Episode 63: Chicago Prepares for Protests at the DNC, Hoping to Forget 1968
The parallels between the 1968 Democratic National Convention and this year’s are undeniable: An incumbent president dropping out of the race. A party deeply divided over a brutal war. A nation arguing over the right to free expression vs. law and order. And it’s all happening again in Chicago, where in 1968 the streets around the Convention became a bloody battle between protesters and police. Is it going to be possible for the city this time around to accommodate peaceful protesters peacefully protesting? A protest organizer, an eyewitness to the violence of ‘68, and an expert on law enforcement weigh in on preparations for the convention and the lessons to be learned from that violent week in 1968.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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ARCHIVAL Walter Cronkite: In the name of security, freedom of the press, freedom of movement, perhaps as far as the demonstrators themselves are concerned, even freedom of speech, have been severely restricted here.
That's the legendary newsman Walter Cronkite, reporting in his typically measured manner, on an ordinary political event that became extraordinary.
ARCHIVAL Walter Cronkite: A Democratic convention is about to begin in a police state. There just doesn't seem to be any other way to say it.
It was 1968. Civil unrest and protests were sweeping the United States…and the music playing on the radio captured the growing discontent.
ARCHIVAL “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire: You’re old enough to kill but not for votin' / You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’? / And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’.
Discontent over the war in Vietnam AND the inequality of American society.
ARCHIVAL Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.: What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.
And in August 1968, the Democratic National Convention landed in the tense, heavily fortified city of Chicago, where more than 10,000 Chicago police officers, 7,500 soldiers and 7,500 Illinois National Guardsmen were ready to maintain law and order.
For 5 days, outside the convention, armed police confronted the protesters. And on TV, the world saw some disturbing images: bloodied young people being tear-gassed and beaten by police.
And protesters chanted … the whole world is watching.
ARCHIVAL Newsreel: Protesters chanting “The whole world is watching.”
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The police response was unrestrained and indiscriminate violence. There was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating, to make a conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force required.
But that kind of aggressive approach to “law-and-order” was seen as an asset to the 1968 Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon.
In his campaign commercials attacking the Democrats, Nixon played images of the violence in Chicago — suggesting that the Democrats had let the country slide into a level of anarchy he would rein in.
ARCHIVAL Richard Nixon: When the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness. And when the president of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration, then it's time for new leadership for the United States of America.
Nixon went on to win the election by a razor-thin margin. And now it’s 2024.
Once again we’ve got a party deeply divided over a brutal war, this one in Gaza. With young people protesting that war and getting arrested in droves. And a nation arguing again over the right to free expression vs law and order.
Disturbingly, according to one recent survey, nearly a quarter of Americans now believe it might be necessary to resort to violence to ‘save the country.’
And in mid-July, an assassin tried to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, a distant echo of the assassin who succeeded in killing presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy as he was campaigning in the 1968 election.
Amidst all this turmoil, the Democratic National Convention is once again headed to Chicago. There are plenty of people planning to protest. A group called Behind Enemy Lines, which opposes the war in Gaza wants to quote “Make 2024 as Great as 1968” and issued a call to “Come to Chicago and Shut Down the DNC!”
So, is it going to be possible for Chicago this time around to accommodate peaceful protesters peacefully protesting?
Andy Thayer: The best protests, most effective protests I've ever been part of have always had an edge to them.
What’s being done to prevent the violence of 1968?
John Miller: Police tactics have come a vastly long way since the Democratic National Convention of 1968.
And what are the lessons from that week of violence that matter now?
Abe Peck: We had a lot of good ideas. Might not have been the right people to ultimately implement them, but uh, I think we were onto something.
I'm Peter Bergen, and this is “In The Room”.
[THEME MUSIC]
In the weeks and months leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Abe Peck had a feeling something bad could happen.
Abe Peck: You know, people were just gathering with a certain kind of ominous, you know, something's going to happen. It was heating up.
