Preparations are well underway for the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago now seen as an exciting introduction of the Harris/Walz ticked by an energized and united party.
Note—It has been 56 years since the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and all the tumult in the streets. The whole world was watching, briefly, a slice of police mayhem embedded itself in fading tribal memories. Fading, but not gone. The return of the Party to Chicago in 1996 to renominate Bill Clinton and Al Gore heavily enforced relative peace on the streets despite some controversial preemptive arrests of some and scuffles far from the convention site. A much hyped invasion of black-clad street fighters who had emerged from Group of Seven protests as a new threat didn’t get far off the ground. But those fighters would evolve into the Antifa who would become a bug-a-boo to the emerging MAGA crowd and often the excuse to militarize their most dangerous elements.
The Convention this year did not much interest the media when it was viewed as a ritual renomination of a politically doomed incumbent. All that changed when in final surrender to the political reality Joe Biden withdrew from the race and Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. Within minutes of that development even before the frenzied anticipation of a choice of running mate, talking heads were pitching a scenario where delegates who felt they had been abandoned and ignored and potential “other candidates” who never emerged would be split wide open in an ugly floor fight that would doom the nominee as Hubert Humphry was in 1986. And they also hyped potential mass street protests by Palestinians and their growing allies against the Israeli war in Gaza, Police violence protestors, and even generally non-violent climate activists. Of course there would again be the nasty professional protestors—whatever they are calling Antifa this year—inflaming every situation. And somehow it could all be linked to increasingly bold street criminals eager to use any chaos as a cover for smash and grabs and car hijackings. It could be 1968 all over again solemnly predicted a multi-colored cast of attractive young reporters and analysts not yet born or toddling in 1986.
Just as contention and division will virtually disappear inside the Convention venues, street protests like those in 1968 are now virtually impossible due the massive militarization of law enforcement on all levels including extensive training, heavy protective gear, and a variety of “less than lethal” weapons. Sophisticated intelligence operations have infiltrated or gained access to plans and discussions of most “identifiable” threats. The use of drones and the wide network of public cameras and access to business and residential cameras not only can keeps the cops a step a head of most protests, but in combination with sophisticated facial identification software enables the widespread prosecution of many participants no matter how incidental to violence can be prosecuted as the Siege of the Capital gang discovered. The Chicago Police Chief and State’s Attorney have both publicly and pointedly promised mass prosecutions not just cherry picking identifiable leaders or the unfortunates at the flash points of confrontation who had been nabbed. Believe it or not, that kind of thing discourages casual participation.
At any rate, this seems a good time to resurrect a look back on the events of 1968 by an awfully young and naïve boy with shiny ideals and not much sense. I have run this series of memory stories before. These which will run for the next several days, have been somewhat buffed and edited. Edited yet again they will become core elements in the memoirs of an Old Man now being prepared for publication by Charles H. Kerr & Co.
I Go To a Party
It was the summer of 1968. I was back at the folks’ house in Skokie—for the last time—after my first year at Shimer College and working on the assembly line at Koldwave/Heat Exchangers, an air conditioning plant. It was a time between times, a time of waiting for that thing that would change—I was sure of it—everything. That “thing” was the Democratic National Convention in August and the massive street protests that we all knew were coming.
One warm evening I took the Skokie Swift and the L down into the City for a party. It was my first Chicago party. People my own age with an apartment of their own in the gritty, mysterious city! Eileen Claire was quite beautiful and brilliant. She played cello and read French. We had gone to different Niles Township Highs Schools—she to East and I to West. We met in LYNT (Liberal Youth of Niles Township) and worked together on a program about the draft, Uptight About the Draft? which was inscribed on the flyer in San Francisco psychedelic lettering. She pushed the rest of us to be more militant.
Now she had the second floor of a three flat on Bissell Street, not far from the Armitage El. The building backed up against the tracks. Trains roared by at eye level to the back porch. Ramshackle furniture was scattered around. Posters—Janis Joplin’s peek-a-boo breast and demonstration calls—were tacked to the grimy walls. There was a hole in the wall in the bathroom and the toilet rocked when you sat on it. Beautiful. Bohemian. Dangerous.
.jpg)
The apartment was jammed when I got there. Claire waved at me from across a room, smoking intently and engaged in an animated conversation with a knot of earnest young men. She pointed to a keg in galvanized tub in the kitchen. I think that was as close to communication with me as she got all evening.
I couldn’t blame her. Compared to the sophisticates here, I was sure that I must be something of an embarrassing relic from the past, someone casually invited pro-forma without any expectation that he would actually show up.
My appearance was a combination of naiveté, nerdiness, and an ardent yearning for bohemia. Black Wellington boots. Western cut jeans from Monkey Wards where I still shopped for huskies A frayed white short sleeve dress shirt—my uncle had given me a drawer full of them—past prime salesman crispness, pocket stuffed with pens and an address book stuffed with scrap notes of lofty ideas. A red bandana knotted to the side of the throat. The first bloom of an orange goatee, sideburns down to the jaw line. Hair full behind the ears and just a tad over the collar hoping for Byronic heroism. Thick horn rim glasses fit for a middle aged accountant from Queens. All topped off by a dingy white Open Road Stetson, front brim snapped down, sides curled. A symphony in incongruity.
