In Chicago, the ghosts of 1968 are still haunting American democracy

CHICAGO — For a half-century, I’d only seen this city’s iconic General John Logan Monument — a dramatic bronze statue of the Civil War hero charging into battle on horseback — in photographs. To be even more accurate, I’ve never seen the actual statue.

That’s because famous images from Aug. 28, 1968, show Logan and his steed drowning under a sea of youthful humanity. Anti-Vietnam War protesters sit atop the statue and cover every inch of the grassy slope that surrounds it — carrying signs that proclaim, “[Mayor] Daley and HHH [Hubert Humphrey] Stole America,” and acting giddy in a brief moment of triumph in a war with Richard J. Daley’s cops that would soon crash on them with the force of nightsticks.

On a brilliantly sunny Sunday morning 56 years later, there was utter serenity at the Logan monument. The handful of people circling the green mound were there with their white labs or their terriers, there for the business of pet relief and not for politics. The dog walkers came from sleek, ultramodern condos that line Grant Park, one more reminder of how much the world has changed since the week of protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention that were met with a show of police violence that shook America to its core.

And yet, despite the calm, no one sat on the statue’s grassy knoll because it’s surrounded by metal barricades, erected by jittery city officials on the eve of another Chicago DNC that starts Monday. The cries of “The whole world is watching” that roared down this stretch of Michigan Avenue in that distant night are just a faint echo, the throng that once buried John Logan the equivalent of ghosts. And yet, these specters of 1968 still haunt the nation’s third-largest city, and America writ large.

Is today’s serenity in Grant Park because we learned to be better people than what the world watched that fateful August, or are we hypnotized by a forced peace of metal barricades, concrete medians, and even more warrior cops?

I’m writing this under electric candlelight and beaded chandeliers in the ornate lobby of the Chicago Hilton, which on Aug. 28, 1968, was called the Conrad Hilton. It was just outside here, at Michigan and Balbo, that cops charged into the crowd of protesters in the Battle of Michigan Avenue that was broadcast to a stunned nation in living color, as tear gas wafted up into the suite occupied by Humphrey, minutes before he won the Democratic nomination in a tense roll call.

Cops pushed demonstrators into a large plateglass window at the Hilton, shattering it and traumatizing those who were trapped. They included a then-31-year-old writer Hunter S. Thompson, who left Chicago determined to describe the American fascism he’d experienced. “I went to the Democratic convention as a journalist,” he later said, “and returned a raving beast.”

But almost everyone touched by Chicago 1968 was radicalized in one way or another. A then-25-year-old filmmaker from the city’s North Side with a passion for cinema verité and a growing curiosity about leftist politics named Peter Kuttner was filming near the former bandshell in Grant Park near the Hilton on the afternoon of Aug. 28, 1968, when he saw the blue-helmeted cops charge into protesters and start randomly clubbing people.

Now 81, with bushy gray eyebrows and an undimmed passion for recounting a time in Chicago when there was music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air, Kuttner told me Saturday as we sat in a hip Oak Park coffee shop that he handed his camera to an associate and chose to support the protesters instead of filming them.

“I’m starting to say to myself — because I’ve become a lot more political now — I don’t want to record this now,” he recalled. “I want to do it. I want somebody to film me doing it. ... I don’t want there to be a camera between me and the action. I was outraged this was going on.”

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Personally, I know how Kuttner felt. I was part of that whole world that was watching this on TV. I was 9 years old — old enough to start caring about baseball but not politics, not yet. On the night of Aug. 28, 1968, my parents invited a few friends to our linoleum family room and newfangled color TV to watch Humphrey get the nomination, and probably imbibe a beverage or two. I wandered in just when NBC showed the cops wailing on the protesters at Michigan and Balbo, shocked but mesmerized. A friend of my parents said, “I don’t think little Willy should be watching this,” but I couldn’t leave. I was now interested in politics, and soon journalism — the first moments of a journey that’s brought me 1,000 miles to this Hilton lobby and isn’t close to finished, 56 years later.

In 1968, the stakes could not have been higher for the mostly young protesters who watched neighbors return from Vietnam in body bags and feared they would soon be next. The diverse group of protesters included the more serious National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, known to all as “the Mobe,” and the more flippant Yippies led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who made the evening news by putting forth a real-life swine named Pigasus as its candidate. They’d hoped for more people than the 15,000 or so who showed up, but many were intimidated by the massive police force under Daley, who’d ordered cops to shoot to kill arsonists after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968.