1968 had already been a tumultuous and violent year, even before the Democratic convention took place that August. It's often been described as a year that forever changed the United States.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The Viet Cong simultaneously attacked just about every major city and town in South Vietnam.
ARCHIVAL Lyndon B. Johnson: To help meet the enemy's new offensive, we sent to Vietnam about 11,000 additional marine and airborne troops.
ARCHIVAL Walter Cronkite: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
ARCHIVAL Newcaster 2: Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, these are just a few of the cities in which the Negro anguish over Dr. King's murder, presumably by a white man, expressed itself in violent destruction.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Senator Kennedy has been shot! Is that possible? Oh my god. Senator Kennedy has been shot.
And in the spring of that violent and tumultuous year, Abe Peck was 23 years old. He’d just had what he describes as a real rock and roll year, after dropping out of grad school and participating in the summer of love. He’d joined up with the youth international movement known as the Yippies.
Abe Peck: And I got Jerry Rubin in my living room, talking about this groovy convention that was going to happen in 1968.
Jerry Rubin was a well-known anti-war activist and one of the founders of the Yippies. Peck and his fellow Yippies were busy planning non-violent protest gatherings for the upcoming convention.
The upheaval of 1968 had happened under the presidency of a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. He’d sent more than 500,000 American troops to Vietnam, and already 30,000 had died there and there was a lot of discontent on the left with the Democratic Party.
The Yippies weren't the only group involved in organizing demonstrations. Other antiwar groups were also planning to be in Chicago for the convention.Protesting not just against the Vietnam War but also against all sorts of other injustices.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: A number of militant groups are preparing to protest almost anything the Democrats have in mind.
ARCHIVAL Rennie Davis: We are coming to Chicago not to disrupt the convention, but to challenge the policies of militarization that have been felt so strongly and brutally in Vietnam.
And along with his organizing work, Peck also managed to land himself a job at an alternative, underground newspaper.
Abe Peck: Hippies find hippies, even if their hair is short at the time, and I managed to drift into the Chicago Seed underground newspaper. Chicago Seed was kind of a mirror of a daily paper. It was colorful instead of black and white. It was for the liberations of the time, it was against the war. It was pro-sex. It was pro-soft drugs.
Abe Peck: I wrote a piece for The Seed saying, “If you're coming to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair as opposed to the flowers in your hair.”
Peck wanted to warn anybody coming to demonstrate that there was a real potential for violence by the police. He says the signs there could be violence during the convention were there for months beforehand.
There'd been a big peace march in April in downtown Chicago.
Abe Peck: And the police kind of smashed it. The police were bouncing some of the people you know, banging them into the truck. So this was kind of the tone.
Abe Peck: So we started organizing for the Yippies, and the first meeting we had was raided. There was an undercover cop there, someone lit up a joint, and he called it in, so that was our auspicious beginning, was an arrested meeting.
Abe Peck: And there was an increase of police surveillance, a lot of undercover cops.
The Yippies were known for being provocateurs and pranksters and doing things that would capture the attention of the cameras.
So a few days before the start of the actual convention — and to show their disdain for the Democratic Party, the Yippies gathered in a city park and nominated their OWN alternative candidate, a 145-pound pig.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: Sir, why did you decide to become the candidate? [Sound of pig snorting]
They demanded the Secret Service provide protection for the pig, whom they named Pigasus J. Pig.
Abe Peck: There was a big debate over the pig because there was a debate over whether to have a little cute little porky pig or, or a boar. And the pig got arrested. In fact I went to try to bail out the pig.
Abe Peck: And there was actually a pretty funny line by the cops, I have to say. Some people got arrested and they said you guys were in trouble 'cause the pig squealed.
[MUSIC]
Chicago's Democratic mayor Richard J. Daley was preparing to meet the massive protests with a massive show of force. Daley had promised that as long as he was Mayor, law and order would prevail.