The crowd skewed slightly older than I—college juniors and seniors, a smattering of graduate students, even a sprinkling of hip young junior professors, the kind who mixed high minded idealism with sleeping with adoring students. Some had dropped out and were now organizing the masses. The men could be recognized by their uniform—blue chambray work shirts, sleeves rolled up just below the elbow, jeans, and engineer boots, sometimes a Greek fisherman’s or newsboy cap. The girls wore peasant blouses or loose t-shirts, full skirts with bare legs or jeans, hair long or loosely tied behind the ears, scrubbed faces defiant of make-up.
This was not a crowd of hippies or flower children. Even amid the flowing alcohol and passed joints there was an air of seriousness, of conspiracy, of danger. Eileens’s friends were self-described militants, SDS, and Communists. Some of them I would later come to recognize as movement heavies. Eileen herself, in just a couple of years, would ascend to leadership in a Maoist sect which would briefly hold the official American China franchise, and helped litter radical America with vinyl covered Quotations from Chairman Mao, blue People’s Army caps with red stars, and garish red and gold Mao buttons.
.jpg)
That night was the first time I heard the word revolution bandied about as if it were the most natural thing in the world, not something to do with Redcoats and embattled farmers in tri-corn hats, not something that erupted in exotic foreign places like St. Petersburg, but something that we were going to do right here, right now, next week at the latest.
I was telling folks that summer that I was a socialist. But then I would expound on my firm belief that what American needed was a Fabian Movement of intellectuals that could make socialism respectable to the middle classes. Mention of this theory in these circles drew only eye rolling, dismissive snorts and long, jargon filled lectures on abandoning bourgeois sentimentality, casting my lot with the proletariat, and recognizing the central role of the vanguard party in creating a real revolution. Evidently they were less impressed by George Bernard Shaw than by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
When they learned that I actually, if only temporarily, worked in a real factory, something that very few, if any, of them had ever actually done, I was sort of patted on the head with an expectation that I would learn about exploitation. A couple of them asked if I would take red bannered newspapers to work with me and pass them out to my comrades. I didn’t think that anything with a huge hammer and cycle on it was apt appeal to the hillbillies, Poles, Mexicans and Blacks who sweltered with me on the air conditioning assembly line.
Under the circumstances, I soon drew apart. I drank scotch, which I believed was the official beverage of the aspiring young writer and caught a hit on whatever joints might come my way. And I watched.
I was sitting on a sagging couch, squeezed among strangers acutely into my buzz when a large man with a bushy, bright red beard pulled up a milk crate in front of us and fished a crinkled clipping from his pocket. “Here,” he said thrusting it at a girl sitting on an arm of the sofa, “Can anyone tell me who this is?”
When it was passed down to me, I saw a clipping on glossy paper, the photo image sharp. Probably from a newsmagazine. In it a portly middle-aged man in a three piece suit with a receding mop of mildly unruly hair gestured emphatically with one hand and clutching a large mug with the other. The photo was taken from a low angle, looking up at a platform or stage.
We all studied the picture for a moment, trying to focus our un-focused brains. A couple of folks thought it might be Alan Ginsberg. But he had no beard, and no one could imagine Ginsberg in a suit. One, sensing an air of menace in the man’s scowling expression, was sure it was a Republican Senator. But in the end, we had to give up.
Red Beard waited a moment. “It’s Norman Mailer! With the famous cup of bourbon the night before the March on the Pentagon!”
Mailer, I was informed, had taken to the stage and launched into a long, incoherent rant. The next day he was busted on the march and spent an un-Thoreau like night in jail. All of this had happened the previous October while I was getting used to being stoned every night at Shimer. It was news to me.
But I did know Mailer. Who didn’t. He was one of a handful of American writers who were more famous than their books at a time when serious writers had some of the same air of celebrity about them as movie stars. In fact these writers seemed to move in the same orbits as movie stars. Hadn’t Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe? And didn’t Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and George Plimpton breezily pop up on Johnny Carson’s couch? And Mailer was bigger than any of them, the most famous American writer since Hemmingway and just as pugnacious.
So I was impressed that Mailer, drunk or not, had thrown his lot in with war protestors and radicals. I had been vaguely aware that the writer was anti-establishment. His journalism appeared not only in glossy mainstream magazines but in hipper journals. Like a lot of folks my age, I had read Why are We in Vietnam? and was a bit perplexed by the connection of a Texas adolescent’s Alaska hunting trip to the title. I gathered it was an allegory.
I knew Mailer from my mother’s wide collection of best sellers, mostly in paperback editions. She prided herself on keeping up with good books. And in the days when the best seller lists often were dominated by many of the authors destined for admission to the pantheon great American literature, those old, dog eared Pocket Books and Cardinal Editions provided me with a deeper and better education than I ever received in high school English. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Pearl S. Buck (these older writers in cheap book club hard cover editions), Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Faulkner, James Jones.
My father’s books were another thing entirely. Slender pulp genre shoot ‘em ups, heavy on westerns, hard boiled detectives, and war stories.
But The Naked and the Dead may have been one of the few books both of my folks may have read. It was serious literature and a rip-snorting yarn, even if it did take more than one night to read.
Of course, I read it, too. It was one of the books that changed my impression of war from the brutal glory of the old John Wayne movies I saw on TV, to something more personal and ambivalent. Without The Naked and the Dead, and a handful of other books I might have been swept along by enthusiasm for a good ol’ martial crusade in Vietnam. Certainly my earliest impulses had been in that direction. But these dusty old paperbacks readied me to view things differently.
That early Mailer, not the current radical, had primed my pump.
Tomorrow—Getting ready for the Big Event.
Well done, Patrick!
ReplyDelete