In My Chicago Summer of '68 I Go to a Party--Part I of a Murfin Memoir

The Skokie Swift, derided as the Tooterville Trolley, pulls into Howard Street in Chicago where I transferred to the L for my expedition to an exotic party.

Note—It has been 58 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.  

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.  

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.

A three flat on Bissel like this one would now sell for far more than a million dollars.  In 1968 it was seedy, rundown, cheap, and in a gang-infested neighborhood--perfect for an aspiring revolutionary just starting out.

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.

In  a few short years Eileen Claire would rise to co-chair of a Maoist sect that would briefly hold the official China franchise in the U.S. and would help make Mao buttons and plastic-covered Little Red Books ubiquitous.

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!”

I searched for years for the photo of Norman Mailer with the cup of bourbon I was shown at the party and have never found it.  The next morning he was at the head of the March on the Pentagon in October 1967 with poet Robert Lowell, labor and anti-war activist Sidney Lens, and Dr. Benjamin Spock at the far right among other notables

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 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.

 

 

In My Chicago Summer of '68 The Run Up to the Big Event--Part II of a Murfin Memoir

 

Roosevelt University on Michigan Avenue in the Auditorium Building was home of the Free University where I took a class with Staughton Lynd every Wednesday.

Yesterday—A party in the big city set the stage for a radical adventure.

The party at Eileen Claire’s was not the only time I got into the city that summer. I was weekly visitor. I signed up for a class at something called the Free University at Roosevelt University. Every Wednesday I made the long trip via the Skokie Swift and the L to take a class with Staughton Lynd.

Lynd was a pretty big deal in those days in left wing and academic circles—a prolific writer who lost his job at Yale for his activism and outspoken opposition to the war, leader of a delegation to Hanoi, advisor to SDS, and pal of Tom Hayden. He relocated to Chicago to give community organizing a go.

Activist/scholar Staughton Lynd was my instructor at the Free University.  Seen here in a Vietnam war protest in Chicago with Dave Dellinger of The Progressive (left) and civil rights organizer Robert Moses (right).

To tell the truth, I remember more about those long train rides, reading Ramparts, Evergreen, The Progressive and other lefty magazines than I do about the classes. That is until the one where Lynd suggested that we try to document the demonstrations planned for the upcoming Democratic National Convention as “participant observers.” That got my attention. One after another students volunteered for this or that demonstration, march or program—mostly serious and sober actions by recognized liberal and radical groups or Clean for Gene McCarthy supporters. But no one picked the obvious one.

“Doesn’t anyone want to do the Yippies?” Lynd asked. Immediately my hand shot up. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know much about them except that the press was outraged, City Hall was in a near panic at being invaded by hordes of drug crazed hippies who were probably planning to put LSD in the water supply, and it sounded like fun. Looking back, it is possible that my classmates may have known something I didn’t.

A week or so later on a hot night, I made my way to the one place in Chicago where I knew any Yippies could likely be found—the offices of the underground newspaper the Seed then on LaSalle Street just off of North Avenue within blocks of ground zero for the staging area for the Yippies in Lincoln Park.

                            A pre-convention cover of the the Seed promoting the arrival of the Yippies.

The door was wide open to a dimly lit, cluttered and chaotic office a few steps below street level. Two dudes with suitably long and unkempt hair were sweating over a table. “Hi!” I said, “I’m looking for Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.” I was greeted with incredulous stares and deep suspicion.

Let’s review how I looked that summer—the frayed white short-sleeve salesman-cast-off shirt, the store brand jeans with the cuffs turned up, the heavy Wellington work boots, the natty red kerchief knotted at the throat, scroungy orange goatee, thick horn rim glasses, topped by a battered white Stetson. I looked like I may have just graduated from the J. Edgar Hoover Academy for Stool Pigeons and Spies.

“They’re not here,” one of the guys said without volunteering any information on their whereabouts or how I could contact them. I could have been staring at both of them that very minute and I wouldn’t have known it.

A brief but cool conversation followed. I was beginning to detect full blown drug induced paranoia from them. But they did give me some handbills and other information about the publicly announced plans for Convention week, all of which relied on free camping in the Park.

Armed with this intelligence, I retreated to Skokie to contemplate my next move.