And he intended to make good on that promise during the convention, when his city would be in the international spotlight.
Earlier that year, during the riots that followed Martin Luther King's assassination, when many homes and businesses were set on fire in Chicago, Daley had ordered the police to shoot to kill the arsonists.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Much of Chicago was beginning to take on the appearance of an armed camp. Mayor Daley imposed tight controls on the city.
ARCHIVAL Richard J. Daley: I said that an order be issued immediately to shoot to kill any arsonist
He promised more of the same for the convention.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A half mile-long chain link fence topped with barbed wire has been erected at the main entrance of the International Amphitheater. It’s known that some 8, 000 officers will be deployed in the hall or at Chicago Hotels housing the delegates.
The Yippies were organizing their big convention event in a park. The event was called the Festival of Life. It was going to be part music festival, part teach-in, and they expected a really young boisterous crowd.
Abe Peck: It was going to be a joyful noise, it was going to be a freak freely kind of event.
The city refused to give them a permit to hold this event.
But the Yippies decided to hold it anyway. Peck was nervous about what might happen.
Abe Peck: I mean, I was afraid, I'll tell you that. I wasn't afraid enough not to go. I knew cops were, police were following me all the time. I hung in. And there was a certain amount of excitement too, but I wasn't a thrill seeker. It was all right, here we go, heads down, we're in, you know.
So Peck and his fellow protesters gathered in the park.
Around 11:00 PM on Sunday, August 25th, a couple of thousand police officers wearing riot gear, helmets, and gas masks lined up and gave the order to vacate.
Abe Peck: With a bullhorn, right, and, uh, you must leave, it’s past the curfew. // So they came across from the lake toward the street there and, and they had this giant, garbage truck that was like a catapult that could kind of throw tear gas, that was a convention special. We hadn't seen that before.
Abe Peck: But you know, you saw police really in formation, some people tried to stay and got tear gassed, a few people fought back. And in that sense it was a turning point.
[AMBIENT CROWD SOUNDS]
Abe Peck: I thought I became a reporter that night because I went down to Henrotin Hospital, which doesn't exist anymore, and interviewed people as they came in, because people were really getting beat up.
Abe Peck: It was stark. I mean, there was no doubt about it.
Over the next few days, the violence spread.
ARCHIVAL: [Sounds of DNC 1968 protesters with police]
ARCHIVAL Protester: Get behind the mule train so they can follow right to the amphitheater to the illegitimate convention being held there!
By the end of the convention, more than 600 people had been arrested and hundreds injured.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey — who became the party's candidate after President Johnson decided not to run for re-election — at that point still publicly supported the Vietnam War. And he narrowly walked away with the Democratic nomination.
[MUSIC]
It's no secret that today lots of Americans are unhappy about the current state of politics. According to recent polls, less than 25% of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country. And there are all kinds of people who might take advantage of that discontent or be fueled by it.
Even without all of that, the DNC is already considered “a national special security event.” That’s a designation given by the Department of Homeland Security to an event considered a potential target for terrorism or other forms of violence.
And it’s the sort of event where lots of people plan to come to express their First Amendment rights to protest — and where law enforcement is tasked with the dual roles of both protecting the protesters’ constitutional right to protest and also maintaining public safety.
It’s something my CNN colleague, John Miller, knows a thing or two about.
John Miller: What are they accounting for, Peter? They're accounting for the potential of the event being a lot to police, cos it is.
Miller provides analysis on law enforcement and intelligence for CNN, but he also used to work in law enforcement — including as Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, and in other roles for the LA Police Department, and for the FBI.
Even before the attempted assassination on Trump, Miller said he was very concerned about the “lone wolf” who might want to carry out some kind of attack at the convention.
John Miller: And when I say the lone wolf, it could be the ISIS lone wolf. It could be the Al Qaeda-inspired lone wolf. It could be a domestic violent extremist who has their own particular ideology lone wolf. They're all dangerous and they're all hard to detect because they're out there on their own and they may not have telegraphed to anybody what they're about to do. With the lone wolf, if it's in their mind and you're not in their mind, you're not going to know til it's game time.
