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 third part of the interview.
Why do you think people keep creating myths out of what happened? Do you think it helps or hurts younger generations, who are struggling to learn about the events and reasons about why it happened?
Well, of course, it was a myth before it even happened. The organizing strategy of the Yippies--just a handful of people with no resources--was to create a story about what would happen in Chicago, a story so compelling that the media would communicate it to the world, and 100,000 people would come to Chicago to act out that story. Yippie was trying to use the mass media to do grassroots organizing. As a strategy that failed--spectacularly--but the storyline stayed out there. Yippie was all about theatre, artifice, and deception. So, there's a certain sense in which you can't be truthful to the spirit of what the Yippies were trying to do in Chicago without indulging in mythology.
But the Yippies were just a part--and not the largest part--of what went on in Chicago. It was a complicated event. Events took place over the space of a week. Different groups with quite different goals and tactics protested in the streets and in the parks. The Chicago police and the Illinois National Guard worked the crowds of demonstrators: very different units, under no apparent unified command, with different styles of engagement. Perhaps 1,000 undercover operatives from a variety of agencies mixed with the crowds. And a complicated mix of factions and factions-within-factions sparred over the direction of the Democratic party in the convention hall.
It was a confusing and very emotional political moment--an unpopular war was continuing to escalate with no end in sight, two national leaders had been assassinated, the Democratic party was publicly leaderless, protests and strikes by students and radicals had taken place around the world--so many possible futures seemed to open up and then shut down.
It was complicated, and human minds prefer simpler explanations, so myths have taken hold. Plus, there are plenty of folks still with us who were on one side or another of those actions and many of them have a self-interest in perpetuating one story or another about what happened. Surviving Yippies revere Chicago as the event in which Yippie was created, reached its fullest expression, and was destroyed--all at once. Surviving policemen want to finally clarify that they were not responsible for what happened. And so on.
The story of what happened in Chicago in August of 1968 is never going to be definitively stated and settled, any more than there is one accepted explanation of everything that happened in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over three days in July of 1863. Chicago '68 isn't quite as complicated as the Battle of Gettysburg, but it's a useful comparison.
And there's another major source of the mythology and misunderstandings of Chicago '68: the conspiracy trial. More than a year after the 1968 DNC eight people were put on trial for conspiring to incite a riot in Chicago. This was the trial of the Chicago 8 (later the Chicago 7 when the case of defendant Bobby Seale was separated from the rest). To prove conspiracy, the prosecution created a narrative of how these eight people were individually and collectively responsible for what happened.
The story that the prosecution wove in the trial has colored every account of Chicago '68 since. The trial elevated a small group of people into the role of leaders. It obscured the role of others who were equally involved in planning for Chicago and organizing people to come to Chicago. And it obscured the decisive role of individuals in the crowds.
The real story of Chicago '68 is about the thousands of ordinary people who refused to be intimidated and silenced, not the so-called leaders. The trial is frequently--almost unavoidably--used as a lens for viewing the events of August 1968. For instance in the movie "Chicago 10" scenes from the trial make for many moments of laughter in what would otherwise be a fairly horrific film. But the conspiracy narrative of the trial is a distortion. It assigns responsibility to the defendants for what happened in August 1968, but a dispassionate reading of the history doesn't just fail to support the idea of a conspiracy, it doesn't even support the role of leadership in the streets and parks that is implied by the prosecution's case.
The crowds in the parks and the clotted humanity on Michigan Avenue--when they were not simply reacting to a nightstick swung toward them--took direction from the crowded humanity itself: from a nameless one or another who cajoled the crowd, waved a march across a bridge or up a hill, screamed at a cop, or stood toe-to-toe with a National Guardsman. By and large, people acted at the behest of no one that anyone has ever heard of. Thousands of ordinary people refusing to back down--that was Chicago '68.
I know that you were an organizer for the 20th anniversary conference of 1968. Can you talk a bit about that? What were your impressions of the event and the people involved?
The Chicago 68+20 Conference brought together some of the participants of Chicago '68 to discuss what happened and the legacy of the events. David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale were there. Paul Krassner did some standup comedy. Writers like John Schultz, James Miller, and Todd Gitlin participated. Chicagoans Abe Peck, Don Rose, Studs Terkel, Paul Sequeira, and Quentin Young added their voices. And others.
The whole thing took place in the International Amphitheatre, which was where the 1968 DNC was--so the elusive goal of the people trying to march on the streets in 1968 was finally reached twenty years later. (Mythology!) It was a raucous, sometimes contentious revisitation of 1968. This took place in 1988, when counterinsurgency wars were going on in El Salvador and Nicaragua. In some respects, that was a time not unlike today, when antiwar activists struggled to alert and mobilize an all-too-often apathetic public to oppose an overseas war. So, the conference veered between semi-sober reflection and call to arms.
What became apparent to me personally from the event were the differences between people and groups that came to Chicago. It's one thing to understand that intellectually and another to watch the legacy of '68 contested by its participants. What impressed me in particular was the oratorical brilliance of Abbie Hoffman and the incredible personal strength of the pacifist David Dellinger--if you had an army of pacifists each with the strength of a Dellinger the war machine would be stopped in its tracks, I have no doubt.
7) Finally, if you were in your 20s in August of 1968, would you have been in the streets or in the Amphitheatre?
I was thirteen years old in 1968, growing up in a town of about 30,000 in Iowa. At the end of 1968 an antiwar committee formed in town and I joined a small group of people who organized local demonstrations for the fall 1969 moratoriums and beyond. That's an example of how deeply into the heartland of America the antiwar movement reached. It was not an elitist, isolated, bicoastal, college campus phenomenon like some people try to portray--it bubbled up in the cornfields of Iowa and the wheatfields of Kansas. There were factory workers and farmers for peace, as well as students and freaks.
On the other hand, I supported and worked for Eugene McCarthy when he ran in the Iowa caucuses in 1972. But, when I had a chance to ask McCarthy a question, I asked his opinion of the demonstrations that antiwar activists were planning for both political conventions that year. This is just to say: I could have ended up either on the streets, or in the convention hall, and would have preferred to have an eye in each.
