Dean Blobaum has been interested in the events of 1968--and especially the Democratic National Convention of 1968--for many years. He maintains a website about Chicago '68. His dayjob is at the University of Chicago Press. This is the second part of the interview.
If the riot outside the convention hadn't occurred, would it have altered the outcome of the Presidential election?
First, let's clarify what "outside the convention" means: it means "five miles away." None of the action between protestors and police was anywhere near the convention hall.
Compare what happened at the 1968 Republican convention. There were riots in Miami while the convention was going on in Miami Beach and that rioting at one point was a mile from the convention center. No one has ever said that the Miami riots--in which four people died--impacted the presidential election. But of course there was a lot more television coverage of what happened in Chicago. And of course Chicago was different: it was mostly white people in the streets, not black people. It was about a war, not poverty and racism. It had a political point, of sorts.
But the biggest difference in Chicago was what happened inside the convention hall. The Democratic disarray of 1968 is just as much what went on inside the hall. The Democratic party had been fracturing over civil rights since 1948 and 1968 was the point of no return. The southern white wing of the party split off and supported the third party candidacy of George Wallace. Democrats were also challenged by a movement within the party to reverse course on the Vietnam War. 80% of the voters in the Democratic primaries that year voted for peace candidates. But in Chicago the party adopted a position totally re-affirming LBJ's war policies. The convention was fractious, contentious, and disorderly. Lots of the people who had been energized by the peace candidacies of 1968 and ame into the political process to support McCarthy, Kennedy, or McGovern became very disillusioned and did not support the nominee. McCarthy himself was very lukewarm toward Humphrey.
Nixon won because the Democrats lost the support of many Southerners who voted for third-party candidate George Wallace, because they lost some support among Northern blue-collar workers who voted for Wallace or Nixon, and because they lost support of the emergent peace wing of its own party. Had they held on to any one of those Humphrey could have won. Had everything happened as it did, but the demonstrations in Chicago had been peaceful and orderly, I do not think that would have substantially altered what happened inside the convention. The party would still have splintered and there may have been no difference in the outcome of the presidential race.
Wallace was the wild card. He bolted from the Democratic party and took Southern voters with him, just as Strom Thurmond had done in 1948. It's often said that if Wallace had not been in the race, his votes would have gone to Nixon. But if Wallace had not been in the race, the Democratic ticket might have looked different; Democrats often added a southern Democrat to the ticket in an attempt to retain that bloc of votes.
It was an extraordinarily complicated election cycle. Less than six months before the convention the presumptive Democratic nominee drops out of the race. Less than three months before the convention a strong contender is killed. And all the while the party is under pressure from a breakaway third-party insurgency on the right and a leftwing insurgency within the party. Who could have held the party together under those conditions?
But the disorder in streets didn't help. "Law and order" was an important issue that year, and even though the issue was really about three years of riots in the urban ghettoes, the Chicago disorder dovetailed effectively. Nixon got some great visuals to use in his law-and-order TV ads. Democrats couldn't stop disorder in Vietnam, in the cities, in Chicago, or even on the floor of their own convention.
What lessons do you think Americans still have to learn from that year?
How to accommodate dissent. During political campaigns and conventions, the right to publicly assemble and protest has been significantly limited. When the Democrats finally came back to Chicago for their convention in 1996, protesting was limited to a prescribed area, out of eyeshot of the convention hall. In New York in 2004 an antiwar march was prevented from marching anywhere near the site of the Republican National Convention. For the DNC in Boston in 2004 the city erected fencing beneath a freeway and permitted protest only within what was dubbed "the pen."
In 1968, protesters were clubbed to control them, these days they are surrounded, encapsulated, and fenced in. Free speech is muzzled in either case. The message that our civic institutions convey is that if you are not expressing your opinion within the means that the System favors, your opinion has no right to be heard. We seem to think that democracy is supposed to be quiet and efficient. Sometimes it's messy and loud and intrusive. Political parties cannot contain the political ideas and aspirations of everyone. Those outside the traditional political institutions are suppressed.