And he says there are all kinds of groups that might see the DNC as a potential target.
John Miller: The DNC event ticks a lot of the same boxes on the terrorist checklist, as other major events, but more so. Number one, it's an attack on America and an attack on an American symbol, the process of democracy. Number two. It is an attack on an event where coverage is already in place.
John Miller: Meaning, whatever it is you're going to do, it's basically going to be live. And third of all, because it's connected to the process of democracy, for a lot of different extremist groups, the idea of doing anything that breaks down the confidence in democracy, or creates a threat to democracy, is an added plus in terms of motive.
John Miller: So, when you go into the DNC and you do your threat assessment, you're looking at a long menu of different groups to want to either disrupt it, attack it, derail it — and that makes securing it a very complicated job.
Peter Bergen: You said there are domestic protesters who are planning // they want to disrupt the convention, they know, as, as you've said // there's built-in giant amount of media coverage, and they want to draw attention to whatever their cause is, whether it's the Palestinian cause or some other cause.
Peter Bergen: At what point, and this may be more art than science, does a lawful, peaceable assembly become something slightly different, where law enforcement feels they have to intervene?
John Miller: You know, there's models for that, Peter, that kind of work on the police end, which is, if it's planned and compliant, meaning, this is what we want to do, this is where we want to be, this is where we want to go and the police say, we can, we can let you do this, we can let you do that, and, you know, we'll set it up.
John Miller: That's planned and compliant. Then there is unplanned but compliant, which is, a group shows up, they're not going to get a permit, it's spontaneous. They want to be moving. If they work with the police to follow the instructions about this is how we're going to do this, um, they can usually get what they're looking for.
John Miller: And then there's the third level, which is “unplanned and uncompliant.” And we've seen an increasing number of demonstrations that are planned to be unplanned and “uncompliant.”
And Miller says part of the training that police are getting in Chicago is how to make sure that no matter what protesters say or do to provoke police officers into a confrontation, that they don't get drawn in.
John Miller: Like, you are going to stand that line, and they are going to hurl insults at you. And they're going to say things about your mother, and they're going to call you a racist. And they're going to say you're an Uncle Tom if you're a person of color with a badge. And they're going to say a lot of things that are meant to raise your anxiety level and lower your patience.
John Miller: And one of the solutions to that is to tell them, ‘You need to block all that out and make sure that, you know, you're following your training and the instructions of what constitutes an arrestable offense and what we're willing to handle.” But at the same time, the alternative is, they switch those officers out on a regular basis.
John Miller: They literally have officers in reserve to say, these people have been on the line too long and these men and women have probably had it. You're fresh, go up there and, you know, remember what we told you and, you know, understand that there's a human component here.
The Secret Service is the overall coordinator and planner for security in Chicago. While The FBI is in charge of intelligence gathering and then of course the Chicago police department also has a role.
Chicago’s Police Chief, Larry Snelling, has promised that his officers are up to the security challenges of this convention, particularly when it comes to how they will interact with protesters.
John Miller: For Chicago, this is not just a major event. It's going to be looked on by a lot of people as a test. If you look at what Superintendent Larry Snelling has been saying in his media interviews.
ARCHIVAL Larry Snelling: Good morning. We're here today with our partners from the Secret Service for an Executive Steering Committee meeting. During this meeting, we will report out on where we stand with preparations for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
John Miller: He has not been discouraging protest. He has been saying, we are prepared for protest, we will accommodate protest, we will facilitate protest. So that's a very positive message. The caveat that he keeps repeating is, but it has to be within the law. It has to be orderly.
ARCHIVAL Larry Snelling: Constitutional policing and the First Amendment are the foundation of everything we're doing from policies to training. We want people to express their rights safely and responsibly, and we will protect them. But we are not going to tolerate crime, violence, and vandalism.
