The Nineteen Sixty-Eight Democratic Convention, Police Riot in Grant Park

The Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on August twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-eight, at the International Amphitheatre on the city's South Side. Inside the convention hall, delegates were nominating Hubert Humphrey for president, an outcome that anti-war delegates had tried and failed to prevent through procedural challenges. Outside, in Grant Park and on the streets around the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, something else was happening.

Tens of thousands of young people had come to Chicago to protest the Vietnam War. The city had refused to issue demonstration permits. Mayor Richard J. Daley had called in the National Guard and positioned eleven thousand police officers in and around the convention zone. On the night of August twenty-eighth, police moved against protesters gathered in Grant Park, using clubs, tear gas, and Mace on crowds that included not only demonstrators but journalists, bystanders, and medical personnel. Television cameras were recording. The footage went out live to the entire country.

The Walker Report, a federal commission investigating the events, used the phrase "police riot" to describe what happened. The phrase was precise: it was not a crowd that had rioted, but a police force that had attacked. Mayor Daley appeared on national television and said the protesters had gotten what they deserved.

Eight people were subsequently indicted for conspiracy to incite riot: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and Bobby Seale. Seale's case was separated from the others after Seale demanded the right to represent himself and was ordered bound and gagged by the judge. The remaining seven became known as the Chicago Seven. All of the convictions were eventually overturned on appeal. The contempt citations were vacated.

What nineteen sixty-eight produced, beyond the immediate legal aftermath, was a crack in the Democratic coalition that had governed American liberalism since the New Deal. The party that had nominated a pro-war candidate over the objection of its anti-war majority, in a city where its own police were attacking voters in front of television cameras, had a credibility problem that took decades to address.