A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:
When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.
Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.
There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.
Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).
Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.
By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.
Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.
Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.
The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.
Have fun with your couple of hundred dollars of federal tax rebate and your many hundreds of dollars of property tax increase. My wife and I bought a house two and half years ago. Our property taxes have increased by 1300 dollars in that time. This is no McMansion in the swanky part of town. Its a nice, quiet, typically middle-class, suburban neighborhood. Integrated, well-kept up, a nice place to live. $1300 in two and a half years. Meanwhile, services decrease and the states continue to struggle. Can’t tax the rich, you know. They might get angry. Can’t make the corporations pay taxes at all, they might take the jobs overseas…oh, they did that.
As many may have already heard, 62% of corporations that made over abillion dollars in profit last year paid NO TAXES AT ALL. Want to know the name of one of those corporations?
Halliburton.
I realize this is a complete change of subject…..Ruy, do you ever cover opinion polls from other countries? Is there any polling information from Iraq? I am very curious about how the prison abuse crimes are affecting the attitude Iraqis have toward the occupation. Also I’d like to see some polling results for Americans, too when they become available.
Thanks for all the ineresting articles .
A former economics professor stated that people vote almost exclusively with their pocketbook. Those former professionals that have had to take McJobs will not support the President again. When gas prices reach $2.25 a gallon (in Texas) folks will be ready for a change. When seniors realize they can still get drugs cheaper in Canada, they’ll send George packing. When the youth of America realize they’ve been handed a bill for a useless war, all for the benefit of the priveledged few. . ., well, it won’t matter cause they don’t vote anyhow.
I think that the public is eager to turn to a soft and safe cushion after the past month. Believing the economy is fantastic may be that cushion. I think that the lack of jobs with real wages or benefits, and the high gas prices and rising food prices is one reason that the cynicism and wariness remains, but with the way the media manages to guilt-trip people into believing that all this is necessary because of “the war on terra”, I don’t know how much longer the public doubts will last.
I don’t see that at all, James. The media cheering squad has been talking up the recovery since last Fall, and it hasn’t penetrated public consciousness yet. The job numbers might be the thing to finally do it if they’re perceived as “real” (which they never were in 1992) and ongoing. But, so far, people appear to remain resistant — partly because of the three years that preceded this, but maybe for some deeper reason. Is it possible the uneven quality of the Bush policies — the radical redistribution to the upper 10% — makes it an unevenly perceived recovery? Even if the economy is going well by standard measures, the percentage of the electorate truly feeling the benefit is too small to having beneficial effects at the ballot box.
Everyone forgets that the public has such low expectations for Bush, as does the media. When he apologized for Abu Gharib, the public acted like they had been touched by Jesus. And again, the same thing happens with the economy. The more the media shrieks about the economy, and the more fatigued the public gets about the horrors in Iraq, the more likely they are to support Bush based on the job numbers.
Or something like: “When was your last raise? How big was it? When do you expect your next one? If your answers to these questions were “I don’t remember, too damned small, and not anytime soon”, you can thank President George Bush and the entirely Republican-controlled federal government, especially as your boss flies by in his new luxury SUV because his profits are up so much. Have fun paying 40% more on average for your kids’ health coverage.”
The message that should be communicated to voters:
Bottom line on the improvement in the job picture under Bush: too little, too late. Grading on straight performance or on the curve, the man has failed miserably. Promoting Bush to an additional term would be succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations.