Pod Insights The Rest Is History 512. America in '68: The Chicago Riots (Part 5) About this episode The Democratic National Convention is in Chicago, and the incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson, has pulled out of the race. Anti-war protestors are flooding the streets of the city, and Johnson continues to press on with the war in Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination has turned the Democratic candidacy contest into a two-horse race between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. And while they’re battling inside the convention for delegates, the real fight is taking place on the streets. Dope-smoking youth activists known as the “Yippies” have called for a protest against the Vietnam War, and their threats made in the name of the ‘politics of play’ have been taken seriously by Chicago police, who react with brutal force. Flowers and poems meet truncheons and guns. As DNC votes are being counted, images of these confrontations are broadcasted on newsreels across the nation.
Join Tom and Dominic to discuss a Democratic National Convention that saw Chicago descend into violence and chaos. Listen as they explore what led to one of the most anarchic political conventions, and how it impacted a divided America.
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Transcript 13,023 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
0:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
0:45 Tom Holland? So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
0:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.
1:08 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
1:17 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know, coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it, nothing more, except...
1:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
1:44 Tom Holland? And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialized. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us. And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.
1:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.
2:12 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really. So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options, and of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive, and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers, and there are real people there to help. So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.
3:04 Tom Holland? Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth seekers, peacock freaks, poets, barricade jumpers, dancers, lovers, artists. It is summer, it is the last week in August, and the National Death Party meets the Blessed Johnson. We are there. There are 500,000 of us, dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, groping,
3:50 Tom Holland? and making a mock convention and celebrating the birth of free America. The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of violence, decay, and the napalm cancer fiend. We demand the politics of ecstasy. We will create our own reality. We are free America, and we will not accept the false theatre of the death convention. We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now. Chicago is yours. Do it. So that, Dominic, I mean, you'll recognise this because these are very much your people, aren't they?
4:36 Tom Holland? These are the YIPPIs, the Youth International Party, and that was their manifesto, which was published in early 1968.
4:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
4:44 Tom Holland? And the National Death Party, that's the Democrats. The YIPPIs are preparing to go and make their case for how America should be run.
4:54 Dominic Sandbrook? They are.
4:54 Tom Holland? On the very doorstep of the National Death Party, as it meets for its convention in Chicago.
4:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Nothing better captures, I think, Tom, the tone of the late 60s counterculture than that very powerful and persuasive manifesto.
5:08 Tom Holland? I'm going to be honest, I love the YIPPIs.
5:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you?
5:10 Tom Holland? Yeah.
5:11 Dominic Sandbrook? So what's coming today is one of the most dramatic weeks in modern American political history. It's the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where, as you say, the YIPPIs are going to confront the warmakers.
5:23 Tom Holland? The man.
5:23 Dominic Sandbrook? With the politics, not merely of protest, but the politics of play, as they would call it. And a massive spoiler alert for anybody who doesn't know what's coming. This will not end well at all for anybody.
5:37 Tom Holland? It all kicks off, doesn't it?
5:38 Dominic Sandbrook? It does indeed kick off. So this is one of the most turbulent political set pieces in American history. The televised pictures of riot police, the Chicago police, battling protesters right underneath the hotel where the Democratic bigwigs have their campaign headquarters. I mean, it's an extraordinary, extraordinary moment. But we've got the YIPPIs to come, Tom, so restrain yourself. I know you love the YIPPIs. By the way, I will just say the one thing, which is that everybody who's listening to the podcast, not watching us on YouTube, you merely heard that, but I had to see. I mean, you really performed that, didn't you?
6:12 Tom Holland? There was a lot of gurning, wasn't there?
6:14 Dominic Sandbrook? There was a lot of gurning.
6:15 Tom Holland? Well, I was entering into the fun.
6:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the absolute spirit of it. And I think, you know, that you've missed your calling in many ways.
6:20 Tom Holland? I like to think that you can smell the Jostics as I was saying that.
6:23 Dominic Sandbrook? I think ultimately, the dynamic of this podcast is basically, on the one hand, somebody who could well have been in the YIPPIs, and on the other hand, somebody who would very much enjoyed being part of Mayor Daley's Chicago Police Department.
6:36 Tom Holland? The pigs.
6:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
6:37 Tom Holland? And there are more pigs to come.
6:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And I'll leave it to the listeners to work out which is which. So let's remind ourselves where we got to with the Democrats. President Lyndon Johnson had pulled out of the race on the 31st of March and that left three candidates Eugene McCarthy, the giant killer who had kind of toppled him, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the romantic celebrity par excellence, Robert Kennedy. McCarthy and Kennedy, you'll remember, fought out of the primaries. Kennedy won narrowly in California on the 4th of June and was assassinated in his moment of victory. So you might think, just picking up that story, well, does this leave McCarthy free, unchallenged as the standard bearer of the anti-war movement against Hubert Humphrey? But actually, not
7:22 Dominic Sandbrook? really. First of all, the Kennedy people still, you know, are very bitter about McCarthy. McCarthy himself spends the next two months in what I think was ultimately a kind of deep depression.
7:31 Tom Holland? Does he feel guilty then?
7:33 Dominic Sandbrook? I think he does feel guilty. So if you remember in the last episode, he had made quite sardonic, you might say insensitive remarks immediately on hearing that Kennedy had been shot. But then I think he did feel guilty. You know, when I did my book on McCarthy, people I interviewed said he just seemed a stricken man in the next two months. He was disengaged from his campaign. Actually, there's a note in Hubert Humphrey's archives. McCarthy went to visit Humphrey the day after Kennedy died and Hubert Humphrey made a secret note of the conversation. And he said he felt that McCarthy was just completely exhausted, had lost heart, all of the fun had gone out a bit for him. And his campaign basically falls apart. There's a wonderful line, and I think it's in American Melodrama,
8:18 Dominic Sandbrook? where the British, it's a very British comparison. They say of McCarthy's campaign, it degenerated into a cross between a girls' boarding school and an Oriental court.
8:27 Tom Holland? Yeah, that is a very British comparison.
8:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Which is a very British comparison. So his marriage is kind of breaking down under the strain of the campaign. Things aren't good for McCarthy. So this leaves Humphrey, really, it's very clear by midsummer that he's going to be nominated by the Democrats. And to remind ourselves who he is, because he's a kind of presence offstage throughout this story. He's the former mayor in Minneapolis. He was an absolute liberal titan in the Senate. He was key in passing loads of civil rights legislation. But he has been Lyndon Johnson's eunuch since 1964 and has sort of turned himself into a very implausible defender of the president's Vietnam War policy. Well, he
9:08 Tom Holland? Hates it, doesn't he, secretly?
9:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
9:09 Tom Holland? But he feels bound by loyalty to stand up for it. So it's a horrible position for him to be in.
9:13 Dominic Sandbrook? He's in a terrible position. And the thing is that makes it such a terrible thing is that in many ways Humphrey is such a likeable person. He's very optimistic, he's very cheerful, he's very earnest, he's quite uncool by late 60s standards.
9:25 Tom Holland? He's like the protagonist of a 1950s American sitcom, isn't he?
9:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, very much, yeah. He's quite Dickensian, I think he could be like a Mr Cheerable or something.
9:33 Tom Holland? Big jolly man.
9:34 Dominic Sandbrook? He's jolly, he's kind hearted, he's a do-gooder. He's a philanthropist kind of character, all of that kind of thing. It was later said of him that he was forced onto the party by the corrupt party bosses. That's not really true, he is the party favourite. The polls always show that most rank and file Democrats actually really liked Humphrey.
9:52 Tom Holland? And he's very popular with the unions, isn't he as well?
9:53 Dominic Sandbrook? And he's very popular with the trade unions and the city bosses because he's been there for so long and he's great at kind of firing up a crowd. And he understands the kind of bread and butter issues that Democrats have always wanted. But unfortunately, in the climate of 1968.
10:06 Tom Holland? He's not groovy.
10:07 Dominic Sandbrook? He's not groovy at all. So he is probably going to be nominated in Chicago. Now, let's talk about Chicago. Chicago is at this point the second biggest city in the United States. It hasn't yet been overtaken by Los Angeles. It's the capital of the Midwest and its reputation is the city that works. So it's always compared with New York. Chicago is a much more well-oiled machine than New York. Its finances are in better shape. It's not crippled by strikes all the time as New York is. It's a very, in inverted commas, ethnic, to use the terminology of the 60s and 70s, a very ethnic city. So Irish, Eastern European, Italian and so on.
10:45 Tom Holland? And black?
10:46 Dominic Sandbrook? And it does have a large black population. However, it's by far the most segregated city in the United States. Meaning there are black neighbourhoods and there are white neighbourhoods. And there's not really a huge amount of mixing.
10:59 Tom Holland? But obviously not legally.
11:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, de facto rather than de jure. So when Martin Luther King had gone to Chicago in 1966 to try and urge kind of housing integration, he had been really shocked by the hostility in Chicago. And he had said this is worse than anything in the South. Now, all of this is controlled by one man, Mayor Richard J. Daley. He's going to dominate this story in many ways. He is the Democratic Party in Chicago. He's from a working class South Side Irish neighbourhood. His father was a sheet metal worker. His mother was a Catholic Church volunteer. He'd worked his way up the Democratic Party ladder. He's a bright boy. He's very ambitious. He's a hard-nosed operator. And in 1955, he had become mayor and he controlled everything in the city.
11:45 Dominic Sandbrook? He's one of the last of the great big city American.
11:47 Tom Holland? He's a man for whom the word boss is basically made.
11:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Totally, exactly. He is the quintessential.
11:54 Tom Holland? Boss Daley.
11:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Boss Daley, city boss. He controls every job, every elected official.
11:59 Tom Holland? Does he smoke fat cigars?
12:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Massive, I would imagine, yeah. I mean, he basically looks like a cigar. He's like a walking cigar. But he's the working man's friend, right? So ever since the New Deal, when federal money has come into Chicago, it's Mayor Daley who basically dispenses it to working class neighbourhoods.
12:18 Tom Holland? And presumably to organisations that are chiefly staffed by working class people, including the police.
12:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly so, exactly. Now, to high-minded people, outsiders, they regard him, especially in the climate of the late 60s, as an anachronistic and ultimately both sinister and comical person. So Norman Mailer, in his book Miami in the Siege of Chicago, which is a brilliant book about the conventions of that year, he says of Daley, Daley looked like a vastly robust old peasant woman with a dirty grey silk wig.
12:46 Tom Holland? Good description.
12:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Which is not entirely untrue, it has to be said. So Daley had lobbied very hard for the convention to come to Chicago. He wanted it for prestige. He wanted it for the $30 million that it would bring into the sort of Chicago tourist industry. And he's very close to Lyndon Johnson. So he has benefited from the Great Society and all the federal funds coming in. Like Johnson, he's a hawk on Vietnam. He talked to Lyndon Johnson's biographer, Carl Orton. Daley probably talked to Johnson 15 times in the first few months of 1968. Daley was horrified when Johnson withdrew. And Daley is thinking that since the convention is in his city and he will have a lot of control over it, maybe he can use it to get Johnson to reconsider.
13:31 Tom Holland? Right, right.
13:32 Dominic Sandbrook? And get the convention to draft Johnson in as a candidate, even though Johnson has supposedly withdrawn.
13:38 Tom Holland? And is that because there's a political alignment, or is it the kind of fact that they're quite temperamentally, quite similar political figures?
13:44 Dominic Sandbrook? I think a bit of both, actually. I think they're both at this point on the kind of hawkish wing of the Democratic Party. But I think temperamentally, they're both kind of, you know, cigar-chomping bullies, even though Johnson's given up smoking. They are big men, burly men. They like nothing better than sitting up late at night with a bottle of Scotch.
14:04 Tom Holland? Yeah.
14:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And laughing at fey, foppish students and all this kind of thing.
14:09 Tom Holland? Neither of them are really fans of hippies.
14:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Not at all. I think it's fair to say Daley is not at all a fan of hippies.
14:15 Tom Holland? Right.
14:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, by early 68, it's obvious there are going to be protests at Daley's convention. So the most prominent peace group is a group called the National Mobilisation Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which is better known as the MOB, a very late 60s abbreviation. And the MOB is really quite religious, kind of born out of Catholic and Quaker peace groups.
14:36 Tom Holland? I was going to say, I mean, it is a kind of late 60s name, but the tone of it is kind of more earnest. It's almost the kind of stuff that George Orwell was mocking as.
14:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
14:47 Tom Holland? Prune-juice drinkers and all that kind of thing.
14:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
14:49 Tom Holland? Because the guy who's its guiding spirit, Dave Dillinger, I mean, he's a very Orwell figure, isn't he? He actually, I think he drove an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War, and he was a conscientious objector in the Second World War. And
15:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
15:03 Tom Holland? He brings a whiff of the 40s and 50s.
15:05 Dominic Sandbrook? He does indeed. He's from a Protestant background, pacifist background. As you say, conscientious objector in the Second World War, been around peace groups, you know, all his life, absolutely has that kind of mid-century earnest.
15:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Improving quality. So slightly out of kilter, I think, with the more ludicrous atmosphere of the late 60s. And Dellinger wanted to get 100,000 people to Chicago to, as he put it, confront the war makers. The interesting thing here is, of course, there are two conventions that year. So the Republicans are meeting in Miami, but it never occurs to them to go to Miami because it's the Democrats who draw their ire. I think for two reasons. One, obviously, the Democrats are in power. But two is there was something more offensive about the people who are supposedly meant to be.
15:55 Tom Holland? Yeah, on your side.
15:56 Dominic Sandbrook? On your side. So it's very much, I think, reminiscent of the protests against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this year.
16:05 Tom Holland? About Gaza.
16:06 Dominic Sandbrook? About Gaza, exactly. That the ire is directed at them and not at kind of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Anyway, now the Moab have a rival. There's another group that are planning to go to Chicago. And this is the group that produced that lovely manifesto that you began with.
16:20 Tom Holland? The yippies.
16:21 Dominic Sandbrook? And these are the yippies. So the two big guys in the yippies are Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They're both activists from Jewish backgrounds. They had been to university. Hoffman had been a student activist and a civil rights activist. Rubin had started a sociology PhD at Berkeley.
16:41 Tom Holland? I mean, the thing about Hoffman particularly, and why he's such a contrast to Dellinger, is that he absolutely gets the technology that is available to him. So he's always doing stunts like kind of burning money on TV and things, isn't he?
16:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
16:57 Tom Holland? And he has this famous line that a modern revolutionary should head for the television studio, not for the factory. And that's basically what he's all about. Happenings, sit-ins, all this kind of stuff. You need to get on the television.
17:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:10 Tom Holland? And of course, that is a lesson that he will have picked up from Martin Luther King.
17:15 Dominic Sandbrook? I guess so, yeah. The Civil Rights Movement was all about getting on TV to some degree. Yes. Staging public spectaculums in which you are the martyrs and the victims.
17:24 Tom Holland? Yes.
17:25 Dominic Sandbrook? That mobilize people behind your cause. I mean, that is the essence of Martin Luther King's strategy, I guess.
17:30 Tom Holland? Yeah. And because in 67, so the Summer of Love, it's Hoffman, basically, who invents the look of the hippie, doesn't he? Because he, he has this group called the Flower Brigade.
17:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yeah.
17:39 Tom Holland? And he's the one who says, you know, put on the flowered clothing and the bell-bottomed jeans and the headbands and the beads, the classic hippie look. And it's designed. To aggravate.
17:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
17:51 Tom Holland? The police, basically, kind of squares.
17:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, it's designed to be a very stark contrast with the war makers, the pigs, the military industrial complex, all of that kind of thing. So the classic image of people putting flowers.
18:05 Tom Holland? In the barrels of guns.
18:06 Dominic Sandbrook? In the barrels of guns is a very kind of Hoffman Rubin kind of image. These guys had worked together on the March on the Pentagon in October nineteen sixty seven, and they had led this huge protest in the centre of Washington DC. They had gone on this march to the Pentagon and they had chanted songs and tried to exorcise it and to levitate the Pentagon.
18:29 Tom Holland? Love it.
18:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, obviously, a lot of people read about this in the newspapers or saw it on TV and thought, these people are demented. The Pentagon cannot by definition be levitated. But it's all part of their thing, which is about silliness. You know, don't engage with the military industrial complex on its own terms or the establishment politics, but challenge it through radical theatre, singing, chanting. Make them look stupid. Yes. So these guys were smoking dope one day at Hoffman's apartment in the East Village.
19:02 Tom Holland? And Dominic, they loved dope.
19:03 Dominic Sandbrook? There's an awful lot of it, yeah.
19:04 Tom Holland? Hoffman was high all the way through his wedding and spent the whole time giggling.
19:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I think he was high through a large proportion of his of his life, frankly. So they're sitting with their mates in the East Village in New York City, and they come up with the idea of basically staging a fun youth festival at the Democratic Convention to show up the Democratic delegates, the politics of fun. And their friend, Paul Krasner, who's sitting around with them on kind of beanbags or whatever they're doing, says, why don't we call it Yippee? We'll be the Yippies. And then Hoffman's wife Anita said, we should think up a different name. So for the straights, we'll say that the Yippies are actually, it stands for the Y I P, the Youth International Party. And the media will take that seriously, but the kids will know
19:51 Tom Holland? Yeah.
19:52 Dominic Sandbrook? That this is all just a joke and they're very.
19:53 Tom Holland? Hey, it's a smoking.
19:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So for the next few months, the early months of 1968, they are producing badges and posters and all with psychedelic logos.
20:05 Tom Holland? They've got a marijuana leaf, haven't they, on a kind of purple background, I think.
20:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's all pink and purple. Exactly, exactly. They want to get the LSD guru Timothy Leary, they want to get
20:15 Tom Holland? Of course they do.
20:15 Dominic Sandbrook? The beat poet Alan Ginsberg, they want to get kind of folk singers like Phil Oakes, they want to get these kind of slightly countercultural people to join him. Now, there is a tension in the Yippee vision because Hoffman is all about having fun. And he says, you know, what we're going to do is we will basically have the model of the alternative society on the Democrats doorstep. We'll be all reading poetry and making love and stuff. They'll feel terrible because they'll realise their lives are worthless. Rubin is much more confrontational and he told a meeting in New York, he said, basically, we're going to bring half a million people to Chicago. We'll camp out, we'll smoke pots, we'll dance, we'll burn our draft cards and I quote, roar like wild bands through the streets,
20:58 Dominic Sandbrook? forcing the president to bring troops home from Vietnam to keep order in the city while he is nominated under the protection of tear gas and bayonets.
21:07 Tom Holland? Because he wants to provoke.
21:09 Dominic Sandbrook? He does.
21:10 Tom Holland? Mass violence, doesn't he?
21:10 Dominic Sandbrook? He does. He's asked about this and he says, a movement cannot grow without repression. And some people are like, really? Do we want all the bayonets and stuff? So Alan Ginsberg, the poet, says, I see bloody visions of the apocalypse. The trouble is, he always says that, so.
21:27 Tom Holland? He loves Blake, doesn't he? He's always quoting Blake.
21:29 Dominic Sandbrook? So people don't listen. However, I think right from the start, there is a slight sense that if you keep talking about all this, if you say you're going to go roaring through the streets, it's unrealistic to expect the authorities not to take you seriously and to make the appropriate preparations, which is of course what happens.
21:46 Tom Holland? And especially when you've got a mayor of the city who, you know, who'd love to have a crack at a yippee.
21:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, exactly. So their project runs into trouble really when Johnson pulls out because they needed the big baddie.
21:57 Tom Holland? They've lost their enemy.
21:58 Dominic Sandbrook? They've lost their enemy. Then it all goes quiet. Maybe it's not going to happen. Then Robert Kennedy is shot. They say, oh, well, that proves, you know, we were right. Rubin said rather tastelessly, Sahan Sahan is a yippee. And they said, brilliant, we're back on. So they resuscitate their plan, all the poetry and all this stuff, and they're going to have this big march to confront the Democrats. The big problem they have is they need permits. To stage a big demonstration, you need a degree of cooperation. You have to be allowed to sleep in the park. You have to be allowed to put up your stage. You know, all of these kind of mundane things. And they are trying to do that, but it's very clear to them that the city of Chicago has no interest whatsoever in cooperating. That dailies people keep putting off the meetings or putting off a
22:43 Dominic Sandbrook? decision.
22:44 Tom Holland? But also, I mean, certificates and stuff, I mean, they're a bit square, aren't they?
22:48 Dominic Sandbrook? They are square, but there are people in this movement in the underground who know that you do need the permits, right? So the people actually in Chicago, hippies in Chicago, become quite worried about this. At the beginning of August, one of the leading lights of the kind of Chicago counterculture, who's a journalist called Abe Peck, sends out a public letter called A Letter From Chicago. And he says, guys, the organization for this is a complete shambles.
23:16 Tom Holland? It's going to be really heavy.
23:17 Dominic Sandbrook? It's going to be very heavy. The authorities have been freaked out by the talk of violence. And he says, you know, I love a protest as much as anybody, but I quote, it is a black piece of action. It involves masquerading as the Pied Piper of peace. And he says, I'm just saying, if you're going to come to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.
23:38 Tom Holland? Very good.
23:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, the thing is, nobody listens to him, and they should have done. Because Hoffman and Rubin, the New Yorkers, say, oh, these Chicago people are absolute wimps and weeds. What do you expect from these provincial hicks? You know, we know better. So there's a bit of a rift between the Chicago people and the New York people. The New York people then do something, I think, very foolish. They are hoping to mobilize the African American population of Chicago. And their strategy for doing this is to try to make contact with the largest gang in the city, called the Blackstone Rangers. Now, they don't obviously have any joy. The Blackstone Rangers have no interest in having, reading poems.
24:16 Tom Holland? Hippies and stuff.
24:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. However, as we will see, word of this reaches the Chicago police and it completely freaks them out. Because obviously, they say, what's going on? These hippies are in alliance with these bad guys from the streets. Anyway.
24:34 Dominic Sandbrook? The convention approaches, August 1968. The Chicago Underground are now very concerned about what's going to happen. And they issue another statement begging people not to come. The word is out, the cops will riot. Chicago may host a festival of blood.
24:51 Tom Holland? But Hoffman, he's not put off, is he?
24:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Not at all.
24:53 Tom Holland? He's saying he wants five days of energy exchange, which is kind of what he's going to get.
24:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, the New York people are all there by about the 20th of August.
25:03 Tom Holland? Which I think, isn't that also the date that the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia? Which is kind of grumbling away in the background to all this.
25:10 Dominic Sandbrook? It is.
25:10 Tom Holland? And so that provides more scape for them to, you know, compare Chicago to Prague or whatever.
25:15 Dominic Sandbrook? There's definitely an element of role playing in this, right? That the Chicago convention is unfolding at exactly the same point as the Prague Spring. And so a lot of people are saying, oh, these are two sides of the same coin. People are confronting the warmakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
25:29 Tom Holland? Soviet tanks, Chicago pigs.
25:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly right. On the 22nd of August, Hoffman holds a press conference in Chicago. And he says, here are our demands, the Yipis' demands. They are not unpredictably, legalize marijuana, let's have full employment, turn all the mass media over to the people, end imperialism, abolish money.
25:52 Tom Holland? Make love, not war.
25:53 Dominic Sandbrook? And the last one is blank, he says, so people can fill in whatever they want. And the manifesto ends, political pigs, your days are numbered. We are the second American revolution. We shall win. Yippee.
26:05 Tom Holland? It's not yippee. I suppose it's ambivalent, isn't it?
26:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, you're thinking yippee in the sort of
26:10 Tom Holland? Yee hee.
26:11 Dominic Sandbrook? A slider to children's party, are you?
26:13 Tom Holland? I'm thinking yippee.
26:15 Dominic Sandbrook? See, I think of it as more
26:16 Tom Holland? Yippee.
26:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Slightly downbeat, yeah, like a bit more stoned, I guess. I don't know. Now, the mainstream people, the Mobe, are very anxious about the Yipis being there. They see them as irresponsible and narcissistic. But the Mobe also are conscious of the potential for violence. So violence, you could say, is built into their protest model too. Their slogan, confront the warmakers, you know, has the kind of implicit suggestion that stuff might kick off. And their poster is a kind of very aggressive poster. It shows a pig, literally a pig, holding a club, wearing a police helmet, sort of dancing or stamping on a map of Chicago. And I guess that brings us to The other great actors in this drama, which is the Chicago Police.
27:01 Dominic Sandbrook? You might have the sort of stereotypical vision of the Chicago Police, oh, they're just enormous burly men.
27:06 Tom Holland? Eating doughnuts.
27:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, who never smile and love cracking heads. And actually, that would be a little bit harsh. There's a really good book on this by a guy called David Faber. And I can remember he published it, I think, in the late eighties or early nineties. I'd read many accounts of this convention, but I'd never read one in which it had ever occurred to the author to give the story from the point of view of the Chicagoans, of the Chicago Police. So he points out, the Chicago Police are not enormously backward. They had been modernized in the previous 10 years by the most innovative police superintendent in the country. He was a guy called O W Wilson, and he had promoted and aggressively recruited black officers.
27:47 Dominic Sandbrook? So actually, one in four of the Chicago Police are black, a better proportion than most other American cities.
27:54 Tom Holland? Yeah, that's not part of the image you have of the events, is it?
27:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Never part of the image, but it's important to have that in mind. The morale of the Chicago Police is rock bottom. Crime had been growing five times faster than population had. And the threats to policemen's, you know, health, life, so on, are greater than ever before. However, they feel, if you ask a cop, they feel unsupported by the courts, by the political system, and indeed by the public. They feel that they're hands tied behind their back, all of this kind of thing. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with them.
28:29 Tom Holland? But that's their take.
28:30 Dominic Sandbrook? That's their take. They're conscious their pay has fallen behind. Faber points out, they are paid less than plumbers, less than glaziers, and a lot of other, what he calls, low-status workers. So they're not the elite of the working class by any means. And they feel what they hate more than anything, and I quote, "ill-mannered, self-righteous college kids whom they believed came from privileged backgrounds protesting in the streets and mixing with and supporting Negroes about whom they knew nothing. They resented the middle-class demonstrators who talked about equality and freedom, but showed no respect for authority or understanding of those who just wanted to keep the simple things they had worked for so hard." So that is their mindset.
29:14 Tom Holland? Okay, there is class-based. Tension.
29:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Definitely this class-based tension.
29:19 Tom Holland? Right from the beginning.
29:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Huge amounts of class tension. Also, the Chicago police have come in for severe criticism in sixty-eight, not for being too harsh, but for being too weak. So after Martin Luther King's assassination in April, there had been days of rioting in Chicago, eleven people had been killed and five hundred injured, and there'd been thousands of arrests. Now, the civil rights leaders in the city laid into the police and said, you know, shouldn't have gone in so hard, all of this. Mayor Daley came out and said, I was disappointed the police were so weak. He said, we should be a city of order, that police chiefs should have told their men that we're arsonists. He's horrified by the arson. And he says arsonists, we should shoot to kill.
30:06 Dominic Sandbrook? When people are looting, we shoot to maim. That was his expression.
30:11 Tom Holland? And so with that robust approach to law and order.
30:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
30:14 Tom Holland? What is Daley's response to the yippies turning up and Hoffman suggesting that they're planning to put LSD into the Chicago city water supply?
30:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, you see, this is the thing.
30:25 Tom Holland? Does this go down well?
30:26 Dominic Sandbrook? It doesn't go down well at all because remember, the yippies are saying all this publicly, they're not just saying it among themselves. They are saying, for example, we will block all the expressways. We will, as you said, Tom, I mean, this is the story that's repeated in every newspaper.
30:40 Tom Holland? Yeah.
30:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Dose the water supply with LSD. We will storm the amphitheatre. We will invade the hotels.
30:46 Tom Holland? And they wanted to paint cars to look like taxis.
30:48 Dominic Sandbrook? All of this stuff.
30:49 Tom Holland? And kidnap delegates and dump them. But, I mean, you'd have to be a square who's not familiar with Antonin Arto to take it literally, right? I mean, only a square would do that.
30:59 Dominic Sandbrook? I think in a country which has seen years of urban rioting.
31:03 Tom Holland? Yeah.
31:04 Dominic Sandbrook? And also has seen a president shot dead five years earlier, the leading civil rights leader, one of the most famous men in the world, shot dead that April, and a presidential candidate shot dead in June. It is implausible to imagine the city authorities not taking these threats seriously.
31:23 Tom Holland? But Dominic, they are not real threats, are they? I mean, they are ludicrous threats. They are street theatre, they are.
31:30 Dominic Sandbrook? I suppose so. I mean, if your car is painted to look like a taxi, you'd probably find it enormously annoying, wouldn't you?
31:36 Tom Holland? Yeah, they're not really planning to do it. They're not really planning to do any of this stuff.
31:40 Dominic Sandbrook? I think they are planning to do some of it, actually. They're planning to do stunts.
31:44 Tom Holland? Because they talk about setting up mortars and aiming it at the Democrat.
31:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, they're not going to do that.
31:48 Tom Holland? I mean, it's obviously exaggerated.
31:49 Dominic Sandbrook? But it's easy for you and me, right?
31:51 Tom Holland? Of course.
31:52 Dominic Sandbrook? All these years after the event to sit back and say, well, they are going to do this, they're not going to do that. How can Daley and his police?
31:58 Tom Holland? But it's another manifestation of this class-based tension, because if you're kind of hip, you know, you've been to an arts college, you've studied theatre, you know that this is obviously a joke. But if you're, as you say, a harassed police chief, of course, you're not going to think it's a joke.
32:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course. So as August approaches, right, the yippy supporters are kind of tooling up with flowers and books of poetry and jostics or whatever. But Daley's police, they are all issued with riot helmets, they're all given personal tear gas sprays, they're given a shotgun in every car.
32:32 Tom Holland? Crunchions, all the stuff.
32:34 Dominic Sandbrook? They are actually expecting an armed rebellion. One of Daley's officials says, "We are looking forward to the battle of the century."
32:43 Tom Holland? Goodness, I think we should take a break there. And when we come back, we'll find out if he's right, if we really are facing the battle of the century.
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34:36 Tom Holland? The great stillness rose up from the street through all the small noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens, sigh of loaded arrest vans as off they pulled, shouts of police as they wheeled in larger circles, the intersection clearing further then further, a stillness rose through the steel and stone of the hotel, congregating in the shocked centers of every room where delegates and their wives and press and campaign workers, innocent until now of the intimate working of social force, look down now into the murderous paradigm of Vietnam there beneath them at this huge intersection of this great city.
35:21 Tom Holland? That was Norman Mailer in Miami and the siege of Chicago, and he's writing about the climax of this battle of the century that one of Daily's officials had promised, taking place in the streets of Chicago. So Dominic, before we get to that climax, how does it all play out? How does it begin?
35:39 Dominic Sandbrook? So to give people a sense of the geography, the downtown area of Chicago is called the Loop, and the main hotels and office blocks are along Michigan Avenue, which runs north to south. So you've got that. Adjoining the Loop, next to Lake Michigan, is Grant Park. Now, further to the north, you have another park, which is called Lincoln Park. And then to the south, there are the great stockyards on which Chicago was built, the biggest in the world. So Norma Mailer, in his book, he starts the section about Chicago with a brilliant, brilliant sort of portrait of these stockyards, of the blood and the work and all this.
36:17 Tom Holland? And this is quite a distance from the centre, right, from the downtown?
36:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
36:21 Tom Holland? About six miles or something.
36:22 Dominic Sandbrook? And next to the stockyards is the amphitheatre, where the convention will take place. The hotels are in the centre, but the amphitheatre is to the south. And the amphitheatre is ringed by a huge barbed wire fence. There are roadblocks, there are armed police, thousands of them on patrol. There's a no-fly zone above. There is maximum security. So the yippies have set up shop in Lincoln Park, quite a long way away. And on the Friday before the convention week, they are handing out maps and flyers to people. There are only a few hundred of them, nowhere near the thousands they had hoped for. I have to say, Tom, their flyers do not suggest a terribly progressive attitude towards gender relations.
37:01 Tom Holland? Whoa, chicks who can type and spell, cats who have wheels and want to do a digger trip to feed the masses.
37:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, if you are a chick who can type, I think you might feel a little bit triggered, I believe is the word, by that, Tom, or indeed if you're a chick at all, whether you can type or not. So they are handing out maps of the democratic hotels and saying, written on them, break in, break in, break in. Security precautions taken by the convention bigwigs are a farce. Again, they think this is very funny. If you're a police agent or something, you read this with a sense of kind of horror. Oh my God, they're going to break into the hotels, right?
37:40 Tom Holland? And so do you find it funny that they're also staging their own nomination battle to elect a president?
37:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
37:45 Tom Holland? And this president is going to be called Pegasus, and he's a pig.
37:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
37:49 Tom Holland? And Hoffman, he's brought along a pretty pig, an attractive pig, a sweet little pig. And Rubin has brought along an ugly pig.
37:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
37:57 Tom Holland? And Rubin's ugly pig gets the nomination. And he then gives a big nomination speech for Pegasus, doesn't he?
38:04 Dominic Sandbrook? He is.
38:05 Tom Holland? Gets arrested and charged with disturbing the police, but he then gets released. And then the next day, they've got another pig. So there's more pig based yippie humour.
38:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
38:14 Tom Holland? And they set him loose in Lincoln Park. And this apparently is the female pig. And this is going to be the candidate's wife. So it's going to be what? The first pig lady. And the police are kind of rushing around trying to catch this pig and the yippies are all shouting, pig, pig. Because, you know, is it a pig or is it the police? It's all very funny.
38:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
38:30 Tom Holland? And then when the police finally get the pig, they all shout out, be careful with the next first lady. Do you find that funny?
38:36 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't perhaps find it as funny as some people do, to be brutally honest.
38:39 Tom Holland? I think it's quite funny.
38:40 Dominic Sandbrook? So in the break, Theo complained and said, you're being very kind to the police, explaining their worldview. And you're not being kind enough to the yippies. I feel that this isn't tremendous behaviour from the yippies, to be honest, the last couple of moments we've had from them. I feel they've let themselves down a little bit with the pig and with the chicks. I think all that.
38:59 Tom Holland? I think more with the chicks than with the pigs.
39:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, animal rights people will pronounce on that, Tom.
39:04 Tom Holland? You'd rather be nominated for president than be chopped up into slaughtered.
39:07 Dominic Sandbrook? In the stockyard.
39:08 Tom Holland? In the stopyard, wouldn't you?
39:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Maybe, maybe. Well, I suspect that a lot of those pigs had both those experiences, to be fair.
39:15 Tom Holland? I guess.
39:15 Dominic Sandbrook? All right. So the Saturday night, the 24th of August, there's the first little confrontation with the police, really. Police wanted the yippies to clear out of Lincoln Park by 11 o'clock. But they basically hate doing that, being told to clear out. Of course, they don't have a permit to sleep in the park, which is a big problem. And this confrontation is diffused by Alan Ginsberg, who sits down and chants.
39:38 Tom Holland? Om.
39:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Om. For 20 minutes. And this works. He calms the crowd down and he leads them, like a Pied Piper figure, out of the park. But on the Sunday, it's a different story. So the Sunday, the 25th of August, the convention is going to meet the next day. First of all, the mainstream peace movement, the MOB, they organised a march into the downtown area to the Hilton Hotel, the Hilton where a lot of this action is going to take place. It's right in the centre of Chicago, on Michigan Avenue. All the bigwigs are staying there and the campaigns have their headquarters there. And they are down below the hotel, some of them waving Viet Cong flags and chanting, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Their traditional kind of chant.
40:24 Dominic Sandbrook? But the real confrontation comes back in Lincoln Park to the north. This is where the Yippies were going to have their festival of life. And there were all these bands going to come and it was going to be brilliant. And actually, it's like one of those festivals that people organise these days for Instagrammers in the Caribbean or something, where they all end up stranded on a desert island with no food.
40:44 Tom Holland? Or like those Christmas festivals that turn up to see a sheep with an antler on it.
40:48 Dominic Sandbrook? That's right, exactly. So only one band turns up, it's a local band called the MC5. They expected 100,000 people to come, they get about 3,000 or 4,000. There's a big dispute with the police about electricity and if they can use a stage. And there's a lot of tension between the crowd and the police, a lot of shouting of obscenities and the police kind of cracking heads and stuff. And as darkness falls, there is a very tense atmosphere. There's a changeover in the police shift, so a new load of police arrive and they are told by their departing comrades, it's all going to kick off this evening, you know, you've got to be ready to crack some heads. Alan Ginsberg starts chanting, om again. And he does this, I mean, I find this extraordinary, he does it for seven hours.
41:33 Tom Holland? Yeah, he ends up with a very sore throat.
41:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, frankly, I sometimes have a sore throat after a Rest Is History live show, like the ones for which there are still tickets available in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
41:45 Tom Holland? Because we don't want to look like the Yippies, do we?
41:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Am I right?
41:47 Tom Holland? Alone in an empty park.
41:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, if it's like that, imagine, it'd be terrible.
41:51 Tom Holland? I'd be all right with it, I'd just sit there and do an om.
41:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Would you?
41:53 Tom Holland? Yeah.
41:54 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no, no, I'd like to be like a presidential candidate, doing that pointing thing they do with the crowd. The thumbs up, exactly, that's what the atmosphere would be like. So at 11 o'clock, we're on the Sunday night here. The police are trying to clear the park, the crowd are chanting, hell no, we won't go, a lot of shouting about pigs. And at about midnight, for the first time really in this story, the police discipline breaks and they just start clubbing people, beating them to the ground. And this continues for some considerable time and ultimately it descends into total and utter chaos.
42:27 Tom Holland? Is this the point where Hugh Hefner comes out of his mansion and gets hit on the head by a pig?
42:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, I didn't know that.
42:33 Tom Holland? With a club. And he's so cross about it that he then pays for the publication of a book on police brutality. I think it is around this time.
42:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Surely he's been cancelled, has he?
42:42 Tom Holland? Well, he's got a big mansion in Chicago, I think.
42:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Has he? Okay.
42:45 Tom Holland? I think it's around this time.
42:46 Dominic Sandbrook? So now things really do kick off in the small hours of Sunday to Monday. The police go berserk, they are attacking reporters, photographers, medical volunteers from the peace movement. They are spraying their mace, they are hurling kind of tear gas grenades everywhere. Some of them take off their badges at this point, it's the first time they've done this in the story, and they're hitting people with clubs. There are helicopters buzzing overhead, there are people shouting, "Clear the streets, clear the..." You know, it's total kind of...
43:13 Tom Holland? Gotham City.
43:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Very Gotham City. Now, Jerry Rubin is watching this and he says to a friend, "This is fantastic, this is fantastic." And it's only Sunday night, they might declare martial law in this town. You know, because that's what he has always wanted, he likes the thought of confrontation. Hoffman doesn't, he wants it to be more playful, but Rubin kind of likes the thought of a lot of this. So about a thousand people managed to get out of the park. They kind of run down towards the loop, the downtown area, and they're chanting, "Ho, ho, ho Chi Minh." And they're jumping on cars, they are throwing bottles and stuff like this. There are police waiting for them at one of the bridges and they managed to kind of beat them back. And this dies down at about two o'clock in the morning.
43:57 Dominic Sandbrook? This is before the convention has even opened, right? So a lot of people think that it's basically one night of action. It isn't, it's night after night after night. So the next day, the convention opens, daily opens it. He has prepared signs reading "We Love LBJ." He still really is hoping to get LBJ nominated as president. His fallback position is if necessary, he'll accept Humphrey, but he really would like LBJ. And he says to the convention that morning, "We will not tolerate," and I quote, "people who seek to destroy instead of to build, who would make a mockery of our institutions and values." But actually, that very evening, there is yet more fighting in Lincoln Park.
44:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Because after the previous night, everybody now is expecting it. So the police now come wearing gas masks, they've got gas and smoke grenades, and they don't wait before wading into the crowd this time. Again, they tear off their badges. And again, there is a sense that all the rules have been suspended, that they are beating people, especially women, they target women a lot.
45:04 Tom Holland? Why's that?
45:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, women don't, are less likely to fight back, so they're easier targets. But also perhaps there is a sense of frankly, sexual aggression to it.