*** 

The Friday before the Convention was my last day at the air conditioner plant in Skokie. Joe, the Iranian foreman knew that I was not due back at college for two weeks and was put out that I was leaving early. I spent the summer covering for vacationing workers in different parts of the plant and rotated through sub-assembly, polishing and buffing, coil making, and the final assembly line. Despite a few mishaps, I had apparently done well enough to be asked to come back to work over my six-week semester break.

                    Among my duties at the Skokie air conditioning plant when I worked on the final assembly line was snapping this logo onto the nearly completed units.

My co-workers viewed my plans to leave work to participate in what was being advertised in the hysterical press as a planned riot with some amusement. Ralph, the chief inspector, a middle-aged man with a grey brush cut and the only Hitler mustache I ever saw on a live human being, had opinions on the limits of free speech. He considered himself the plant intellectual. Because we both read books at lunch time, he had taken a reluctant shine to me, even though I may have been the cause of more air conditioners being rejected than any other worker.

On the whole I got a warm send off from most of the guys. Buckwheat—I’m not making that nickname up folks—the skinny black dude with the pomade hair, pegged pants and Cab Calloway mustache who ruled the tool room. Mingo, the grinning little Mexican dude and gang banger proud as punch of his club sweater who was always asking me to line him up with hippy chicks. Roy, the young hillbilly who introduced me to the joys of listening to country hits on WJJD as we sweated in sub-assembly. The assorted Pollacks and D.P.s on the assembly line. They were all so cheerful that I suspected there was a pool on the date and time of my demise.

Next—I come to the City the weekend before the Convention starts, become a Marshall, get some training in Lincoln Park, and settle into a church basement Movement Center

The U.S. Finally Paid Reparation to War Time Internees Too Little Too Late.

 

From George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy.

On August 10, 1988, more than 45 years after the start of internment, the United States government authorized reparations payments to Japanese-Americans detained during World War II.

President Ronald Reagan signing the bill apologizing for World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and authorizing largely symbolic reparations.

Ten weeks after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering 120,000 people of Japanese descent—including 75,000 American citizens—into internment camps. The announced purpose was to protect the West Coast from sabotage and collusion with the enemy, but the perceived threat was based more in racial prejudice than military necessity, as the great majority German-American and Italian-American residents were allowed to remain in their homes undisturbed despite the large pre-war German-American Bund with its openly pro-Nazi rallies and proven networks of spies and saboteurs.  

For the length of the war, Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese nationals—many of denied American citizenship based on racially discriminatory quotas—were imprisoned in makeshift internment camps throughout the West and as far east as Arkansas. Interned people were forced to abandon their homes, farms, and businesses, or sell them at rock bottom prices, losing economic stability and generational wealth. The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. U.S., upheld Roosevelt’s executive order.

A member of the Nesei 442nd Regiment on guard in France in 1945. 

Despite the trauma the great majority of the detainees remained loyal to America and thousands of their young men volunteered for service in the Armed Forces.  That included members of the 442nd Infantry Regiment made up of Nisei—second generation American citizens—that became the most decorated unit of it size during the war for its hard-fighting service in Italy and France

After the war, Japanese-Americans returned home to distrust and resentment. Wartime internment traumatized an entire generation of people and continues to impact their descendants.

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, survivors of internment organized to demand that the United States government address this history.

After the war the detainees were often unwanted back in their home communities. 

In 1980, Congress established a commission to investigate the internment camps and their legacy. The report decried Japanese internment as a “grave injustice” and acknowledged that the internment was fueled by “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

The decade-long efforts of Japanese American civil rights advocates were realized when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an apology and compensation of $20,000 to living survivors of Japanese internment. An estimated 50,000 people interned during the war died before the reparation act’s passage.

Although Japanese-Americans were gratified by the acknowledgement of the grave injustice done to them and for the formal apology, the cash settlements were a drop in the bucket compared to actual losses.  

A one-day evacuation sale at a Japanese-American owned business.  Many did not even have the time or opportunity to even attempting to get some value for their abandoned property. 

Hard working and industrious Japanese had some of the finest farms on the West Coast, prosperous businesses in towns and cities as well as high rates of home ownership.  All of that caused resentment and envy by their neighbors, many of whom swooped in to claim their property legally or by winked-at outright theft.  A mere $20,000 came nowhere near making up those losses, especially considering inflation.  And by denying recompense to the tens of thousands who had already died, their heirs were effectively cheated as well.

In the decades after the apology and reparations, a public consensus grew that the internment was one of the blackest episodes in American history.  But new camps—and proposals to actually use former Japanese internment camps—sprang up like mushroomed under the first Cheeto-in-Charge iteration. Trump apologists, right-wing ideologues, and outright White nationalists—not only defend the camps but exulted in them.  And they assailed the birthright citizenship of the Nisei generations.  The Japanese like the millions of Latino American citizens are derided as alien stains on White America.

lways ready to play a xenophobic hand, first term Trump publicly hyped an executive order to end birthright citizenship.  This Voice of America graphic made clear why he couldn't follow through and might be why VOA slashed and muzzled.

Trump redux acted to end birthright citizenship by fiat—executive order—and many MAGA cultists cheered it on.  The Courts have consistently denied that he had the right or power to alter the terms of citizenship laid out in the Constitution. 

All because we are already forgetting the lessons of Manzanar.

A Prayer for Ordinary People Revisited—Murfin Verse from 2012

  

Norm Siegel, The Old Man, Dave Drayer, Andy Cohen, Cheryl Niemo, and Andy Andrick led the audience of Just Plain Folk--Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things in singing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land. 

Fourteen years ago, it poured rain here in McHenry County.  It came down in buckets in what was a very soggy month.  That put a crimp in plans for an evening folk mini-festival grounds of what was then called the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry and is now known as Tree of Life UU Congregation.  Undeterred, we moved the program into the sanctuary and a little more than 50 folk slogged through the storm anyway.

The program, grandiosely named Just Plain Folk—Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things, was a benefit for our Compassion for Campers (C4C) program for homeless PADS clients and despite the gloomy weather raised enough money to keep it afloat through the rest of the season until the seasonal church-based overnight shelters resumed operations in October.  By the way, that program is now in its seventeenth year of operation and is humming along nicely serving an often abused and neglected unhoused population year-round at the McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) at the McHenry County Mental Health Board offices, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake.  

 

The program included Appalachian and early country music by The Siblings featuring singer Cheryl Niemo, Dave Drayer on the stand-up bull fiddle, and Andy Andrick on guitar; Chicago folk scene vet Norman “Mad Dwag” Siegel who did a set heavy on singer-songwriter material from the ‘60s, and Memphis based traditional bluesman Andy Cohen who headlined with a tight hour set that was a virtual clinic on great guitar picking and roots blues.

Then with all of the musicians on stage and the audience on their feet we closed with a Centennial birth year salute to Woody Guthrie by singing This Land is Your Land with all of the subversive, seldom sung verses.

At the beginning of the evening, I snuck in one of my poems.  Yeah, I know it wasn’t fair, but I was up there as emcee and had the microphone. The piece was written for the occasion and the theme of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

 

                                                    Caught in the act of committing poetry 

To tell you the truth, I had forgotten I wrote it until I stumbled on an old post about the event.  It struck me, he said immodestly, as not half bad.  And as a challenge.

My Prayer Tonight

A Poem for Just Plain Folk—Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things

August 9, 2012

 

Let me be worthy of those

whose names have been forgotten.

 

Those who stood up,

            stood out

            and stood down.

 

Those whose hands bled,

            brows sweated

            and backs bent.

 

Those who nurtured,

            nursed

            and loved without question.

 

Those who questioned,          

            created

            and cared.

 

Those who offered hands up,

            hand outs,

            and hands on deck when it mattered.

 

Those who saw far,

            saw clearly

            and saw what need be done.

 

Those who sang,

            who danced,

            and laughed despite it all.

 

Those of faith,

            free thought,

            and far horizons.

 

Oh, Greater Mystery,

            make me worthy of them all.

 

—Patrick Murfin

Free Soilers Failed as a Third Party and Prospects for Successful New Ones now are Dim

 

An anti-Free Soil cartoon shows party leaders as warlocks brewing up a poison pot.

