With next week’s Democratic Convention promising to hit all-time highs of boredom and pointlessness, the attention of the media legion will naturally be turning to recollections of and comparisons to that other Chicago Democratic Convention, you know, that one in 1968. In some ways this is as it should be. It’s no coincidence that Clinton and Company are coming to Chicago in a year without any significant intraparty battling. Chicago is where the Democrats came apart as a ruling party, where they opened the door to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, where they provided an instant language and credibility for the legion of small-town cranks who populate the nation’s statehouses, always looking for a way to slam-dunk the social reforms that make up the party’s primary legacy. So with dissidence at a preternatural low and a good part of that legacy having been conveniently abandoned by their leader, the Democrats are here to put old ghosts to rest for good.
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They are, of course, taking an enormous chance in coming here, virtually daring crackpots from all over the country to show up and do their worst to disrupt the processes of government before the watching eyes of the whole world. For Bill Clinton, who is ordinarily averse to risk of any kind, then, this must be a mission of enormous significance, part of his duty as the boomer president to bandage our national wounds. Not that Clinton himself was part of the “up against the wall” set, of course: there’s an enormous gap between his counterculture, represented by the burbling pleasantries of Fleetwood Mac, and that of the demonstrators of ’68, who listened to the MC5 in Lincoln Park before joining battle with the police. But this is a distinction lost on Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of the GOP’s bloodthirsty culture warriors, who rode to power in 1994 by portraying Clinton’s every move as dictated by 60s “political correctness.” It is their blurring of the fine distinctions of the 60s that has forced the Democrats back to Chicago, their propaganda that will dictate the soporific spectacle that we will no doubt endure. And it is their Manichaean terms, their simple vision of liberal treason and conservative virtue, that will make this one of the most successful Democratic conventions ever; it will allow Bill Clinton to assume the mantle of cultural peacemaker once sought by his hero, Richard Nixon, and to leave Chicago crowned as nothing less than the redeemer of his generation.
That place is in the “protest pits,” to which the city is enthusiastically–and with conspicuous, accountant-certified impartiality–inviting anyone who feels the urge to make trouble. As an explicit reference to ’68, one of the pits is to be located at the intersection of Michigan and Balbo, a spot forever enshrined in the city’s history as the place where opponents of the Vietnam war quite randomly took their worst beating from the police. In just about every way short of opening a new Yippie-themed Lettuce Entertain You restaurant, the city next week is going to be a monument to the glorious passions of the youth of ’68, now pragmatic “New Democrats” planted firmly in the national saddle, busily undoing their parents’ beloved New Deal.
In the aftermath of ’68, the monument to the fallen police of 1886 became a battleground between young revolutionaries and the elder Daley, who was frustrated with a youth movement he could neither understand nor suppress. A little more than a year after the riot at the Democratic Convention, the Weathermen held a “Days of Rage” protest in Chicago featuring speeches at the Haymarket monument and running battles with cops on the Gold Coast. The day before the action began, another unknown bomber dynamited the monument. Restored and returned to its pedestal, it was bombed again exactly one year later. Daley responded by putting a 24-hour guard on the statue and then moving it in 1972 to the unquestionably secure environment of police headquarters. In 1976 it was moved again to an atrium in the police training center on West Jackson, where it stands today, largely inaccessible to the public. The monument’s pedestal, though, remained at the original site of the Haymarket melee–that is, until a few weeks ago.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Collage by Victor Thompson; Haymarket Monument photo by Mike Tappin; Haymarket martyrs courtesy Chicago Historical Society.