45:14 Tom Holland? Right, okay, yeah.
45:16 Dominic Sandbrook? They will target, you know, a girl in a very short skirt. They'll beat her to the ground and they get a sort of kick out of doing it, I guess, groups of policemen.
45:23 Tom Holland? Yeah, okay, yeah.
45:24 Dominic Sandbrook? And there are lots of stories about smashing people's cameras and all of this kind of thing. And then at the end of that confrontation, there are stories about police having ripped off their badges, going through the streets and they slash the tyres and smash the windows of cars with McCarthy for President bumper stickers. In their minds, right? The McCarthy campaign, civil rights, beatniks, peace protesters.
45:49 Tom Holland? Do you know, actually, I think this is when they beat up Hugh Hefner.
45:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, okay.
45:53 Tom Holland? Like in a dressing gown.
45:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
45:54 Tom Holland? Give him a crack.
45:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, definitely. If the man in a dressing gown, looking foppish, came out of his nice townhouse.
46:00 Tom Holland? Funny girls, yeah, whack him.
46:02 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, you'd be mad not to. So Tuesday, the 27th of August, is Lyndon Johnson's birthday. He's celebrating it in Texas, but I think there's a part of him, a considerable part of him, that is hoping to get a call from Mayor Daley saying, they've come to their senses, they're gonna nominate you. And of course, they're not.
46:21 Tom Holland? Would he have accepted, do you think?
46:23 Dominic Sandbrook? I think Johnson is an enormous egotist. I think he would have found it hard to resist, actually. If they came back crawling to him and said, please, Mr. President, will you? Yeah, I think he might well have done. But it's not gonna happen, because actually what's happening is the convention has degenerated into a massive argument about Vietnam policy, between the kind of anti-war delegates of Kennedy and McCarthy, and the kind of Humphrey loyalists. And there's also a big argument, actually, which we won't go into. Which is very Labour Party in Britain circa 1981, about the party's internal procedures.
46:58 Tom Holland? Yeah.
46:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Which takes an enormous amount of time and effort, but I don't want to drive away all our listeners. So by this point, all the major news organisations have already complained to Daily that their men are being beaten up. Their reporters are being beaten up and that enrages him and it makes him even more determined not to give in and to keep to a hard line in the streets. But what also probably contributes to the hard line is that evening, a new face arrives in Lincoln Park to address the Yippi's and Co. And this is the National Chairman of the Black Panthers, a guy called Bobby Seal.
47:35 Tom Holland? So that's the militant black organisation.
47:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And Bobby Seal stands up and he says, if a pig comes up to you and starts swinging a billy club and you check around and you've got your piece. You've got to down that pig in defence of yourself. He says, if you pull out your piece, your gun and you shoot it well. All I'm going to do is pat you on the back and say, keep shooting. Now, again, some people listening to this would say this is clearly not really meant to be taken seriously. This is exaggerated, sensationalist, it's part of the rhetoric of the late 60s. On the other hand, there are quite a lot of guns in America. And again, an FBI informant or a police agent listening to this will go back and say, there are people there who are telling the crowd to shoot us.
48:21 Dominic Sandbrook? So you can see how it contributes to the sort of sense of tension. But actually, that evening is not quite so bad. The police have now brought out a special tear gas dispensing machine. Powered by a garbage truck, which basically pours out tear gas in the streets of Chicago. So there's tear gas generally drifting through the streets and actually a lot of people are knackered and bruised after the previous evening. So Tuesday is a bit quieter, but also everybody knows the real climax is coming on the Wednesday.
48:50 Tom Holland? Because that's the day that the Democrats are nominating their candidate for president.
48:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So let's turn to Wednesday. Nine o'clock that morning, Abbie Hoffman is arrested having breakfast at this hotel. The police have clearly been keeping tabs on him. They arrest and charge him with disorderly conduct because he has an Anglo-Saxon word printed on his forehead. They want to make sure basically that he is off the streets. They see him as one of the masterminds of this conspiracy. However, they don't arrest the mainstream peace movement leaders, the MOB. And they are going to have a rally in Grant Park, which is directly opposite the Loop, which is across Michigan Avenue from the big hotels like the Hilton. So at about three o'clock that afternoon, there are about 15,000 people in Grant Park,
49:39 Dominic Sandbrook? and they are yippies, MOB peace campaigners, general kind of pacifists and people of that ilk, and McCarthy campaign volunteers. So a real mixed bag. And there are hundreds of police. And it really starts to turn ugly when a boy, a teenage boy, climbs a flagpole by the bandstand in Grant Park, and he lowers the American flag or starts to lower it. And at that, some of the police go mental. They push through the crowd, they grab this boy, and they start to beat him up. And then the crowd intervenes and attacks the police, and there's a bit of fighting. More teenagers climb the flagpole, and they bring down the flag and they hoist a red t-shirt. And at that, the police go berserk.
50:21 Dominic Sandbrook? They wade in again, and for the first time now, they explicitly target some of the organisers. So there's a MOB organizer, a guy called Rennie Davis. They target him, they get him down on the ground, a huge group of them beat him senseless. There's blood everywhere, and he has to be rushed to hospital. And at that point, his friend, who's a guy called Tom Hayden, who was one of the most, probably the most best-known student leader in America, or had been, he gets up and he gives this incredibly impassioned speech, and he says to the crowd, "Let's turn this overheated military machine against itself. Let's make sure that if blood is going to flow, let it flow all over this city. If the police are going to run wild, let them run wild all over the city and not over us.
51:05 Dominic Sandbrook? If we're going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated. Find your way out of here. I will see you in the streets."
51:14 Tom Holland? So quite French Revolution.
51:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Very French Revolution, actually, very Camille de Mullin, actually, isn't it? At the Palais Royal. So at that point, the rally breaks up. It's unclear what they're going to do. There are different plans. There's about 6,000 people blocked in Grand Park. And some of them must sit down and start singing protest songs. The police start bringing up arrest vans and some of the crowd become very frightened. And they want to get away into the streets, into the Loop. They sort of start to head towards the bridges. There are railroad bridges that connect the park to the Loop, to the downtown area. But as they get to the bridges, they find that most of them are blocked by lines of National Guardsmen with machine guns.
51:55 Tom Holland? So they're trapped?
51:56 Dominic Sandbrook? They're trapped.
51:57 Tom Holland? I mean, it's a bit like, for the sake of argument, the Battle of Lake Trazamine, where the Romans were trapped by Hannibal.
52:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, Tom.
52:03 Tom Holland? Wouldn't you say? Just, I mean, clutching at a historical analogy.
52:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but I know, and you know, that you're not the first person to have made that analogy. And you'll come to the person who makes that analogy later. As darkness falls, the police start to wade into this trapped crowd with their clubs and stuff, but also firing tear gas grenades. So now you have people who are vomiting on the ground, crying, being blinded, whatever. And the police just whacking them over the heads. An atmosphere of total panic. And now you have tear gas drifting west from the park, over the bridges, towards the Democratic Hotels on Michigan Avenue. Eventually, the crowd finds one bridge that has been left unguarded, Jackson Drive. So for people who know Chicago, it's between the Art Institute and the Symphony Center.
52:47 Dominic Sandbrook? So it is right in the heart of kind of institutional Chicago. The crowd floods over the bridge onto Michigan Avenue. And here they find a very bizarre sight. In front of them is a three wagon mule train that is being sort of shepherded along the street by Martin Luther King's friend Ralph Abernathy.
53:12 Dominic Sandbrook? So people who listen to the Martin Luther King podcast will remember the Poor People's Campaign.
53:17 Tom Holland? Oh, yeah.
53:17 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, King's great project, right? Abernathy has brought this mule train to symbolise poverty with these wagons with mules. He's brought them to the centre of Chicago, a very bizarre and incongruous sight.
53:30 Tom Holland? Yeah, because it must come as quite a surprise to yippies and police alike, I would imagine.
53:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. You've been shouting about like pigs and stuff.
53:38 Tom Holland? Suddenly, it's a little house on the prairie.