Note--You would think the political chaos of the second Trump residency would invite new third party challengers to the polarized warring establishments but once promising alternatives--Libertarians on the Right and Greens on the Left have faded as adherents of each answered the call not to divide forces in an Armageddon like final battle.  Anti-Trump Republicans have failed to rally an alternative to the MAGA cult.  Instead of taking the opportunity to launch a new Socialist party on the heels of recent election triumphs, the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) are locked in an increasingly bitter battle with establishment centrists for the future of the Democratic Party. 

The history of third party movements in this country is strewn with failure, futility, and frustration.  Yet often they set the stage for great change to come.  That was certainly true of the first important third party, the Free Soilers, born on August 9, 1848 at an outdoor convention in Buffalo, New York’s Court House Park.

The party arose from the bitter debate about the status of territories recently obtained by conquest in the Mexican War.  Southern zealots wanted the whole territory including parts of Texas, New Mexico (including the future Arizona), California, and parts of the future states of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada open to slavery without reservation.  Northern states had enough power in Congress to block that.

Northern Democrats, always seeking accommodation, officially advanced the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty—letting the citizens of the new territories decide their status by popular election.  

The areas shown in tan on this map of U.S. territorial growth include Texas and the lands acquired by conquest in the Mexican War.  The Wilmont Proviso would have banned slavery from all but Texas.  It was doomed to failure in Congress, but its ardent supporters would form the nucleus off the new Free Soil Party.

This outraged anti-slavery Northern Whigs and a minority of Democrats centered in Up State New York. These factions endorsed the Wilmot Proviso as an 1846 proposed rider to an appropriation bill for the costs of negotiating a peace with Mexico.  The Proviso would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico.  Although it was defeated, advocates hoped to resurrect it in some form.

In the run-up to the 1848 Presidential Race the Whigs, always an unstable coalition of former anti-Jacksonians, side-stepped the issue in their platform but nominated war hero Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana plantation and slave owner who was presumed to be sympathetic to the extension of slavery.  Although it later turned out that Taylor was not, outraged anti-slavery Whigs centered in Massachusetts and New England began to look for alternatives.

Up-state New York Democrats dubbed Barn Burners for threatening to split the party in support of the opposition to the extension of slavery into Western territories, a policy first advanced in Congress as the Wilmont Proviso.

Meanwhile the Democrats nominated Michigan Senator Lewis Cass, the leading proponent of Popular Sovereignty leading to a similar crisis among anti-slavery elements of that party.

Things came to a head earlier in 1847 at the New York State Democratic Convention where the majority refused to endorse the Wilmot Proviso.  Almost half of the members of the convention, the so-called Barn Burners, centered in heavily anti-slavery Up State, walked out.  But they did not entirely abandon the party until Cass’s nomination.

Opponents of the Free Soil Party--and they were legion--mocked its embrace of the tiny, largely symbolic abolitionist Liberty Party. A reluctant Martin Van Buren, third from left is shown being shoved into the arms of Negros by Democratic Barn burners and Boston Whig snobs.

A meeting was called in Utica at which it was decided to invite anti-slavery Whigs and members of the tiny abolitionist Liberty Party to join the Buffalo Convention and form a new party.

Although the meeting was engineered by the Barn Burners and supporters of the old Albany Regency, the nation’s first state-wide political machine, which had been put together by Martin Van Buren in the late 1820’s, the leading strategists at the convention became Ohio’s Salmon B. Chase, a Whig and erstwhile maverick Democratic Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire.  Since his election to the Senate by a surprise coalition of minority Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats in the New Hampshire legislature in 1847, Hale had quickly established himself as the most voracious opponent of slavery in the Senate.  His experience led him to have faith in the possibilities of a fusion of the anti-slavery factions of the two established parties.

Although the Free Soilers were a party devoted to stemming the expansion of slavery, they were not the single-issue party often portrayed in history.  Their platform adopted planks shrewdly designed to appeal to former partisans of the older parties.  On the one hand they endorsed Federal spending on internal improvements, a cause dear to Henry Clay Whigs and Westerners and on the other opposed protective tariffs, long a cornerstone of Democratic platforms.  They also advanced a proposal for disposing of government land in the West by homesteading.

Still, their party platform proclaimed, “...we inscribe on our banner, ‘Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men,’ and under it we will fight on and fight ever, until a triumphant victory shall reward our exertions.”