John Miller: It can be passionate, but it has to be within the lines of what the law allows. And if it's not, we are going to deal with it, which is the flip side of that message. I think that's about all you can do, because there are groups that will argue that if we develop our base, and we bring those numbers, and we don't break the law, we will make our point by our sheer size, sound, and passion.
John Miller: But there are other groups that are going to say, if we are orderly, then we are not committed. If we don't break the law, then we are just noise in the background. That's got to be built into Chicago's planning.
Peter Bergen: You've either worked at senior levels of law enforcement or reported on law enforcement for almost your entire career. What has changed, do you think, in terms of police tactics? I mean, obviously, 1968 and what happened there is on everybody's mind because it went badly at the convention then. What do you think has changed that has sort of improved police tactics and also the technology available to them?
John Miller: Police tactics have come a vastly long way since the Democratic National Convention of 1968. The 1968 convention, you know, the presidential commission that looked into national violence around the time of that convention, concluded in part that it was, and these were the commission's words, that it was a police riot.
John Miller: In other words, that the law enforcement response by the Chicago PD was so far over the top. Um, and so, so much the opposite of de-escalation, that they took what was disorder and escalated into a riot with their response. Um, we could look back in Chicago and peel back the layers and decide if that was a fair conclusion or not, but when you look at it today, uh, the number of, uh, training, uh, that they've gone through, uh, the diversity of the equipment they're applying, the focus on de-escalation, the focus on trying to use no force and then only the minimum amount of force required, is the real, the real contrast between today and 1968.
[MUSIC]
While Miller says the Chicago Police Department has been training in de-escalation techniques, and planning to use things like plastic shields instead of charging protestors with clubs.
Chicago's police force has never quite recovered from the reputation it gained in ‘68 for the excessive use of force. And that reputation only got worse. Things got so bad the Justice Department intervened.
Chicago's police department has been under a federal consent decree since 2019. That’s essentially a court order that mandates reform in policing and training and includes deadlines for making those changes.
But Chicago says it's ready for the DNC. Its current Democratic Mayor, Brandon Johnson, has a background as an activist, and he’s said he is supportive of the idea of protests.
ARCHIVAL Brandon Johnson: We firmly believe in the fundamental right to assemble as well as to protest. I've been someone who's been a part of large scale protests. In fact, black liberation is tied to large scale protest. We just want to make sure that it is done in a safe and secure area so that, um, that right to assemble, uh, um, doesn't get taken over by individuals who may have other interests.
But one longtime activist isn't so sure about the mayor's promise to protect the right to assemble.
Andy Thayer is a member of the coalition “Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws,” one of several groups that’s filed lawsuits against the city of Chicago, alleging that their permit applications for protests were improperly denied.
Andy Thayer: If you're not giving people permits, where are protesters supposed to go? I mean, the city says it doesn't want the chaos of ‘68, and yet its whole pattern and practice heretofore has been to enforce it.
Andy Thayer: There are a lot of people who gain by promoting fear about threats of violence.
If there's a protest happening anywhere in Chicago, there's a good chance Andy Thayer is going to be there.
Andy Thayer: I've always been very stubborn. I hate bullies. And when I moved to this town in 1978, the police certainly were very open about being bullies.
Thayer’s been called anything from “the protest King” to “a gigantic pain in the butt” for law enforcement. And he's been arrested so many times for protesting that he couldn't exactly say how many.
Andy Thayer: I have no idea. I mean, many dozens.
And over the last several decades he's organized or taken part in more protests than he can count.
Andy Thayer: I've learned a lot over the years about protesting and as I'm getting older, I'd like to, uh, to the extent I can, share that with others so they don't make the same mistakes I did at one point or another.
Andy Thayer: One of the main lessons that I've learned is: only we can free us. The politicians can make all sorts of promises, but if you look at the true motors of history, it has been social justice movements in the streets that have made the changes that so many people feel that we urgently need.