53:40 Dominic Sandbrook? You've been tear gassed and then suddenly, exactly, you run over the bridge and there it is. And they do have a permit to go all the way down to the amphitheatre as a reminder to the delegates of poverty in the heart of America, right? And they're moving very slowly under police guard. So you have now this incredibly weird scene. There's about 6,000 to 7,000 people packed into the centre of Chicago in the intersection of Balbo Drive and Michigan Avenue, literally underneath the multi-storey Hilton Hotel, kind of huge high-rise building. And they're chanting Dump the Hump. There's these mules, they're surrounded by police.
54:16 Tom Holland? Tear gas.
54:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Tear gas. Eventually, the police commanders agree to let the mule train through, but only the mule train. So their lines part and the mule train kind of proceeds off the stage towards the amphitheatre.
54:28 Tom Holland? Point successfully made, you'd say.
54:31 Dominic Sandbrook? I guess so. But they haven't quite got to the amphitheatre yet. But the police lines then reform and now the demonstrators are effectively surrounded again. And basically, it's about eight o'clock, whether there's a signal that is given or whether it is an improvised moment, it's impossible to be sure, but the police just go for it. They pile in as one into the crowd, screaming abuse at the protesters. They've got their clubs, some of them are just using their fists, they're spraying mace in their faces. Some protesters fight back, they've brought sticks and rocks in the park, but that only inflames the cops further. More cops are being unloaded from buses of reinforcements.
55:14 Dominic Sandbrook? As they get off their buses, people see them and they're chanting, kill, kill, kill. And they pile into the demonstrators, they push a whole load of them back against the glass windows of these office blocks. The windows shatter and the demonstrators fall backwards into the buildings and then the police are in on top of them, among the shards of glass, kind of total and utter carnage.
55:34 Tom Holland? And this is the same time as Prague is. Being-
55:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, of course.
55:39 Tom Holland? Soviet tanks are coming in. So I think the protesters call it Chicago, Czech-ago.
55:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
55:45 Tom Holland? Kind of drawing the parallels. And I suppose one of the ways in which that comparison, which seems, I mean, on the face of it grotesque, is the fact that the TV cameras are in Chicago for the convention and can cover all this, whereas in Prague, obviously, there isn't the kind of live TV footage.
55:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Absolutely, absolutely. So because this is under the Humphrey and McCarthy headquarters, the cameras are already there. There are huge floodlights. If you go onto YouTube to see the scenes, you will see it's very bright, right? Because it's lit up by TV arc lights and the cameramen are there filming it. And the police are attacking the cameramen as well, and press photographers and things, as part of this general chaos. Norma Mailer is watching this from his hotel. He's there to cover the convention. The police attack like a chainsaw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw, the edge of their clubs. They attack like a scythe through grass, lines of 20 and 30 policemen striking out in an
56:40 Dominic Sandbrook? arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing. And this goes on and on and on.
56:48 Tom Holland? And are any of the presidential candidates watching? I'm thinking specifically of Eugene McCarthy. And if so-
56:54 Dominic Sandbrook? They're all watching, yeah.
56:55 Tom Holland? Does an incident from the Second Punic War strike him? As it has struck me.
57:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Sir McCarthy is up on the 23rd floor and he's looking out of his window and he says at first, "It's incredible. It looks like a Bruegel." And then he says to his aides, "Reminds me of the Battle of Lake Trazemee."
57:12 Tom Holland? There you go.
57:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Which he'll actually later amends, Tom.
57:15 Tom Holland? To the Battle of Cannae, doesn't he?
57:16 Dominic Sandbrook? To the Battle of Cannae, exactly.
57:18 Tom Holland? Which even worse slaughter.
57:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, the thing is that you think this is tremendous, but actually, his campaign staff were horrified by this. They thought it showed his detachment and his aloofness, that he was too busy thinking about Punic War parallels. And actually, he should have been, you know, weeping or-
57:35 Tom Holland? I think that reflects badly on them.
57:36 Dominic Sandbrook? You're clearly, despite all your talk, you're not at one with the temperament of the late 60s, are you? You're more Eugene McCarthy like.
57:44 Tom Holland? No, I think that when a parallel from the Puny Wars hits you, it hits you. You know, you go with it.
57:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, maybe. There are times when people don't want to hear a parallel from the Puny Wars, clearly.
57:53 Tom Holland? We'll fall then.
57:54 Dominic Sandbrook? His volunteer headquarters, which was down on the 15th floor, was later turned into a makeshift hospital for the wounded. They brought up protesters and McCarthy did go down to visit the wounded. And later on, his volunteers went to sing songs with the demonstrators and express solidarity with them. Hubert Humphrey, on the other hand, he's higher up, he's on the 25th floor and he's not watching these scenes, actually, because he has been affected by the tear gas, which has come up through the air conditioning.
58:21 Tom Holland? Unbelievable, isn't it?
58:22 Dominic Sandbrook? And he has had to retire to the shower to basically try to wash out the sort of tear gas and stuff.
58:28 Tom Holland? And that's why the story of 1968 is such an amazing one to tell, that throughout it, there are these unbelievably vivid metaphorical scenes that combine colour with the grotesque.
58:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, completely. Because, right, this has been happening on the very night their delegates are nominating their candidate for president. So the campaign, this incredibly dramatic campaign is reaching his climax at this moment. So at the amphitheatre, there are now three candidates. There is Humphrey, there is Eugene McCarthy, and there's also another senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, a former historian, who has basically stepped forward to inherit Kennedy's delegates, so the front man for the Kennedy campaign. And the first footage of the fighting appears on network TV at about 9.30 that evening and the delegates can't believe it.
59:22 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, they're watching the cops in riot helmets just beating the living daylights out of defenceless people on the ground. And Senator Abraham Ribikoff, who's from Connecticut, has got up to the platform to nominate George McGovern for president. He's seen the scenes, he's heard the news, and it's an incredible moment if you watch the footage. He looks directly at Mayor Daley and he says, "With George McGovern as President of the United States, we wouldn't have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." And Daley and the Illinois delegation at that go completely berserk. At first, if you watch the footage, Daley clearly laughs contemptuously.
1:00:03 Dominic Sandbrook? And then it's as someone has flicked a switch and Daley loses it and he shouts. You, you son of a, you lousy mother, go home.
1:00:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And there is total bedlam, right? And Ribikoff, standing up there, cool, contemptuous, he stares at Daley in the face and he says, how hard it is to accept the truth, how hard it is. I mean, an amazing scene.
1:00:32 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:00:32 Dominic Sandbrook? To be playing out on national television.
1:00:34 Tom Holland? And you can imagine, I guess, that the Democrat spin doctors
1:00:40 Tom Holland? are thinking, this could be going better.
1:00:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, it's not ideal for the Democratic Party's image. So Humphrey wins on the first ballot, massive margin. And Humphrey's come out of the shower now, he's in his hotel suite at the Hilton.
1:00:54 Tom Holland? So he can see.
1:00:54 Dominic Sandbrook? He can see, he's watching the television, surrounded by photographers to mark the moment. And because he's Mr. Cheerable, he just completely fails to kind of grasp the mood. So his wife's face appears on the screen, she's down at the convention at the moment that he wins. And he says, oh, how pretty you are, I wish you were here with me now. And he kneels down and kisses the television screen with her face on it. And photographers take pictures of this. Now, it's a very sweet moment in one sense, but for him to be doing that, well, down below, there's this police riot, glass, tear gas.
1:01:35 Tom Holland? You could say that he is conjuring up the warmth of the traditional American way.
1:01:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, you could, yeah.
1:01:41 Tom Holland? Apple pie, all that kind of thing.
1:01:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course you could.
1:01:44 Tom Holland? Which I guess would be his pitch, won't it? When it comes to actually running for the presidency.
1:01:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but that pitch is totally drowned out.
1:01:49 Tom Holland? Yeah, I get it, I get it. I'm just trying to stick up for him, I quite like him.
1:01:52 Dominic Sandbrook? I like him, I feel sorry for him. The next morning, you know, in the breakfast news, which everybody watches, NBC led with, they did a montage and they intercut scenes of Humphrey's delegates, Humphrey's supporters cheering and laughing and singing, they intercut it with footage of demonstrators being gassed and being beaten up on Michigan Avenue. The two things had not actually happened simultaneously. Their beatings had happened much earlier. But the TV networks gave the impression they had happened at the same time. And that was unbelievably bad publicity for Humphrey. Mayor Daley went ballistic. He went on CBS and he said to Walter Cronkite, we were fighting terrorists.
1:02:34 Dominic Sandbrook? He says, I had intelligence that they were planning to assassinate the Democratic candidates. We've had three people shot in the last few years. No, it's not true.
1:02:43 Tom Holland? He'd made that up.
1:02:44 Dominic Sandbrook? The trouble is, the yippies have said so many
1:02:46 Tom Holland? Incendiary stuff.
1:02:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Lurid and sensationist things. It's hard for anybody to be certain. Who doesn't understand, it's easy for us.
1:02:54 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:02:54 Dominic Sandbrook? We know that the yippies are all about dope and about talking nonsense.
1:02:58 Tom Holland? And there had been lots of assassinations, so.
1:03:00 Dominic Sandbrook? There have been assassinations, yeah. McCarthy that afternoon went and talked to demonstrators in the park. He said, you're the government in exile. And he read them a nice poem.
1:03:10 Tom Holland? But that's quite yippy, isn't it?
1:03:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, it was a poem by his friend, Robert Lowell, who is this kind of very kind of New England Harvard kind of poet.
1:03:16 Tom Holland? Of course, tweed.
1:03:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, very tweed, very tweed.
1:03:20 Tom Holland? Not the vibe.
1:03:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Not quite the vibe, but I think, you know, if you like poetry, it's nice to have some on the show. That evening is Hubert Humphrey's moment. So he finally gets to make his speech. You could not imagine worse circumstances to make your speech in. He starts his speech by talking about his sadness at the violence. He doesn't really do sadness. So when he first announced his candidacy, he had said he was going to bring back the politics of happiness and the politics of joy. But obviously he can't play that card now, right? He has to look sad and somber. He actually, I hadn't realised this until a couple of days ago. He does a Margaret Thatcher. He reads the, where there is discord, may we bring harmony?
1:04:01 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, he reads that so-called St Francis of Assisi prayer, which St Francis of Assisi never said. But he doesn't use a good translation, so it's not as powerful. And also he doesn't do a good Margaret Thatcher impersonation as I do.
1:04:13 Tom Holland? So a further disappointment for the Democrat delegates.
1:04:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that's the real disappointment for the Democrats this week. But anyway, it's been a complete and utter nightmare for the Democrats. It confirms every suspicion that they are the party of chaos, the party of disorder. They are disunited. You know, the images that all Americans take from this convention are of violence and people screaming and sobbing in the streets and so on and so forth. The interesting thing though, Tom, I know you'll say this is a Sandbrook bingo point.
1:04:44 Tom Holland? Yeah, I do. I know exactly what you're going to say.
1:04:47 Dominic Sandbrook? The public side overwhelmingly with the police, not with the demonstrators. So Daily had 100,000 letters of support and 5,000 letters of criticism. And the polls showed that only 10% of the public thought the police were too harsh. And more than double that thought they weren't harsh enough, which is kind of unsurprising, I guess.
1:05:07 Tom Holland? Well, I mean, so just to ask, to what extent were the public aware of where the yippies were coming from? I mean, had any of this kind of joyous, lewdic riot banter?
1:05:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:05:20 Tom Holland? Had it filtered through at all?
1:05:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Probably not massively in their minds, I think. If you're not somebody who massively follows the news, you turn on your TV and you see.
1:05:29 Tom Holland? And there's a bloke with long hair like a girl.
1:05:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
1:05:32 Tom Holland? All that.
1:05:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. But having the living daylights beaten out of him by the Chicago police and you're shocked by the violence. But probably there are a lot of people, we know there are a lot of people who say, yeah, I don't like to see it. But what are they expecting, you know?
1:05:50 Tom Holland? Okay, but why? Because the violence is so extreme. I don't see what it is about the yippies or the protesters or whatever that is so offensive that people would say, oh, well, they've had it coming.
1:06:02 Dominic Sandbrook? I think because it comes in a climate of a year that is to a lot of people, very frightening and very disorderly. Right? Assassinations, urban riots. So there's a backlash mood. There is a law and order mood.
1:06:16 Tom Holland? So like the people pulling down the American flag or dressing up as the Vietcong or whatever. Is this cutting through? I mean, are they being seen as completely unpatriotic?
1:06:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Undoubtedly.
1:06:26 Tom Holland? Okay. So that does cut through.
1:06:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Absolutely, that has cut through. So there is a sense, certainly from 1967, I would say onwards, that the peace protesters are people who burn American flags, that they are long haired, that they take drugs. A lot of this may be very unfair, you know, and there are people in the peace movements. Who are very conscious of this and say this is media distortion. And actually, there are parts of our movement that don't do our movement a great deal of good because the levitating the Pentagon and chanting songs and stuff.
1:06:58 Tom Holland? So there are still Quakers and stuff.
1:07:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there are still people who say, come on, the point is to win over Middle America and we are not doing that. But the mood of the moment is wave a Viet Cong flag, chant ho, ho, ho, Chi Minh. So here's the thing, right? Imagine you are from a Middle America community in Iowa or somewhere. And you know, boys who've gone off to fight in the Vietnam War. And then you turn on your telly.
1:07:21 Tom Holland? Long head college kids.
1:07:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Chanting the names of the opposition.
1:07:24 Tom Holland? I get it.
1:07:25 Dominic Sandbrook? I think that's the problem. I mean, this is actually a moment, you could argue, from which all subsequent protest movements either have learnt or should have learnt.
1:07:35 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, it's the founding moment, isn't it?
1:07:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, absolutely. It's what you do. The contrast is obviously with the civil rights movement earlier in the decade where they wear suits, they work really hard and it's not an accident, they do it self consciously. You know, Martin Luther King and his allies think really carefully about how to appeal to, as it were, the silent majority, you know, the broad mass of the American people. I don't think Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin gave the broad mass of the American people any thought whatsoever.
1:08:08 Tom Holland? Because they despise them.
1:08:09 Dominic Sandbrook? I guess so, yeah.
1:08:10 Tom Holland? I mean, the civil rights movement shares, you know, they share Christianity with the vast mass of the American people.
1:08:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:08:17 Tom Holland? But the peace protesters, I mean, despise all of that. They want to burn it all down.
1:08:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Let's tie up the story. Seven people were charged by a grand jury in the US District Court for Illinois with using interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot. And these were the so-called Chicago seven. So Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, though he was later, his was declared a mistrial. Dave Dillinger, Tom Hade and Rennie Davis and so on and so forth. And they turned the trials in 1969 into kind of political showpieces, denouncing the judge, all of this kind of thing. They were acquitted of the conspiracy charge, but then convicted of other offences. They did spend time in prison, but those convictions were eventually reversed on appeal. So that is the story of the Chicago Seven.
1:09:06 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:09:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Which was a kind of Netflix or something.
1:09:08 Tom Holland? No, it's a film.
1:09:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:09:09 Tom Holland? Good film.
1:09:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Theo must have seen it because he was absolutely bleeding hearted at half time, shocked that we were giving the police his point of view. But back to the story of the politics of 68. Hubert Humphrey, now nominated, leaves Chicago in absolute despair. I mean, he said later, he felt that politics had become polluted and destroyed in the course of the year.
1:09:30 Tom Holland? He'd been very offended, hadn't he, by the bad language used in front of ladies?
1:09:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. I think rightly. I don't agree with using bad language in front of ladies myself. So he is trapped, he is totally trapped, poor Humphrey, by his fealty to Johnson and to the war. He feels he can't break with the president and he can't break with the administration's policy, but how else can he possibly bring his party together? However, the one thing I should say about Humphrey, all his life, he has been a fighter. You know, he's a hardened campaigner. And the one thing that can possibly bring his party together, I guess, is that they are facing their ultimate bogeyman, the one politician whom most Democrats despise more than any other.
1:10:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And that's the man we'll be discussing in the final episode of this series as we turn to the great winner of this epic story, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
1:10:27 Tom Holland? Okay, Dominic, thanks very much. And if you want to hear it straight away, you can do that, you know, the routine by going to therestishistory.com and signing up to the club there. But either way, we will be back very soon with the climax of America 1968. Goodbye.
1:10:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Goodbye.
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Next 513. America in '68: Nixon's Great Comeback (Part 6) Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
