The whole world is watching. How the 1968 Chicago 'police riot' shocked America. By David Taylor and Sam Morris
By the summer of 1968, Americans were dying at a rate of more than 1,000 per month in the bloodiest year of the Vietnam war
Where the National
Guard once stood in formation with bayonets fixed, a line of stands for rental
bikes now stretches away along South Michigan Avenue. Where protestors
against the Vietnam War once massed, chanting “the whole world is watching”,
sun shines on formal flower beds filled with purple hostas and golden lilies. Across the street, the
facade of the Hilton Chicago looms, four towers of brick rising above war-like
stone carvings of figures carrying shields and axes. There are few clues, but
50 years ago, this spot was a crucible of violence, which exposed fault lines
in a divided and traumatised nation.
A tumultuous season of
assassinations, riots and war, 1968 was the year that changed America, in ways
that still unfold today. And part of that momentous drama played out on summer
nights in Chicago when blood ran in the streets and police orchestrated a riot
as anti-war protesters tried to march upon the Democratic National Convention
calling for an end to the Vietnam war. After four days and
nights of violence, 668 people had been arrested, 425 demonstrators were
treated at temporary medical facilities, 200 were treated on the spot, 400
given first aid for tear gas exposure and 110 went to hospital. A total of 192
police officers were injured.
Images of police
firing teargas and beating demonstrators with their nightsticks played on
network television news. It looked like an oppressive fascist state and offered
a view of a nation apparently tearing itself apart. Rick Perlstein, the
author of Nixonland, speaking at an event at Northwestern University’s Medill
School of Journalism to mark the Chicago '68 anniversary, cited an NBC news
producer who thought the footage he had produced was “a crystalline theatre of
moral witness, evil being visited upon innocents”. But not all saw it like
that – a Gallup
poll showed 56% of Americans backed the police actions against the
demonstrators. Charles Kaiser, the
author of 1968 in America, said: “The biggest impact was on the older
generation because they were so completely freaked out by it, this spectacle of
anarchy was really terrifying.
"The combination
of the two assassinations [Rev Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy],
the extremely violent and numerous riots after Martin Luther King was killed,
the spectacle of upper middle class white college students fighting with
policemen in Chicago, I think there is an argument to be made that the images
of police riots in Chicago were as useful to Richard Nixon’s campaign as
anything else that happened in the whole year. “They contribute in a
big way to this whole sense that everything is out of control and therefore the
man who is preaching law and order becomes very attractive.”
In 1969, President
Nixon would hail a "silent majority" and urge them to support him,
claiming patriotism for conservatives and condemning the "bitter
hatred" of young Americans as he derided a minority who tried to impose
their view on the nation "by mounting demonstrations in the street".
Some of those fault lines, and that language, still echo 50 years later... read more and see photos:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/aug/19/the-whole-world-is-watching-chicago-police-riot-vietnam-war-regan