Thayer first discovered that power of protest as a means to bring about real change, large and small, when he joined his high school newspaper.
Andy Thayer: I wrote about the fact that they were illegally operating their school incinerator, which got it shut down by the county health department, and the school in turn shut down our newspaper. So that was the first unintended protest.
His aunt sheltered Daniel Ellsberg who leaked classified documents about the U.S. role in Vietnam known as the Pentagon Papers.
Andy Thayer: My mom helped smuggle draft evaders across the border into Canada during the Vietnam War. And she was certainly an inspiration. Someone who did something simply because it was the right thing to do.
But Thayer cautions about getting any ideas that somehow left-wing activism is just part of his family's DNA.
Andy Thayer: I've got a brother who might be described as to the right of Donald Trump. So, our family is all over the map.
Thayer is organizing a march on the eve of the convention and he hopes that that march will send a clear message to the Democratic Party.
Andy Thayer: We want to hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire on three basic issues. First, reproductive justice, second, LGBTQ freedom and third, stop the genocide in Palestine. We have been asked, ‘Well, why are you protesting against the Democrats? They're on board for at least two of the three, right?’
Andy Thayer: Well, we've had a half-century of the Democrats doing nothing at best to defend Roe v. Wade until we lost it. And all of a sudden they've gotten religion because they see the abortion issue as a path to power. We're sick of being used. We're sick of them saying one thing and doing another.
Andy Thayer: We have got bills littering state houses around the country against especially trans people. Where has been the serious push when they've held both houses of Congress and the White House to push for our rights? You don't see it.
Thayer wanted to be able to lead the march down Michigan Avenue, which runs through Chicago's downtown tourist district.
After all, a protest that isn't seen or heard by a lot of people isn't really worth much. He says the city denied them a permit to do so. So they filed a lawsuit.
Andy Thayer: We knew from bitter past experience that the city administration, regardless of who is in the fifth-floor mayor's office, will reject permits. So the last thing they want are big, well-publicized demonstrations, where people feel safe, marching against the Democrats. I say this as one who organized the 2012 NATO protest, one who participated in the 1996 demonstrations against the Democratic National Convention.
Andy Thayer: You go all the way back to Richard J. Daley. They play this game of denying permits and delay, delay, delay, so that protest organizers can't get out the word about ‘Be at such and such a location on such and such a date at such and such a time.’ As an organizer, I can tell you if you don't have a date-time-venue, you don't have a real event yet.
The coalition that Thayer is part of argued that its constitutional rights were violated by the city’s decision to deny it a permit to march. In court the group eventually reached an agreement with the city over where to hold the protest.
But Thayer is convinced that placing all the attention on this fear of violence stirred up by the protesters is just a tactic to keep people away from the protest, like families with kids who might want to attend, or people with disabilities.
Andy Thayer: There are many people who have a vested interest in raising the scare level against people who might be casually interested in participating in a demonstration but then, you know, they get frightened off.
Andy Thayer: There's going to be a lot of fear-mongering, you know, “chaos in the streets, violence, you know, terrorism,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that is used to prevent people from exercising their First Amendment rights.
Andy Thayer: And it's despicable that people who say they're standing up for democracy, engage in this. Yeah, there's sometimes some legitimate security concerns. I, you know, certainly concerned about Proud Boy types, but I also know having masses in the streets is one of the best defenses against those types.
And when you ask him whether there is such a thing as a quote “peaceful protest,” he pauses. Because protests are in many ways, by definition, confrontational.
Andy Thayer: The best protests, most effective protests I've ever been part of have always had an edge to them. They've always been a message that goes at direct variance to what those who control this city and the country want to hear. And they start passing laws against you and taking illegal actions against you, when you do have that edge.
Andy Thayer: So peaceful protest, unfortunately, can often mean a protest that the powers that be can easily live with.
