’s courtroom.
It was also the evening that 200 clergymen raised a giant cross
and prayed, for which the police were more than happy to crack their skulls.
But if I saw any of
that, I was oblivious. Damn that Malort.
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