The 1968 protesters were kept miles away from the long-gone, stockyard-saturated International Amphitheater where the actual convention was held, but that didn’t curb aggressive policing by cops who broke up a Yippie encampment in Lincoln Park and then attacked marchers twice on the day Humphrey was nominated, at the bandshell and outside the Hilton. The conflict was echoed inside the amphitheater, where about a third of delegates loyal to anti-war Sen. Eugene McCarthy or former supporters of the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy Sr. were rebuffed on a platform vote to stop U.S. bombing of Vietnam and efforts to move the convention out of Chicago in protest of Daley’s cops.

Kuttner and, for what it’s worth, I were hardly unique in watching the violence and feeling compelled to pick a side. That cut both ways. Millions among the so-called silent majority thought the cops were right to beat the protesters, and they narrowly elected the “law-and-order” Republican Richard Nixon over Humphrey in November. Yet, at the same time, public opposition to the Vietnam War surpassed a majority not too long after Chicago, and a 1969 Moratorium Day against the war drew huge crowds of everyday folks who’d never been to a protest before.

The legendary Chicago activist Don Rose, now 94, speaking to me by phone from his home in Oak Park, looks back on 1968 as “a mixed bag” that did bring Nixon and a conservative backlash but also “brought a lot of reform — it ended the draft and somewhat belatedly brought an end to war.” Rose, who’d handled press relations for King’s 1966 civil rights campaign in Chicago, performed similar duties for “the Mobe” in 1968, and was the one who told protest leader Rennie Davis to say the police couldn’t get away with their violence “because the whole world is watching,” the phrase that became immortal when repeated in the Michigan Avenue melee.

A state panel called the Walker Commission agreed with protesters that what the whole world had watched was “a police riot,” instigated by Daley’s boys in blue. A humiliated Democratic Party also created a commission that ensured all delegates would be chosen by the rank-and-file in party primaries or caucus, and not by bosses such as Daley. The idea that 1968 forced us to get better at democracy is a story we told ourselves in order to live — but is it true?

For the Democrats gathering here this week, the real reform record has been a mixed bag. To be sure, open primaries gave everyday party members a real say, as they nominated outsiders like the anti-war Sen. George McGovern in 1972 and obscure Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter in 1976. But picking the candidate in spring primaries meant the summer convention became a four-day TV infomercial, and keeping any dissent off-screen became an obsession of party leaders.

For all its ugliness, party rules in 1968 allowed delegates to debate their anti-war platform plank on national TV and stage a vote. Today, party platforms are decided in advance and rendered as bland as possible to avoid a public squabble. There were roughly 1,200 staunchly anti-war delegates in 1968; in 2024, the election of just 29 “uncommitted” delegates protesting U.S. aid for Israel in its assault on Gaza has panicked party leaders determined to avoid even a slight ruckus. Conventions since 1968 are more peaceful because of less democracy, not more.

Likewise, political protests are mostly smaller — only about 800 marched against the Republican convention in Milwaukee last month, even as it nominated a wannabe dictator in Donald Trump — not because our leaders are better at listening to dissent, but because our cops have become more militarized, convention security zones with concrete barriers and heavy fencing have grown bigger, and the police presence has grown even more dramatically, so dissenters are intimidated without nightsticks.

Some 56 years after the chaos of 1968 was said to inspire reform, the Democrats have put forward not one but two candidates — in President Joe Biden and now in Vice President Kamala Harris, already nominated by computer to take away one more supposed function of the convention — who want to continue U.S. arms shipments to Israel even when 77% of everyday Democrats say they oppose this. That democratic disconnect is why organizers are hoping as many as 20,000 will march on the DNC Monday, which would actually be bigger than 1968’s protests.

One protester planning to show up at Union Park Monday is the 81-year-old Kuttner, even if he says he can’t do the planned 1.4-mile march. “I believe that we had a big role in stopping the [Vietnam] War sooner than it would have been,” he said, “and I’m hoping the same thing will be true of this war.”

But one huge difference between 1968 and 2024 looms large over everything: The clear threat of an authoritarian Donald Trump presidency that, in many ways, would be the apotheosis of the backlash against liberalism that began in 1968. Kuttner, who in theory supports the idea of a progressive third party, said it’s important for Democrats to win in November. His fellow 1968 activist Rose was even more forceful about it. “I sympathize with Gaza, and I’m opposed to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, but my number one priority is beating Trump,” he said.

You can see the new zeitgeist plastered on a fence just across the street from the Hilton, in rows of the new Shepard Fairey poster depicting Harris with the message, “Forward.” But the hopes of 2024 have to be tempered with the reality that the last 56 years have often brought one step forward followed by two steps back. This week will give Chicago and the Democrats a chance to prove that the way to beat back autocracy is not with less democracy, but with more, including a tolerance for the messiness of dissent. Until that happens, the ghosts of 1968 will continue to haunt Michigan Avenue and all of us.

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