The Democratic Party’s 1968 Implosion Is Still Sending Shock Waves Fifty Years On

After the establishment came down on the counterculture at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party was never the same.

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On the fifteenth floor of Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel, a makeshift medical post sprang up in one of the Democratic delegate’s rooms to receive bloodied and injured staffers taking refuge from the police riot below.

Tear gas wafting from the Chicago streets reached the room of Hubert Humphrey, then the current Vice President and favored to secure the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention taking place in the Windy City. His eyes watering, Humphrey called reporters into the room for a briefing. In the International Amphitheater, the venue for the convention, the delayed roll call for the nomination began shortly before midnight. The convention, August 26-29, 1968, was not going well.

“It was a city under siege,” says Stephen Shames, who attended the convention both as a journalist for the underground press and as a protester. “You have to remember it followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and riots in major cities—people were really angry.”

The rancor among Democrats in the convention hall and the police brutality on Chicago’s streets—including attacks of the media—resonate with today’s discordant politics.The dysfunction and mayhem unleashed on the convention floor led to the implosion of the Democratic Party, and a split that continues to thwart it today.

“In approximately half an hour, the complete breakdown of true law and order, and of the soul of the Democratic Party was shatteringly exposed on Michigan Avenue,” wrote journalist Jules Witcover in his 1998 book, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968. Witcover, who was an active reporter at that time, has given his archives to the Dolph Briscoe Center of American History in Austin, Texas (see slideshow). “Fifty years on, there is a lot of interest in this period: it lies at the heart of the time when I was most active as a reporter.”

In the week preceding the convention, groups of anti-war protesters began arriving in Chicago, determined to change the party’s policy toward the increasingly hated Vietnam War.

Counterculture radicals and peace activists were bent on disrupting the convention by whatever means necessary. The Yippies, members of the radical Youth International Party, ran a “Festival of Life” to counter the “Convention of Death.” It offered a nude “grope-in for peace and prosperity,” and workshops on joint rolling, guerrilla theater, and draft dodging.

A less radical approach came from members of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, one of the protest’s main organizers, and from other peace efforts such as students backing the Democratic Party’s anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy. Nevertheless, a mischievous and anarchic atmosphere persisted, with some protesters stoking rumours they were going to dose the city’s drinking water with LSD, and send out “stud teams” to seduce the wives and daughters of the delegates.

It was all designed, Witcover writes in his book, to unnerve the Democratic delegates and keep the Chicago police and investigative agencies guessing. It worked—perhaps too well. Following civil unrest in Los Angeles (1965), Detroit (1967), and Chicago itself the previous April, an atmosphere of severe apprehension clung to the convention and the city. The city’s iron-fisted mayor Richard J. Daley mobilised 12,000 police, supported by 6,000 armed National Guardsman and 1,000 intelligence agents from the FBI, CIA, Army and Navy. Another 6,000 U.S. Army troops were put on standby.

Most protesters were set on demonstrating peacefully, but clashes occurred after protesters encamped in the city’s major parks defied the mayor’s 11 p.m. curfew, giving police the excuse they wanted.

“The city of Chicago ran on officially sanctioned violence against minorities and the counterculture—it’s an American way of life,” University of Texas history professor James Galbraith said in an interview. Galbraith attended the convention as a sixteen-year-old with his delegate and floor-leader father, whose room in the hotel was commandeered to treat wounded protesters. “The protesters were an affront to the mayor’s management of the convention, and he was embarrassed and had no qualms about teaching them a lesson.” The clashes in Chicago were just one manifestation of broad ideological collisions between the country’s counterculture and its “establishment.”

In addition to cracking down on street protesters, the Chicago police also went after those covering the dissent. “Police burst out of the woods in selective pursuit of news photographers,” Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Washington Post about a clash at Lincoln Park. “Pictures are unanswerable evidence in court. They’d taken off their badges, their name plates, even the unit patches on their shoulders to become a mob of identical, unidentifiable club-swingers.”

In the convention hall, the Democrats were being consumed by their own ideological split, as heated arguments and scuffles broke out over the Vietnam War and who should be the presidential nominee.

Delegates supporting Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and other anti-war candidates (including George McGovern, who would be the party’s nominee in 1972) tried to argue their cause, but in the end Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination. The better known and more established candidate, coming from within the Administration’s inner sanctum as Vice President, Humphrey had the required and more acceptable pedigree: many of his delegates still supported Johnson, who through his machinations remained enormously influential within the party. Also, while Humphrey personally favored America pulling out of Vietnam, before the convention he had toed the Johnson line, defending the war as a necessary fight against communism, political expediencies that ultimately condemned him and the party.

Many convention attendees were incensed at the choice of Humphrey, seeing it as an endorsement of the Johnson Administration and its Vietnam War policies. Ted Warshafsky, vice chairman of the Wisconsin delegation, made his own form of protest on the convention floor by nominating for vice president Georgia state legislator Julian Bond, even though, at age twenty-eight, he was too young to hold the post.

“Mr. Chairman, we of Wisconsin are Democrats who are interested in not only what the party is but what it will become,” Warshafsky remarked. “If it will truly make the American Dream a reality not just for affluent delegates but for those young people who march in the parks and look for quality in life.”

The gesture was emblematic of the level of dissent in the Democratic Party and an ever-widening rift. George Wallace, the former Democratic governor of Alabama, had broken away from the party to run in the 1968 presidential election as an independent. Wallace railed against “federal judges playing God,” “pseudo-intellectuals,” and newspaper editors “who have looked down their noses long enough at the average man on the street.”

His segregationist campaign inspired millions of conservative Democrats with the motto “Stand Up for America,” and ultimately set the stage for Nixon’s “southern strategy,” appealing to whites rejecting gains made in civil rights.

Many Democrats as well as Republicans voted for Wallace’s American Independent Party in 1968, which ended up with 10 million votes—about 13.5 percent and five southern states. The damage was done, as far as Democratic Party loyalties were concerned, with 1968 proving a major realigning election. By 1972, Southerners who had formerly been Democrats were voting for the Republican Party—Nixon won by a landslide—as they have ever since, with states like Texas, which the Democratic Party had dominated for a century, turning from blue to indomitably red.

“The Democratic party lost its working-class base,” Galbraith said about the convention’s ramifications. “Today it appeals to two tails of the economy: well-off urban professionals and minorities, making it hard for the party to have a coherent message—which the Republicans have.”

“The Democratic split has only deepened,” he concludes. “It led to Donald Trump today.”