By Joel Thurtell
On the 40th anniversary of my beating and arrest by Chicago cops during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, I find myself wondering if the alienation of Hillary Clinton Democrats who lost to Barack Obama in 2008 is somewhat akin to my own alienation from the Democrats after the officially-sanctioned police riot that I rode into near the steps of the Chicago Art Institute shortly after sundown on August 28, 1968.
I’d planned on writing about my Chicago experience in time to have a column posted on joelontheroad.com bright and early on the day. But a combination of things happened, including a long drive to and then home from northern Ontario, some financial loose ends that needed tying, a lawn that cried out to be mowed and a general feeling that whatever I write 40 years later can have no impact on those temporally distant events and little effect even on the present. Why bother?
That, frankly, was my attitude towards politics after the Chicago debacle. After being harassed by the FBI at work and home, after being tried on trumped-up, made-for-the-occasion charges of “aiding and abetting reckless driving,” convicted by Mayor Richard Daley I’s hand-picked magistrate and sentenced to spend 10 days in the Cook County Jail, all of which was sanctioned and indeed cheered by the national Democrats and their presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, why bother with Democratic politics?
Why indeed?
But the difference between me and the Hillary Democrats is that I was alienated from the Republicans as well. For Hillary Democrats to support John McCain, as many apparently do, is baffling. Then they weren’t really Democrats at all, were they?
Of course they are, and I suspect they will come around. They’re venting now. I was venting, too, railing against the Democrats and in particular President Lyndon Johnson, who vowed in the 1964 campaign to get us out of Vietnam. In the end, I held my nose and voted for Hubie.
But in the meantime, I was seriously disillusioned about both Democratic and Republican politics. I was alienated from the two-party system which conspires to squeeze third parties out of existence before they can be created and makes life hard if they manage to get their names on the ballot. For a time in 1968, I felt there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats. But that belief was not based on reason. I mean, look at who Richard Nixon was — red-baiter to the core, secret bomber of Cambodia, inspirer and protector of burglars and bagmen, hand-chosen by anti-worker, pro-business interests.
No way would I vote for Nixon. No way, despite my painful memory of what happens to peaceful protesters when cops are unleashed on the streets, was I going to NOT vote and thus help pave the way for a Nixon regime. Of course, we know Humphrey lost even with my vote, and we got almost two terms of one of the rottenest administrations the nation had ever experienced.
I felt like I was voting for the lesser of two evils. And maybe I was. But in this political world, it’s rare to find a candidate who fits every one of my requirements and every else’s wish list as well. I believe the world would be better now if Hubert Humphrey had defeated Richard Nixon. Rather, it would have been better unless the likes of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney got into power, when normal rules, including the rule of law, got set aside.
Maybe this year, though, we Democrats will have an opportunity to vote for a true leader. I’m beginning to believe that may turn out to be Barack Obama.
In spring of ’68, I worked for Eugene McCarthy. Went door to door campaigning for the senator in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. But another senator was gearing up a campaign, somewhat belatedly, and as I listened to Robert Kennedy, I thought I heard a real — what is the hip word? — agent for change. McCarthy was a decent guy, he opposed the Vietnam war, but he didn’t have the fire that Kennedy had. I mean, Robert Kennedy went after the mob. I liked what he stood for. I was a Kennedy supporter by the time RFK was assassinated.
I was also no longer draftable. In June of ’68, I convinced an Army recruiter in Grand Rapids that I wanted to enlist. He put me on a bus bound for Detroit. I spent a night in the Pick Ft. Shelby Hotel, sharing a room with a gung-ho militarist teen from Grand Rapids. What I knew and the recruiter apparently didn’t think of was that the orthodontal braces that had been on my teeth for years would flag me as a washout even before I raised my right hand. Sure enough, the Army dentist at Fort Wayne in Detroit took one look in my mouth and put me down for a one-year 1-Y classification, meaning I had a year before I would again be draft eligible. The Army doesn’t want to take care of people with braces.
I’d been quite certain I’d be drafted if I didn’t enlist. I thought of going to Canada. Some of my classmates from Kalamazoo College went to Canada around 1967 and 1968 — and a couple of them are still there. I like Canada. A few years later, I’d begin vacationing in Georgian Bay and come to love our northern neighbor. But in ’68 I was not prepared to leave the U.S.
I was on a Ph.D. track at the University of Michigan in 1967-68, in the history department. In summer 1968, I received an M.A. in history. But I’d turned down a repeat of the big fellowship that supported me my first year in Ann Arbor because I was certain I’d be drafted and felt the money should be given to somebody who’d be around to use it.
I applied to the Peace Corps, but was turned down for the same reason the Army didn’t want me: Braces. And I could still be drafted. The Peace Corps was not a deferment.
I was offered history teaching jobs by two colleges, but when I told my draft board in Grand Rapids, they assured me they’d put me in the Army anyway. Grad school and teaching were no longer deferments. I turned the jobs down.
I remember nightmares probably sparked by World War II movies in which I was one of a company of GIs on a landing craft being dropped on a beach in Vietnam. I was being shot at. I had to shoot Vietnamese or be shot. I didn’t like either option.
I could never figure out what Vietnam was about. The domino theory which held that if Vietnam falls to Communism, its neighbors will also go Red, didn’t make sense to me. All the anti-Communist rhetoric we heard growing up seemed then and now like bunk being paraded by self-serving politicians. Here we were, a powerful country, wasting our own people and those of Vietnam trying to counter a nationalist movement in Asia.
What could I, one person, do to extricate us from a war I believed was morally wrong?
Vote for Hubert Humphrey?
Friends were talking of the Democratic Convention. If you went, at least you’d be signaling your opposition to the war. It was a different kind of vote. It wouldn’t be registered on paper, like a proper ballot, but if enough people went and declared their disapproval of the war, it might make a difference.
Friends of mine, David Braun and Martha Swartz, were planning to go. There were free rides being offered to Chicago by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War. That was important. I no longer had a fellowship, so money was tight. But having that 1-Y from my draft board, meant I could enroll in more graduate history classes. I took out federal loans and got a job as a research assistant at the William L. Clements Library of rare Americana at the University of Michigan. I started that job right after I got back from Chicago. There, in the quiet, ancient-looking reading room of the Clements, the FBI agents first bothered me. But I’m getting ahead.
I’d taken enough summer classes to earn my M.A., and they were finished. Fall classes hadn’t started yet. Why not go to Chicago? My old friend Barry Sherman, a classmate from Kalamazoo College, was in grad school at the University of Chicago. I could stay at Barry’s apartment in Hyde Park.
I dwell on this background because it’s important for you to understand that my companions from Ann Arbor and I who went to Chicago that weekend were not rock-throwers. We were not Communists. Nor were we revolutionaries. We were not Yippies or hippies. We were middle-class students fed up with an awful war. By 1968, two of my classmates from my Lowell (Michigan) High School class of 1963 had been drafted into the Army, shipped to Vietnam and killed in action. Two people out of a graduating class of 75. They were friends of mine, and they were killed in a war that didn’t make sense.
Watch for Part II of “Norman, me & Chicago ’68” tomorrow. Drop me a line at joelrhutell(at)gmail.com
