A 40-Year Memory - Chicago 1968

August 22-August 30 - Police clash with anti-war protesters in Chicago, Illinois, outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which nominates Hubert Humphrey for U.S. President, and Edmund Muskie for Vice President.

Oh my, what a memory. I wasn't there. I was watching in one of the rooms at the college radio station. I watched with horror and terror.

My God, what is happening?


I watched the then Mayor Daly of Chicago screaming, shaking his fist, and swearing at the rostrum.

I saw protesters being clubbed and gassed in what would later be called a "police riot."

I watched as Hubert Humphrey, in and of himself a kind and progressive politician, become the poster boy of the administration, destined, thanks to Chicago and other reasons, to lose to Richard Nixon in the fall elections.

I swore at the TV, got angry and kicked a chair, stomped around the room by myself, and wondered where my country had gone.

Probably no single event, even Bobby Kennedy's and Martin Luther King's assassinations, was as much the paradigm for 1968 as the Chicago Convention. It was the final explosion of frustration and dashed hopes and just plain pent up anger. On both sides. And they couldn't even talk to each other in any civil way, even inside the convention.

Of course this came only a few days after Soviet and other Eastern Bloc countries had entered Prague to shut down their progressive reforms. The echoes and shadows seemed familiar in the Chicago nights.

It was a polarizing year that also became the seed of polarizing politics. That seed would slowly but surely sprout until we have the litmus test politics of today, the ideologically pure approach that keeps us more separated than united too much of the time. Single issue democracy is an oxymoron. Yet we continue to let it fester and rot.

Next week the two weeks of this year's conventions begins. I hope times are different. Yet we live in a polarizing age. As this summer pre-election, pre-campaign went on and on it doesn't look like it will. Oh, there may not be riots and tear-gas and hippies and yippies. But there may be many things hiding under the surface that may begin to turn this campaign into just another American election.

May we hope that something can change that pattern?

--Pictures at the Chicago Tribune