The convention turned for the head of its national ticket to former President Van Buren, who had been ousted after one term by the Whigs who smeared him, unfairly, as an elitist fop and William Henry Harrison who aped the populism of Andrew Jackson.  The aging former Red Fox of the Kinderhook was a shrewd politician and saw a possibility of a comeback, or at least a vindication of his tarnished reputation.  But Van Buren had been strangely mum about slavery in national office, understandable as Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of State, second Vice President, and protégée.  As President he maneuvered for the annexation of Texas, which was bitterly opposed by anti-slavery factions.

But Van Buren announced he had always been an opponent of slavery’s expansion in his heart.  And hoping that a ticket led by a former President would give them instant respectability, the convention went along.

Opponents of the Free Soil Party--and they were legion--mocked its embrace of the tiny, largely symbolic abolitionist Liberty Party. A reluctant Martin Van Buren, third from left is seen as being shoved into the arms of Negros by Democratic Barn burners and Boston Whig snobs.

For Vice President the convention turned to a familiar family name—Adams.  Charles Francis Adams was the son and grandson of Presidents.  His father, John Quincy Adams was lionized by Massachusetts Whigs as Old Man Eloquent for his long post-presidential service in the House of Representatives as an outspoken anti-slavery man.  The studious young Adams was supposed to garner support among the Boston elite.

The new party gained some important support, notably from intellectuals like educator Horace Mann, who had filled John Quincy Adams’s House seat after his death; journalist and editor Richard Henry Dana, Jr.; Charles Sumner leader of Boston’s Conscience Whigs and future Senator; poet/editor William Cullen Bryant of New York City; the Quaker Hoosier John Greenleaf Whittier; and Walt Whitman who became a Brooklyn party leader and editor of the Brooklyn Freeman, a party newspaper.

The Free Soilers also ran candidates for Congress and for several state legislature seats.

This Massachusetts Free Soil rally featured former anti-slavery Whig, rising Party star, and future U.S., Senator Charles Sumner.

The party was careful to pitch itself as moderate.  It did not attack slavery as a fundamental evil or advocate for its abolition where it was in force.  Instead, it argued that the extension of slavery was a threat to Free Labor and that blocking expansion would eventually cause it to “wither away” even in the Deep South.  That drew the scorn of Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who charged that it was “White manism.”  Still, a lot of moderate slavery opponents were drawn to the party.

During the campaign it became apparent that things were not working out as hoped and planned. Of course, the party had no hope in the South.  That region was split between Democrats supporting Cass, and Whigs in the corner of slave holding Taylor.  But Van Buren could not shake the elitist reputation so successfully hung on him damaging his appeal to Northern voters, particularly in the big cities.  Worse, New England Whigs deeply distrusted him as Jackson’s former crony.  Many held their noses and voted for Taylor or sat on their hands in the election.

When the votes were counted, the ticket of Van Buren and Adams got a respectable 291,501 votes and 10.1% of popular votes cast for a distant third place.  They failed to get a single Electoral College vote and were probably the margin of difference that gave the close race between Taylor and Cass to the old general.

On the bright side, the party won seats in Congress and enough state legislative seats so that in combination with liberal Democrats and anti-slavery Whigs they were able to elect candidates like Sumner to the Senate.  Although a small minority in both houses, the Free Soilers in Congress became an important voice in the national debate.

After the Compromise of 1850 most Democrats drifted back to their old party.  But a stalwart few remained steadfast with the Free Soilers.

In the election of 1852, the Party offered little known John P. Hale for President and Representative George Julian of Indiana for Vice President.  The ticket garnered half of the popular votes won by Van Buren and just over 5% of the total.

Salmon P. Chase of Ohio led the remnants of the Free Soil Party into the new Republican Party and in 1860 was a major contender against Abraham Lincoln and others for the Presidential nomination.  Lincoln held his nose and appointed Chase as his Secretary of the Treasury. 

After Northern outrage against the Kansas Nebraska Act, most remaining Free Soilers followed leaders like Salmon P. Chase into becoming an important part, even the backbone, of the new Republican Party, which in the four short years between its nominations of John C. Frémont in 1856 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860 became the first and only third party ever to achieve major party status.