Thayer doesn't want there to be violence. He says he's concerned about making sure that the people who take part in the marches he's organized stay safe. But he thinks it will be up to the city of Chicago and to the police to make sure there is no violence.
Andy Thayer: We feel like we need to give people as much assurance as possible that we've bent over backwards to the authorities to make it safe for people. Now, we can't give an absolute guarantee because of course the police in this town are notorious for breaking the law and most often getting away with it.
Andy Thayer: The whole world will be watching. And I hope they will be smart. You can't count on that. I just hope they are. We're gonna do everything in our power to make things safe.
The whole world will likely be watching as it did in 1968. And John Miller, the law enforcement expert, reminded me that having protesters cause disruption is in a lot of ways, what the United States is all about.
John Miller: It is part of being in a complex democracy, which is the First Amendment was probably first for a reason. You know, the framers, the Founders, thought that protest, because they were revolutionaries themselves, was very important and needed to be preserved and protected.
John Miller: And there are protesters who believe that, that part of your commitment to protest is not just to be there and to be loud and to be proud of your cause, but to be willing to pay a certain price for that. That is also steeped in American democracy. You know, when Martin Luther King, and his marchers came across the Pettus Bridge and faced the onslaught of police billy clubs and dogs, that was part of their commitment.
John Miller: But when you see the burning of multiple police cars, Molotov cocktails, assaults on civilian locations, the destruction of property, attacks on police, that is taking the staid principles of civil disorder and stretching it into disorder and violence.
John Miller: And finding that line for police, of where does civil disorder click into violent protest in violation of the law, is something that's been stretched a little and something that they seem to have to redefine on a regular basis.
For Abe Peck all the focus on violence and security obscures what actually matters. Why people come out to protest in the first place and what these protests can ultimately achieve.
Abe Peck: What's it worth to you? What's it worth to you to live your commitments? You know, and that's what will bring people.
And while Andy Thayer is not in favor of violence necessarily, he does believe the violence of 1968 helped give momentum to all the change that came in the years that followed — which he says achieved some of the most momentous change the United States has ever seen.
Andy Thayer: I think that a pivotal event in the development of the later gay rights movement, the radicalization of the women's movement, which gave us Roe v. Wade, the birth of the Black Panther Party on a national scale, was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where people learned the hard way, by having their heads butted in, that if they're going to make change, they're the ones who have to do it. That they couldn't count on either party. I mean, this was the uh, mainstream Democratic Party, so called, going up against the truly evil tricky Dick Nixon So people had no illusions in the Republican party.
Andy Thayer: They did have illusions in the Democratic party. And those illusions were literally knocked out of their heads on the streets of Chicago. And this led to a fundamental re-evaluation on huge sections of the so-called ‘New Left,’ at the time, that they lost all faith in the Democratic Party, those who had witnessed this and participated in it. It had a fundamental reshaping effect on the movements.
Thayer says the social movements on the left stopped being so “prim and proper” after the 1968 Democratic National Convention. And people began to recognize that protests were real drivers of social change. He points to the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City demanding gay rights, which happened the year after the Democratic Convention, as a good example of this.
Andy Thayer: I don't expect the same thing this time, but I think as students of history, we should look at that. We should learn from that, that the other side overstepping sometimes can blow up in their faces.
Andy Thayer: And so if there's a message to Mayor Johnson, don't do a Richard J. Daley.
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If you want to know more about the issues we discussed in this episode, we recommend by Abe Peck and by Heather Hendershot, which is available on Audible.
CREDITS:
IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA
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With help from Nathan Ray
Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.
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And Sandy Melara
Our theme music is by Joel Pickard
Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross
Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.
Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.
And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.
Audible’s Chief Content Officer is Rachel Ghiazza
Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah
Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt
Special thanks to Marlon Calbi and Allison Weber.
Special thanks as well to the Chicago Film Archives.
Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC
Sound recording copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC