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 first part of the interview.
How did you become interested in 1968?
The events of 1968 coincided with the dawn of my political consciousness. So, like a dream you have as you are waking up--too fuzzy to be completely understood, but too compelling to be forgotten--I keep circling around it.
That's part of it. The other part is that so many lines of history run through 1968 and especially through Chicago in August of 1968. To understand the social movements of the 1960s and '70s you need to understand Chicago '68. To understand national politics in the last fifty years you have to understand what happened at the Democratic convention in 1968.
An illustration: the Democratic party comes into 1968 as the party that starts and fights wars--WW2, Korea, Vietnam, all begun and escalated in Democratic administrations. In 1968 a peace insurgency develops in the party, in 1972 the Democrats nominate a peace candidate, and ever since the Democratic party has been essentially non-interventionist. How did that happen? How does the basic foreign policy orientation of a party turn 180 degrees like that? 1968 is the key to that. I find that sort
of turning point in history fascinating.
I know you've done quite a bit of research into that turbulent year. What are your thoughts about it? It was a whirlwind. So much happened. And so much uncertainty and emotion and fear. And optimism and hope.
Carl Oglesby, who was one of the guiding lights of Students for a Democratic Society, writes somewhere about a meeting he was invited to in 1968 with a group of wealthy New York businessmen. These pillars of the American system wanted to understand what SDS stood for and how SDS analyzed the situation, because even people in business were uncertain about where things were headed or how to comprehend what was going on.
You really get a sense of the extraordinary events if you step back and look around the world. In Czechoslovakia in January the Prague Spring movement brought a few months of liberalization and reform. Late in January the three-week Tet offensive began in Vietnam; the Vietcong and North Vietnamese carried out coordinated attacks all over South Vietnam, reaching even the grounds of the US embassy in Saigon, showing that no end of the war was in sight.
In March Polish students precipitated a political crisis. In May French students sparked a nationwide general strike that brought the country to a standstill and caused the collapse of the government of Charles de Gaulle. Mexico saw nearly two months of student strikes and protests until the army killed hundreds of students in the Tlatelolco massacre early in October.
It is both perfectly simple and extraordinarily difficult for ordinary people--people far from power bestowed by high position and/or great wealth--to create meaningful social change. You just need a big group of them to see the same goal and move toward it relentlessly. For some reason that happened in a lot of places around the world in 1968. Credit the civil rights movement maybe, since it showed how mass movement tactics could be effective. Credit Mahatma Gandhi maybe, for creating a new kind of political revolution. For whatever reason, '68 was a year people found out what they were capable of.
What so strikingly distinguishes our own time from forty years ago--and makes the '60s difficult to fully comprehend--is the broad space of ideological views that flourished. Young Americans for Freedom, the Libertarian Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen--all began in the '60s. There was space for extremes. The protesters on the streets and in the parks of Chicago in August 1968 were not Democrats. Later in the week some Eugene McCarthy supporters joined the ranks of the protesters, but the political attitude of protesters tended toward the anarchist and revolutionary--a rejection of the conventional political parties. It's so hard to make this point intelligible in our current impoverished political vocabulary, but the New Left of the '60s and '70s disdained and rejected the label "liberal" almost as much as Ann Coulter does these days. Liberalism was what created the war in Vietnam; the Left did not want to be liberal.
